The "A" Game

Snow Pea Thai Chicken Gizzard Rice Noodle

Last night in HRI 206 International class was Asian night. This was the second class on Asian food this week. Monday's class on Asia was a trip to Restaurant Depot and then to the Asian Market and a ride to SAVOR Virginia's Low Country Cuisine Restaurant to cook up our finds at the Asian Market. I love going to the International Markets. I learn so much, some thing's I don't want to learn about like jellyfish as a main course is not my cup of tea, but to others well have at it. Chef says to the group while at the market, "a team member go get a noodle, any noodle, just not the same noodle I want four types of noodles."

Shrimp, Asparagus Noodle

Beef and Crispy Noodle

Second member go get a produce, any produce, not the same produce, four types of produce." Then when we all assembled again he picks a person from each team except team one (Me and Sheila) to pick a protein. WHY CAN'T WE PICK OUR OWN PROTEIN??? Ok fine, Sheila and I are still going to do ok. In fact we are going to do better than ok!  I have fresh Thai basil and Cilantro to use in our dish. FLAVOR, FLAVOR, FLAVOR!  It was really a great night at the restaurant. The rest of the students were so excited to cook in a real commercial kitchen. I am at the point that I am not as afraid of some of the equipment any more and it's become home to me. Sheila and I had the fine protein of chicken gizzards chosen for us. No prob! Ok problem don't let the vegetarian cook the protein next time. I swear! Snow Pea's, carrot, asparagus, onion, lots of ginger, garlic, Thai basil and cilantro sauteed and mixed with a spicy soy and sesame sauce and tossed our noodles in and we were done till I felt we needed some fancy shrooms. So I tossed some of them in whole, and should have cut them up, so had marks taken off for that and the gizzards were a little over done; but over all presentation was a 5.0. WHOO HOO! Everyone's dish was flavorful and fun to look at.

Pork Belly and Spicy Mushroom Noodle

Viet Nam

 What a great class! "So be prepared Wednesday" Chef says "have your nine course menu planned and ready to give to me and plan a four course meal for Viet Nam, Thailand, China (one region) and Japan." Sheila and I were given Viet Nam. OY  we wanted Thailand. But ok. Viet Nam has some awesome food. Sheila and I did a lot of talking on the phone and few e-mails back and forth on recipe's and dishes, and we were good to go.

Szuechuan

Natural Spring Rolls wrapped in lettuce leaves and and quickly panned fried served with some chili sesame dipping sauce for the appetizer. Then we did an asparagus and what was supposed to be crab but didn't have the protein in the house and used shrimp instead for a soup. Lots of Thai basil and cilantro with some fish sauce, which made it seriously too salty. I tried to water it down without loosing the flavor, but was unsuccessful. It was flavorful, but too salty. So we thought we needed a pallet cleanser and so I threw some mango juice, a little bit of pineapple juice, powdered ginger and a little unflavored gelatin into a bowl and froze it up. Then quenelled the ice and put in a small dish. Nice! Really it was perfect.

Thailand

Japan

   











 
For our entree we chose an original Curry Chicken recipe "Ca Ri Ga" with sweet potato, carrot, onion and the chicken in a really nice curry and coconut sauce and rice noodles. Fun! Dessert was the total surprise. We found a traditional banana soup dessert made from coconut milk, tapioca, banana's and some spices, slowly cooked and thickened up, then topped with toasted black and white sesame's seeds for a different texture. What is great about this dessert it can be frozen, it can be cold, it can be room temperature, it can be hot. Whatever it is temperature wise it taste's great, your taste buds go crazy and finds a new flavor at each temp. Sheila and I kept tasting it to the point we were afraid it was going to be gone before the plating. Plating a 5.0, Mis en place a 4.75, taste a 4.0. Not bad for a little effort.  I am still sweating on that little bit of effort on our "A" game. All the meals were wonderful. And so much imagination and work went into the presentations. I'd like to do that class over again just for some more of Randy's Thai Iced Tea Cocktails. (YUMM) We have for more labs for HRI 206 International Cuisine. Next up will be India and then the Caribbean. Too bad we can't take a class trip to like Jamaica for the weekend and taste some decent Caribbean food. 

We will have our little fall break and then HRI 207 American Regional will begin. Can't wait!  Cheesecake... Chicken and dumplings, how about some good old fashioned meatloaf and Corned beef sammiches?

Chef talking it up about HRI 207 American Regional

Pizza and Pasta Night

 I have eaten a lot of pizza and pasta in my day. After all New Jersey is like a second Italy with the amount of Italian restaurants in our fine state. I have also made a lot of pizza and pasta dough in my day. But really had all the time in the world to do it. Not in HRI 206. Chef Ellerbe says to us make ravioli dough, make another pasta dough, make a pizza dough, and make some fresh mozzarella and if you have time make a dessert with the dough. Sure no problem. Plate up is 8:30pm. Sheila my partner for the duration of this course and I made some pesto. Lots of basil, garlic, pignole nuts and yummy olive oil. We used it on everything. Keep it simple stupid was our base. We rolled mini ravioli's and then made two pizza's one was my buffalo chicken white cheese pizza, and Sheila's was a pesto, sauteed spinach and mozzarella pizza. I had left over dough and made a white and dark chocolate sauteed granny smith apples in brown butter and sugar pizza with toasted almonds on top. And the lasagna was a serious bust considering we only had two noodles to work with, but the veggies were awfully good with that pesto.

Another Mess

So Tim my partner for the roulade, terrine, and galantine class; says to me if you were a ninety year old lady who owned a farm you could probably kill, pluck and skin that chicken in 15 minutes. I said yto him you are probably right. I should have paid attention to my father when he was slaughtering our chickens. It took me 1/2 an hour to just skin the already dead chicken. Sheesh! I swear it; that my squimeesh girly side will become a know it all chef soon.

So what is a roulade? It is similar to a galantine but rolled in plastic wrap instead of the skin of the animal. A galentine is traditionally boneless poultry filled with a forcemeat, rolled into a cylinder and poached then served cold. And a terrine is usually the term referring to a pate baked in an earthen vessel or other forms are used and lined with fat to reduce the loss of moisture.  Tim said he would marinate the pork for our roulade, if I could skin the chicken and get started on on the galantine, and then we came together on the terrine. Tim went for the spinach, sundried tomato and balsamic vinegar stuffing for the pork, I went for the curry rice and dried fruit filling for the chicken, and then the terrine was grilled vegetables with a pasta dough lining.

We were really on a roll with everything and was able to finish in a timely manner on Tuesday. Thursday showed up and our stuff looked amazing. We cooked everything up by browning and then poaching and then roasting until it came time for the vegetable terrine, where it went splat on the floor before we could get it in the frying pan to brown it up a little. Seriously no panic there, since we only had twenty minutes for plate up of three items before our time ran out. So I ran to the walkin and grabbed some red and yellow peppers and the hot Italian sausage, Tim got the pasta sheets and literally we had what we called the Italian burrito done and plated in 10 minutes with time to play with our sauces. Seriously I was totally impressed with our selves. I think so were our guests.

AN ODD COUPLE

Garde Manger has some pretty weird foods. Good foods but really in essence weird. 
Take for instance when you say mousse what comes to mind? Chocolate right?  Well in Garde Manger there is no chocolate to be found. Try Salmon, or Asparagus, or maybe some other savory ingredients. Mousse is a light, airy food made with a combination of eggs, whipped cream, gelatin, and flavorings. Mousses are served both hot and cold, and they can be savory There are a range of ways to prepare and serve mousse, making it an extremely varied dish.
So the most recent lab was on Mousse. I chose to do a Roasted Red Pepper Mousse, which was challenging since there is such a high water content in the pepper when cooked, that it makes the mousse soupy. To serve my gelatinous mess, I toasted up some garlic butter and Parmesan slices of bread, deep fried the biggest basil leaves I could find and quinelled the mousse. Not bad kinda pretty, even tasted ok. The other odd part of our couple was sausage making. Annette and I were partnered up finally to create more disasters in the kitchen, by choosing a Szechuan Spicy Sausage, we wanted to go different and bold. 
Well it was different, as for the bold it was more like the Lucy and Ethel comedy relief show. Grinding raw park is an experience in it self. But really when you forget to place key parts in the grinder to actually grind well that's a whole other story. We had some great ideas, grind up the pork  add our super duper spices, and case the stuff, and slice it up and sautee it in with some rice noodles and fun, colorful vegetables. Well we lost twenty minutes fighting with the grinder because we forgot the blade to help cut and grind, then since we lost time on that we discovered to late that the noodles needed to be soaked for 40 minutes, so then another brilliant idea comes to mind. Make Spring Rolls and dipping sauce. Se we ground up the veggies of cabbage, carrot, ginger, garlic with the sausage mixture we then decided to cook up the sausage mixture before putting into the wrappers. After browning and cooking we then discovered we had the wrong wraps. So another mess was created by soaking the wraps with water and then stuffing the things and rolling. 

Now here is the Lucy and Ethel moment of all moments. We dropped the spring rolls into the deep fryer and they exploded. They blew up, fizzed and did this rolling thing. 
I fished the wrappers out, which as soon as they hit the air disitgrated into a hot fried gluey mess. Annette fished the sausages out. Which looked ok at least we could save them. 
I can say one thing though they tasted pretty good and the sauce was top notch for dipping our naked spring rolls in.

Something Chocolate

Whole decorated Torte

Sliced Torte

"MJ", Chef says to me. ""We" need to make a flour-less chocolate torte for a dessert. Here's the recipe go to it." What happened to the "we" part is my thinking. I love to bake, I love to create, I am glad I can work at a place and do both. What I really am humbled with is that Chef just lets me go most of the time in his kitchen. I really love being at the restaurant. I wish my kids could see me when I am down there. I am teased unmercifully sometimes, and treated with respect. They call me T-Rex, cuz I am short and can't reach anything. Whatever, some day I will be tall and skinny, and long flowing blond hair. But thankfully Chef just lets me go, but still hovers in a way in case I have questions or needs to step in.

Staff Torte Tasting

So back to the Torte. Lots of separated eggs, some sugar, dark chocolate is chopped up and melted. Sounds easy right? It's not. Chef Drew kept snitching chocolate shavings, Chef Sean put his two cents in with "don't let the chocolate seize" Chef Mike is snitching chocolate. "Go back to the front and cook something" I tell them. What happened to the "we" part if your not going to help, get back to cooking? The chocolate seized and with my short, muscle-less arms, I couldn't mix it fast enough when I tempered the first egg. Chef Mike steps in. So he mixed and mixed and mixed, then "we" folded in the stiffened egg whites, and the mess is put into two pans with a water bath and baked. Then Chef says "we" need to make Ganache, dark or white? I say white, since the cake is dark, he says dark, "we" come in the middle and do a dark Ganache with a white swirl. What do you think? Here it is sliced up and served with whipped cream and fancy-dancy strawberry. Got any ideas for a name for the menu. We still need one. Something elegant, maybe a little French?

Salad Day's

Bacon on the burner

Bacon after the oven

 Remember the bacon? Well here we are Tuesday and  in preparation for the Salad presentation on Thursday.  I needed to first get my bacon done. At this point it has been curing about ten days in the fridge. The question was should I smoke it or try a different method. Well since we eat smoked bacon all the time, so do something different. 

Mango-Bacon Salad

A couple of tablespoons of oil in a roasting pan, some salt and pepper was sprinkled liberally over the fatty side of the bacon and seared. In the meantime. chopped up an onion, celery, carrot and smashed a few cloves of garlic. pulled the bacon out and added the veggie. Sauteed them for a few minutes and added the bacon and 2 cups of chicken stock. Brought the stock up to a boil, and placed the it in an oven set at 350 for an hour. In the meantime prepped the remaining items for the salads. My first salad needed to be a tossed salad. I chose to do a spring mix, grilled mango, bacon, and some type of candied nut and a pomegranate molasses vinaigrette. My bonded salad a curried chicken, bacon celery, toasted walnut and black grape mix. The composed salad a fried green tomato, bacon, roasted Roma tomatoes, a slice of mozzarella cheese and a drizzle of Serrano-tomatillo vinaigrette.
I really didn't know what to expect this bacon to turn out. but so I let it cool and put in the fridge until Thursday where I had to worry about it then.

Curried Chicken-Bacon Salad

 Thursday dawned bright and beautiful, by the afternoon we were expecting the worst with Hurricane Earl supposedly hitting the shores of Virginia. ODU shut down by noon as well as WHRO said don't come in tomorrow. But TCC persevered and kept it's doors open.

Fried green tomato, bacon, Roma tomato stack

I was a little worried about this bacon. It was of course not looking like bacon that we all knew. It was looking like ham, but tasting like bacon so I decided to treat it like ham. I sliced off a good portion of it and just pan fried it to give some color. I then grilled the mangoes, pulled together all the ingredients for the chicken salad and tossed the curry mayo over, created my stack of tomatoes and bacon, and threw on the cashew-sesame brickle over the grilled mango and bacon, added my pomegranate vinaigrette, and presented my plates with what seemed like thirty other salads to the group of judges. Really they were all successful. I am proud of my fellow students because while I was having a meltdown over this bacon, they were creating smoked duck, brined shrimp, duck confit etc. Annette smoked her duck. I am not a duck fan, and neither is she, but I tell you the salad she made with the strawberries was mmm,  mmm, good.
It was wonderful to see you can take a simple salad and create masterpieces I will remember for a while.

Canned Memories

Many years ago when I was small wee one. My Dad was stationed at Ft. Hancock, also known as Sandy Hook. It's this little spit of a peninsula, that has the Atlantic on one side and the Navasink River on the other. I don't remember living there but I do remember as my siblings and I got older we went quite often and hung out fishing, swimming, catching crabs, and making new friends. We lived in a summer trailer where we were surrounded by other Army families in summer trailers. We ran all over the peninsula. Explored every nook and cranny, learned the wildlife, and vegetation. There were bonfires at night and organized activities for us Army brats at day. Ft. Hancock was just an awesome place to summer at for the families of the military. I miss being young and care free.


One of the first classes back in the kitchen's at TCC was Orange Marmalade and  Tomato Jam. While creating the Orange Marmalade, my thoughts went back to the time when I was really little and we were stationed at Ft. Hancock. Dad was an active duty Army medic. He just came back from Viet Nam and baby Sister Suzanne might have been a twinkle in their eyes. But Mom called my God Mother up. Marie who was Editor of Family Circle, Great Ideas at the time. Marie what is a beach plum? Can I make jelly out of it because Joe (Dad) came home with a few bushels of them from the beach. So Marie and her awesome culinary talents, gave a recipe over the phone and beach plum jelly was made.

Tomato Jam (L) Orange Marmalade (R)

I don't see beach plum's or jelly around here in these parts of Virginia. Maybe it's a Northern thing? I am not even sure if anyone still makes it. Many years later after a stint in Germany and three bothers later we moved from Matawan to Marlboro, NJ. Dad insisted on a bigger house for the growing family, and some land to have a chicken or two and a garden, which in my memories was really a small farm. Since we had not only the chicken or two, but turkeys, geese, countless cats, a horse, and dogs. The garden had everything in it. From Asparagus to Zucchini. We used it all. We froze peas, canned tomatoes, and brined our own sauerkraut. Applesauce was made from apples on the tree's and peaches were used for home made ice cream. Chef Emi had us in the kitchen to make Orange Marmalade and Tomato Jam. I added some cinnamon and ginger to my marmalade. Dennis my partner for the night worked on the tomato jam. (YUMM) Something I don't remember making growing up, but Mom did when I told her what we did that night in the kitchen. I am looking forward to cracking my "canned" memories open soon and sharing them with my kids.