samples!

The day before PCR opened we ran a mock service, in which all of the menu items were plated and photographed, then served to the third semester students (because they're running the front of the house - serving and bussing and otherwise interacting with the customers). The entrees came out looking rather professional and I couldn't help but be proud. So without further ado:



The Amuse Station's first creation: Mushroom Pate Crostini with Creme Fraiche and Chives. The amuse is served as a free appetizer to all PCR guests, and it changes on a daily basis. So for the first day of service it was this, but after that we had Thai Beef Salad in Wonton Cups, then Grilled Zucchini-Wrapped Prosciutto with Gruyere and Capers.



Sandwich Station: Oyster, Shrimp and Andouille Sausage Po-Boy with Remoulade Sauce and Side of Fries. The oysters and shrimp are battered with cornmeal with cajun seasoning and fried. The remoulade sauce is a fancy tartar sauce. And the fries I have since nixed because they were coming out stiff and hard to chew - we replaced them with potato wedges. So customers can chose from potato wedges, side salad, or fruit salad as their side, and sometimes we have specials like macaroni salad.



Also Sandwich Sandwich Station: Turkey Avocado Sandwich on Whole Grain Bread with Fruit Salad and Pickle Spear. Pretty straight forward. Someone remarked that the pickle spear looked somewhat phallic. That was my (unintentional) doing.



Also Sandwich Station: Roasted Vegetable Sandwich on Ciabatta Bread with Balsamic Vinaigrette and Side Salad. Also pretty straight forward. The roasted veggies are a mix: eggplant, zucchini/squash, tomatoes, onions, red bell peppers.



Salad Station: Poached Pear Salad with Black Forest Ham, Bleu Cheese, Roasted Figs, Glazed Walnuts and Roasted Shallot Vinaigrette. I contributed to this dish by poaching the pears, which I had experience with from pastry side last semester. These pears were slightly different though as they were poached whole, with less sugar and lemon + star anise + cinnamon + cloves for flavoring. Easily my favorite salad for all the sweet savoryness of it.



Also Salad Station: Shrimp Louis Salad with Bay Shrimp, Cucumber, Tomato, Hardboiled Egg, Asparagus, Poached Mushroom and Assorted Greens. The louis sauce involved brandy (or, alternatively, cognac), which was a little scandalous. Anyway, I thought this salad looked like a little "forest of delight", especially with the scalloping done on the mushroom and the lemon peel (can't wait to learn that type of detail work).



Also Salad Station: Heirloom Tomato Salad with Basil, Fresh Mozzerella and Mixed Herbs. You can't go wrong with this salad. I've done this salad at home many times with regular tomatoes, and it's not any inferior as long as the tomatoes are ripe. I want to try the parmesan chip next time though - can you believe it's made just by baking some shredded parmesan and olive oil? Crazy.



Entree Station: Sauteed Beef Medallions with Three Peppercorn Sauce, Mashed Potatoes and Root Vegetable Batonnets. Here's where the beef medallions went! In the future we should shape the beef so it's more medallion-like, but the dish is so delicious that the non-medallion-ness of the beef is easily overlooked. The root vegetables we used were parsnips, carrots and kohlrabi (which taste like the insides of broccoli stems). Oh and the gravy is to die for.



Also Entree Station: Sautee of Lamb with Artichokes, Oven Dried Tomatoes, Mushroom Pilaf Croquette and Grilled Squash Medley. Here's where the lamb cubes went! The oven dried tomatoes are bomb with their concentrated tomato flavor, kind of a cross between fresh tomatoes and sundried tomatoes. And I made the mushroom pilaf croquette so there'll probably be an entry about that in the future. And the grilled squash medley is eggplant, zucchini and yellow squash.



Also Entree Station: Chicken Paillard with Mashed Potatoes, Ratatouille and Jus Lie. Here's where the chicken pieces went! The jus lie is a slightly thickened jus - I can't wait to make that and demi glace (gravies for the previous two entrees) - after all, I really wanted to get into sauces when I was thinking about culinary school, and that hasn't changed.



Also Entree Station: Grilled Portabella Steak with Whole Grains Pilaf and Roasted Baby Vegetables. For a while this dish was just vegetarian because there was butter in the pilaf, but it soon became vegan because we substituted olive oil. For baby vegetables we have carrot, zucchini, turnip, beet and pattypan squash.

And lastly there was a vegetarian entree: a Pasta Primavera - Fettucine with Bechamel and Broccoli, Asparagus, Red Bell Pepper and Portabella Mushroom. This entree changes out every week or so.

And besides all of this we also have specials that rotate daily (or really more like every two days). More on that later!

some light butchering

To be perfectly honest, I had my doubts about this semester. I was afraid it would be just like how last semester ended, a constant uphill battle against tiredness, dissipating passion, and social mistrust. But instead it's been amazing.

All of the second semester students (the combination of savory, pastry, and nightlab students) are divided into three rotations - main kitchen (campus cafeteria) with Chef Hammerich, meat lab with Chef Oakley, or Pierre Coste Room (on-campus fine dining restaurant) with Chef Ogden. I was assigned to the PCR with thirteen others, the majority of whom I've never worked with before.

One of the first things we did was to pick station assignments. To name them briefly there's amuse (appetizer), sandwich, salad, entremetier (vegetables for entrees), grill + sautee (hot line), and then soup and starches as support for the main kitchen. When it came time for me to pick, most of the stations were already taken so I just chose Student Chef - to start out the same way I started out last semester.

Besides coming early to set-up equipment and otherwise fetch/order materials, I also have the special task of doing all the butchering for the entrees. It's light butchering though, since I only have to cut meat into small portions - no bones and little blood, if any. I do have heavy butchering to look forward to, since we learn the bulk of cooking in this semester, and meat is an important part of that (hence the meat lab rotation!).

Note: This is also a warning to the squeamish, as I will be posting pictures of dead animal parts and people cutting into them.



The first thing I had to cut up was beef for beef medallions. Fairly easy, basically just slicing and trying to get each medallion to come out to 2.5 ounces. Two medallions make for a 5-ounce lunch portion.



Next up was lamb - cubed for a sautee/stew. These were cut on the same board because they're both red meat, but the lamb was done after the beef because the lamb has a distinct smell which we didn't want to cross over to the beef. This was also pretty easy, just had to make sure the sinew bits were cleaned off (since they can get chewy/tough when cooked).



Last was chicken breast for chicken paillard (aka scaloppini). The chicken was done on a different board due to its contaminatory nature (there's a reason you never order chicken medium rare). I measured them out to 6-ounce portions, and pounded them thin with a mallet. The pieces I had gotten from the meat lab were pretty thin already, so I didn't have to do much pounding. The next day they were thicker - actual breasts - and I butterflied them (slicing the thickness in half almost all the way and splaying it open) before pounding.



It looks like a heart!

The next post will show the dishes that these meats ended up going into, but till then I leave you a picture of my cohorts in meat lab. They're serious over there.

being off the grid

I have to admit, I spent much of the summer breaking from culinary school and this blog, but in my defense I've been pretty busy. Aside from the ongoing hostessing gig I've also been interning with Off the Grid, the local food truck collective.

While most of my job relates to behind-the-scenes machinations - event planning, vendor coordination and the like - I sometimes get out to the markets and taste the food I read and write about! Last month we held a special spicy theme night called "Hot Food / Cold Nights" and I did a tasting and a write-up here.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, I urge you to sign up for the newsletter or look at the facebook event postings (both of which I've been writing) and come out to one of the almost-daily markets to sample some mobile but local food.

And for any curry lovers, I planned the "Don't Worry, Eat Curry!" theme night taking place this Saturday - details here.

Happy eating everyone!

***

And here's the curry night event recap.

jam session

Alright, so we didn't get together and guitar-strum our way to any sweet tunes, but the Five Star Club (culinary student club on campus) did organize an afternoon jam workshop with the legendary professor and veteran jam-maker, Ms. Barbara Haimes.

First we were led through a cooked-fruit jam demo involving apricots (although any ripe fleshy fruit of your choice would work). The fruit was cut up into small pieces (the smaller the pieces, the more texturally consistent to mush the jam will be) and cooked over medium heat. No flavoring was added since the fruit was ripe enough, but this is of course up to individual taste.



In technical terms, the fruit was cooked till softball sugar stage (~240° F), which made intuitive sense to me after pastry class because that's the temperature where cooked sugar syrup will coalesce into a soft ball if you drop it into cold water (which is the same consistency you want your jam to be). Ms. Haimes being the expert she is, could tell the doneness of cooking just by observing the foaming and bubbling and then testing by spoon (letting some of the liquid drip off a spoon and watching the viscosity).

After cooking, the jam was scooped/funneled into sterilized jam jars (ideally along with the noyaux, or inside of the pit, which imparts flavor although it cannot be eaten because it contains trace amounts of cyanide) and sealed.

Then we moved onto making freezer jam because it was logistically easier for everyone to participate.



To make freezer jam, first find the ripest (and/or most organic) fruit you can. This is why summer is a good time to jam, as it allows you to taste the ripe sweetness of summer fruits later on, even in the dead of winter. We used fresh-picked strawberries.



Clean and cut the fruit into pieces, then mash them to a pulp. A potato masher works well for this.



Sugar and sour the berries to your taste. The goal is to simply enhance/complement the ripe fruit's flavor, not to cover or overpower. Here somebody used organic cane sugar and lemon juice, although others did more exotic combinations such as honey and balsamic vinegar.



Then add pectin, which is the gelling agent that solidifies the mash into a more solid jam-like consistency. Pectin packets can be purchased in any supermarket, though pectin can also be made at home with green apples, as it is naturally found in certain fruit skins. We used Sure-Gell (grocery store-bought) and Pomona's Universal Pectin (which is a little more difficult to use but is free from preservatives and other pesky ingredients). The Sure-Gell was mixed over the stove but Pomona's required a food processor to blend and the addition of calcium water for activation.



The mash and pectin mixture was stirred until some gelling started to take place, then everything was scooped/funneled into containers. Jam funnels are different from regular funnels in that the opening is a lot wider.

Everyone got to take a few containers home. The jam had to sit out for 24 hours in order to fully gel, but after that one could either keep it in the refrigerator for 2 weeks or in the freezer (hence the name of freezer jam) for up to a year.



I kept mine in the fridge and promptly served it over French toast the day after it gelled up. Mmm-mmm-mmm!

alemany farm dinner

Once school got out I had more time on my hands, which meant I went volunteering! Alemany Farm was one of the places I had read about on the AmeriCorps Alums blog when I was first moving to San Francisco, and finally I was able to go.

Alemany Farm is located on a plot of land right by the highway and next to some housing projects. The farm was brought into existence (and is maintained) exclusively by volunteers. The produce that is harvested goes to the volunteers and to the people in the neighborhood - the produce can't actually be sold because the land belongs to the city.

After a long and cold/windy afternoon of pulling weeds and pushing wheelbarrows uphill, it came to be harvest time. Veteran volunteers led us in pointing out what and how much could be harvested. Aside from getting free and fresh (literally organic) produce, the whole process really opened my eyes to the variety of vegetables that groceries stores don't sell.



For example, I was able to get multiple kinds of chard and multiple kinds of kale. Many grocery stores don't even have one kind of either. It just goes to show how mass-produced our food is (and also how us Americans only eat certain particular vegetables, if any).



I didn't go prepared with a bag or anything, so I ended up taking a planter full of vegetables home. The bounty was rather staggering, and it inspired me to cook a group dinner. In order to figure out what dishes to make with the foreignness of it all, I searched through online recipes for inspiration.



Because I had squash blossoms (pictured above) and butter lettuce, I decided to make something similar to this salad. (Note: the acorn-like things next to the squash blossoms are ground cherries, which you open up like a present and eat - they taste like citrus-y grape tomatoes).



The salad turned out to be easily my favorite dish - creamy avocado, tangy dressing, fresh lettuce, velvety squash blossoms.



Then there was bok choy inspired by this recipe. I really just did the fried shallot part (with the addition of some thinly sliced carrot, parsnip and garlic) and sprinkled it on blanched bok choy leaves. What I liked about this dish was just the look (which reminded me of a peacock) - sadly it was missing a sauce that I didn't know how to make and didn't have on hand, the kind they drizzle over Chinese broccoli at dim sum places.



Next up was purslane, which I had no idea how to use so I substituted it as the basil in pesto. I consulted this recipe just to know what pesto ingredients were, blended everything in a blender and adjusted by taste. I also threw in a couple of spinach leaves from the farm because I didn't find a place to fit them anywhere else.

I was afraid no one would like the pesto because the purslane made it spicy in this wasabi kind of way. But everyone ate it anyway!



Then there was the chards and kales, which were somewhat inspired by this and this recipe. I wasn't sure how people would take to such serious greens, so I wanted to cook them with bacon, but I did a portion without - just to taste the difference - I was curious how tasty the greens would be without the inherent tastiness of bacon grease.

The vegetarian version had fava beans instead of bacon - which I blanched with the chards and kales. I find that I have a stir-fry methodology: I blanch the hardier vegetables (so they get soft and take to the stir-fry better), then after that's done I start up the fry pan with oil and aromatics (in this case garlic, shallots, fennel seed, italian herbs, cayenne, salt and pepper), then I throw in the vegetables by degree of softness. (I figured that the softer the vegetable the less heat it can take before it wilts and/or fades in color.)



For the non-vegetarian version I omitted the oil - instead I fried up bacon and used the grease. Also I used less aromatics because they weren't needed as much. I think both dishes ended up the same in tastiness, although I could be biased because I do like vegetables a lot.

All in all a successful dinner - seven people were fed and all the produce I brought home got used up. Would love to do it again sometime, if only without the back-bending farm labor...!