The idea was simple, make a turkey burger, top it with caramelized onions and apples mixed with reduced balsamic vinegar and topped with fresh arugula and toasted almonds. All in all, I thought I had an idea that surpassed the original recipe which called for just incorporating the caramelized onions and apples (no balsamic) into the burgers themselves, and then topping them like regular burgers.
Don’t laugh, the bread tasted fine.
Well, I gave it a shot, and to my dismay, I discovered only after the burgers were on the grill that I did not have any hamburger buns. So I had to put them on some nice whole wheat bread instead. So yeah, they may look a but odd, but I can still judge the result of my experiment.
Again, I was not thrilled with my results. The burgers were not greatly improved by having bread-soaked milk added to them (as I thought they might be when I first read the recipe). I did “juice up” the flavor of the burgers a little by making sure I seasoned it appropriately with salt and pepper, and I love the taste of a touch of Dijon mustard in my turkey burgers as well. But all in all, the topping just didn’t make me want to get up and shout. The sweetness of the topping did nothing especially grand with the otherwise uninteresting burgers. They were good, but I have a better turkey burger recipe.
And so that you all don’t walk away feeling ripped off, here it is:
Turkey Burgers with Mint/Yogurt Sauce
(adapted from a recipe in Cooking Pleasures Magazine - June/July 2005)
Makes 2 burgers
Burgers:
2 cloves garlic - minced
1 green onion - minced
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp fresh thyme
salt and pepper to taste
8 oz ground turkey
Mix all ingredients for burger, except turkey, in a bowl. Add turkey to combine - but only just combine. Don’t over mix. Form into patties and cook through thoroughly.
Sauce:
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 clove garlic - minced
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp fresh mint - chiffonade
salt and pepper to taste
Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate until burgers are done.
To serve, of course you will want to have hamburger buns (not wheat bread if you can avoid it) and top with fresh lettuce and a few slices of fresh cucumber.
I have never had a better turkey burger than this, so I am sure this is the one I will be going back to now. But hey, it was worth a shot!
This will teach my wife to go out of town and leave me alone for two weeks…
Some of my longer-term readers will remember the article I wrote on chef’s tattoos, and how I was interested in getting one myself after my boss had used a lunch break one day for the purpose of inking his forearm. Well, allow me to fill you in on all that has happened behind the scenes since then.
I went to my local tattoo parlor and showed them my original tattoo idea which had all of the modern cuts of pork listed on it, but I wanted the base of the design to be the old-style pig. They told me that this idea wouldn’t actually work, since there was so much writing and so many fine lines. The tattoo would bleed with time, and in a year or two would look like crap. My only choices for this tattoo were either to make it large enough to spread across my whole back, or to go back to the drawing board. I chose the drawing board.
Taking into account the fabulous the suggestions on my previous post from Swan and Ed, I thought about the hilarious Simpson’s scene wherein Homer asks Lisa about her newly-announced vegetarianism:
The sketch I put together in Photoshop.
Taking that clip into consideration, I now had a refined tattoo idea. I still wanted to stick with the old-time butcher-block print of the pig, but now I figured I would work in the phrase “A Wonderful, Magical Animal” into the mix - since that is how I feel about pigs given the wonderful cuts of meat we collect from them. And to fix the problem of crowding the pig with all the cuts, I would only highlight the cuts Homer mentioned - which happen to be three of the best cuts from the pig anyway. A chef’s tattoo AND a Simpson’s reference to boot! My return to the drawing board had resulted in pure gold, and I was ready to go forward with the project.
All I needed now was to make sure I had the money to pay for the honor of permanently scarring myself. I assumed something like this would cost around $300. So once I achieved salary status at Rustico, I knew I had a steady enough job locked in, so I might as well go for it. It was just a matter of waiting for the wife to go away long enough for me to do something stupid. (Usually five or ten minutes is plenty of time for me to get into trouble, but this would take a little more time…)
With the birth of my new niece, and my wife out of town for two weeks, I had my window of opportunity. I called my good friend Boutros from Nookie Cookie to accompany me along - since she said she really wanted to see me in pain - and she acted as photographer for the ordeal.
After about an hour wait, my artist arrived on the scene, and it was somewhat comforting to see that she was a serious veteran of the tattoo chair herself. I would dare say that there was a greater percentage of her epidermis that had been colored in than not. She turned my sketch into a drawing, and said it would only cost $250 (I was saving money already!) so into the chair I went.
No sooner had I sat down, and right before the needle made its first mark - as if on cue - my phone rang. I apologized and went to turn it off, but noticed it was a call from my mom. As if she sensed a tremor in the force, she called me at the exact moment I was about to start feeling pain. I half expected the voice mail message she left to be along the lines of, “I don’t know why I called, I just suddenly had the urge to see if you were OK…” (She was just calling to say “Hi” as it turned out later.)
For the uninitiated, the pain of a tattoo needle feels pretty much the same as slowly cutting yourself with a razor blade. Non-stop for a half hour. There’s no denying that it kinda sucks, but on the other hand, the pain is hardly “unbearable.” I think the following photo montage will sum up how it went for me in the chair:
The needle goes in, and the work begins. I am glad I could not see this as it happened, or I probably would have freaked, as I am not a fan of needles.
Though I couldn’t see the needle, I could definately feel it as it made my whole shoulder blade vibrate.
The finished product.
So now that I have a tattoo, I join the ranks of, well, all other chefs it seems, as I don’t really know any chefs who aren’t inked in some way or another. This is just another rite of passage that I have gone through on my way to becomming a chef.
I think the next step is to get beaten up by one’s wife, which I fully expect when she returns on Saturday.
In general, Sundays are rough days for me anyway. I have to open the restaurant, but also set up the sauté and pantry stations, and then work them through lunch. So in essence, Sunday mornings have me doing the work of two people normally. I don’t mind the extra work – it’s what helps keep a restaurant profitable, gives my line cooks their much needed time off, and also helps to make me better at working in kitchens. If I can handle it when it is rough, I can surely take care of anything when it is slow.
This is about how sick he better have been, or he’s really going to be dead!
But yesterday was a step even further down this path - one I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to handle. My phone rang at 7AM; it was Javier, the guy who works the grill station at lunch on Sundays. He sounded terrible, and of course was calling in sick. There was nothing I could do to force him to come in, but I instantly knew my day was going to be a mess since this meant I would be two people down on the line. I was going to have to perform the work of three people in the all-too-brief morning hours to get the restaurant cracking. I jumped in my car and raced to the restaurant to give myself as much lead time as possible to make sure all the stations were set up.
It was about this time I was happy that I had chosen not to go to the party some of the people in the restaurant had thrown the night before. The “theme” of this party was to get together after the restaurant closed and drink a lot of beer. But as the morning guy, I usually have to be in bed right about the time when the night crew is getting off work and gearing up for such parties. I had decided to sleep instead of stay out late, and I now knew I had made the right choice.
“OK, so the tomatoes go here, and the cucumbers there… and wait, which one of these things is kohlrabi?…”
(photo from My Bountiful Life)
Adding to the challenge of being a man down for the day, the set-up for the stations were unfamiliar to me thanks to our recently launched summer menu. This was the first time I was setting up these stations since this menu was introduced. This meant I was not 100% sure what all the ingredients I needed on the line were. I had a pretty good idea of what to do though, so I jumped right in to prepping sauces and heating soups at my sous chef station, filling in all the salad ingredients into the pantry station, cooking pasta and portioning fish for the sauté station and building a fire with charcoal and wood in the grill station. There were times I was working on so many things at once, I was shocked that I wasn’t burning everything I tried to cook.
That’s not to say I didn’t burn anything mind you. One half sheet of filberts and one pot of Cheddar Ale soup shuffled off this mortal coil due to my over-exuberance in trying to cook too much at once. But still - given how much else I was working on and prepped for service, the losses to the restaurant could have been much worse.
The first servers started to arrive around 10:30 to begin setting up the front of the house. From the looks on their faces and the enormous bags under their eyes, it had been one hell of a party the night before. Again I thanked the lucky stars I had chosen sleep over beer. (Did this mean I was getting old?…)
The other sous chefs finally rolled in around 11 (I’d already been cooking for 3.5 hours at this point) and I explained to them that I would need one of them to help me man the grill through lunch. They of course agreed to help out as working the pantry, sauté and grill stations alone is too much for almost anyone to handle. But all the same, they had their own prep work for dinner that had to get done, so I knew working the lunch line would hardly be their A-1 priority. In light of that, this basically meant I would have to work these stations on my own as much as possible, and only call them in when there was too much to handle.
For the record, I make awesome frittatas.
Example: An order for a salad and a frittata comes in, so I can handle that since it is all on the sauté/pantry station. Then an order for two burgers comes in - no problem, just throw them on the grill, and let them sit for a while. Back on the sauté line an order for a rockfish comes in - no problem again, I could get that started while finishing off the frittata and dressing the salad. Back over to the grill to flip the burgers and see how they are coming, and an order for two pizzas arrives. The pizza guy - Erik - is actually at work today, so I can ignore that. A quick follow up to that order has two more salads - now things were getting dicey as I have to finish a fish and the burgers while making the salads. I drop a large handful of fries into the deep fryer, throw buns onto the grill to toast them, pull the fish out of the oven to finish it off, plate the salads, pull out the fries, plate the burgers, and just as I am thinking I have it under control the order printers suddenly go ballistic.
Two chicken salads, one melon salad, three burgers, one tuna gyro, one frittata, two grilled cheese and some pizzas.
“Andrew! Help!”
It is perhaps not especially dignified to call out for help in a professional kitchen. But at the same time, it is even worse to fall into the weeds to the point where the quality and/or timeliness of the food’s preparation suffers. There’s only so much one human can do - and this was more than I could handle. It’s not as much about admitting weakness as much as it is recognizing one’s own limitations. I’m not going to let the customers have a bad lunch for the sake of protecting my machismo.
And so it went through the day. Andrew would come bail me out on the grill when things got hopping, but otherwise I was running 2/3 of the line myself. It was a long 3.5 hours for sure. When it wrapped up, I suddenly realized just how tired I was. But with lunch over, the dinner crew was now filing in the door. I was relieved of my post and could carry on with my other managerial duties. For the first time in this very long day, my job was returning to normal.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I was half-expecting Chef and Javier and everyone to show up suddenly and say something like, “Congratulations! You passed the test! Way to go, that was a rough batch of work, but you pulled it off! Good job!” But of course that never happened.
This wasn’t a test. This was just life. Life in the kitchen. On the good days, it’s hard. On the bad days, it’s almost impossible. But if you’re lucky, somewhere along the line, you realize that every day, it’s incredible fun.
As I drove home, I knew that tonight would once again be a night where I would be choosing sleep over beer. And again, it would be the right choice.
Perhaps some of you have actually heard of my restaurant in the news as of late. It is amazing how a little story has blossomed into something so big.
When I came on board at Rustico, Frank (the executive chef) told me that one of the main focuses of the restaurant was to find unique ways to combine beer and food. Well, it seems he has done that, and the result is a story that has brought every major network to our restaurant in the past few days.
Our chef - Frank Morales - with a collection of his hopsicle creations. (AP Photo)
The “Hopsicles” as he calls them are basically beer popsicles (there is a little bit of cooking involved, it’s not just beer on a stick) and while this is a neat idea (and a tasty one as well!) who would have guessed this invention would have garnered so much attention?
We use fruit flavored beers and combine them with fruit (no way am I giving out any recipes here - sorry!) to create a neat way to beat the summer heat for adults. The problem is, this creation is possibly illegal since beer is supposed to be served in its original container, or immediately after it is poured. In short, the paper-pushers of the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) don’t get that this is not just frozen beer, but rather a recipe for a food item - a popsicle - that contains beer. We have every faith though that this misunderstanding on their part will be cleared up soon enough.
Ahhh… would that it were just this easy.
But the controversy that this has created has inadvertently drawn widespread attention to our restaurant. How surprised were we today to see Frank on Fox News today - and he has more interviews pending! (Ugh, I can’t believe I just gave a link to Fox News…) Funny side note about the video - the “customer” he serves the hopsicle to over and over again in the video is actually one of our managers at the restaurant. We got a kick out of that…
Anyway, with all the press about the hopsicles, needless to say, the people were beating us down to try them this evening. The only problem - we hadn’t made them simply because we weren’t sure if we were allowed to sell them yet. Even if it is much ado about nothing, we have to make sure we are on the right side of the law, but the masses are already clamoring to try these things.
I can only hope we have them ready to go soon. The crowds are getting restless. I just hope they are enjoying our new summer menu that we happened to launch today. (As if we weren’t crazed enough as is…)
My first niece: Myriam Catherine Hoehn What a cutie!
I’m now an uncle! My lovely wife’s sister just recently gave birth to a lovely little girl, and thus I am now an uncle. But I haven’t met my niece yet though as she (and her parents) live in Albuquerque, NM - and that is where my wife is for the next two weeks. Alas I couldn’t get away to meet the little sweetie, seeing as how you all know I only just started a new job. So I’m stuck here alone to work on the house and enjoy another bachelor week. (Or in this case - two…)
So as part of living alone, this means I need to feed myself. A trip to the supermarket for the staples - bread, fruit, vegetables, antiperspirant - had me pass by the seafood counter which is normally not all that interesting to me. I like to eat seafood that is more sustainable in nature, and the seafood counter at my local market is usually full of farm-raised Atlantic salmon and the like, so I usually pass it by. But tonight there was a lone wild-caught Alaskan salmon fillet hanging out on ice. And it was on sale to boot. Who was I to refuse such a wonderfully rich, red fillet?
Of course I had no idea what I was going to make out of this lovely piece of fish, but hey, I can improvise, right?…
And improvisation is something that always goes smoother when the wife is out of town. Don’t get me wrong, I love to cook for my wife, but she still has a fear of my improvising since she has lived through so many of my disasters. So if I am truly going to freestyle, I find it is better to do it on my own, so I can suffer my mistakes in silence. And before y’all think this is ungrateful of her, I think it is a good thing (protest though I do…). She keeps me trying harder to improve myself, and keeps me humble as well.
A raw filet of salmon. What to do, what to do?…
So for all you who want to make up a fish dish on your own, here’s the steps of how you generally do it (and I’ve thrown in what I did as examples):
Marinate the Fish - For my slab of salmon, I used some Spanish olive oil, garlic, fresh oregano and parsley and some salt and pepper.
Sauté the Fish - I left the skin on since salmon is easy to peel after cooked anyway. Start presentation side down, then flip it onto the skin side. Finish the cooking on the skin side, since if it burns a little, who cares? You’re not gonna eat that skin anyway.
Remove the Fish and Add the Mirepoix - I put the fish in a preheated 200 degree oven, tented it with foil to keep it warm and moist while I finished the sauce in the pan. If you want to clean out the pan of blackened bits (to keep the sauce looking cleaner), you can, but I choose not to. To the hot pan, I added a diced onion and one ear’s worth of fresh corn (cut from the cob of course).
Deglaze - Of course that’s a step in this blog! I deglazed with a semi-dry Riesling and a fresh lemon’s worth of juice. I then reduced the sauce down to the desired thickness. This is hard to explain, but you know it when you see it. The wateriness of the wine and lemon juice are gone, and the natural thickness of the flavors begin to make the sauce syrupy.
Season - I added some fresh capers, salt and pepper to brighten up the flavors.
Thicken - There are lots of ways to do this - endless liaisons to choose from - but when it comes to fish, I love to thicken with some good old butter. (Off the heat of course to prevent separation.)
The end result. Drowning in sauce and bursting with color. Now if only it tasted a little better…
That was all there is to it, just a garnish with some fresh chopped oregano for color and flavor.
The end result? Meh - a bit too much lemon, and the corn flavor really didn’t pop as much as I wanted it to. But then again I am always hard on my cooking.
Now it is time to work on a turkey burger recipe I saw on Avocado Green Oven. I commented with an idea of how to re-work the recipe, and she asked me to give it a shot and let them know how it came out. That will be my next experiment, and I’ll let you know how it goes!
I’m just glad my wife isn’t around to kick my butt for all these mistakes.
They say you can never go home again, and in some ways, I guess they’re right. I keep in touch with several friends from my “previous life,” seeing as how I worked along side many of them for eight years, but I still had not been back to the building in the full year since I left the job there to start this new career.
That is, until this week.
Just so we’re all clear, I’m talking about this WWF - not the wrestling group who now has to call themselves “WWE” because of us…
I had a day off last Monday, so I decided to swing downtown to have lunch with my good friend Beth at a restaurant we used to frequent in my WWF days. Lunch was both fun as well as tasty, and soon we realized we had whiled away much more than the usual hour allotted for a standard lunch break. We strolled back to the building and as I passed my car, I realized the parking meter had expired. Thankfully there was no ticket on my car, and I dropped in a few more quarters to give me a little more time downtown.
The reason I wanted some more time was so I could swing by the building where I spent so many endless hours tied to my computer. I think enough time had passed that I would be able to handle the experience and not look like I was hanging on to the past. Rather, I was coming in to see how friends were, and to let them know how I was doing these days.
Have you ever visited a house you grew up in as a child? Everything is the same, but at the same time, you find yourself wandering the halls as a stranger in a place that was once your home. That was the overriding feeling in my gut as I toured a building that seemed like my old office. There had been a move of some departments in the time I was gone, so while a lot of the faces were the same, everybody was sitting in unfamiliar places.
While there were a lot of new people working there (who were looking at me oddly, as if to say “Who’s this stranger?…”) there were many others that I recognized and enjoyed catching up with. I found many of my friends had left, some were about to leave, and others were hanging on for the long haul. I even found one who is now pregnant, which is great seeing as how she will be a fabulous mom. We talked about what I was up to, and the restaurants I had worked in, and about how everyone had to come to see me at Rustico. (I’ve gotta drum up business if I’m going to make my food cost projections!) But without a doubt, the funniest moment came as I walked past one of my old cubicles.
I worked in several offices over the eight years I spent at WWF, so touring the old workstations where I spent so many hours was obviously nostalgic. This specific cubicle was one where I helped redesign the WWF website - many times working until midnight - and was probably the time at WWF I most enjoyed. The cubicles were currently just being used for storage, but there on the name plate was my old name tag. Yes, there was still a cubicle that said “Matt Finarelli” on it - a year after I left. I guess it’s good to know that I left a mark there in some way or another. I can’t help but wonder how many people walk by there these days and wonder “Who the hell is Matt Finarelli?”
So quiet. So empty. So… bland.
With any luck, someday they’ll know me for my cooking as supposed to a random name on a vacated cubicle…
The thing that really struck me though was how quiet the workplace was. Everyone was sitting, working away and the pace was calm and quiet. This was nothing like what I go through now on a daily basis, as I look upon sitting as a rewarding luxury and nobody in a professional kitchen uses their “inside voice”. It was a firm reminder of the dullness of office life that was what I needed to escape from so badly for a more rewarding and exciting life. (After working 12.5 hours yesterday – many of them in front of the stove and pizza ovens – I can easily say my daily work life is a tad more exciting…)
The cost of lingering a little too long downtown…
All in all, it was a fun time going back and touring the old haunt for a while. In fact, I spent a little too long lingering with old acquaintances, seeing as how when I returned to my car, I had once again let the meter expire. Having pushed my luck twice, I was not so lucky, as there was a parking ticket on my car after all… But to my own surprise, I found that it really didn’t bother me. Who knew that going back to the old office that I worked so hard to flee would bring me such joy?
I guess I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed what it was I was doing now, especially in comparison to what I was doing then…
I am sure some of you are wondering about the title of this post, and let me assure you; all will be explained. And no, I have not performed any violence against my mom. (Hasn’t she suffered enough already?…)
A plate of fresh fried chicken. As much a sign of summer’s arrival as fireflies.
In recognition of my need to provide y’all with more recipes, I’m offering up my fried chicken recipe since it is definitely that time of year. That and I think this recipe is really something special. Would you like to make fried chicken with super-crispy skin and a moist, juicy inside that is bursting with flavor? If so, today is your lucky day. (If you said “no,” then there is really something wrong with you…)
This is a recipe I developed back in culinary school actually. I was taking a food science course, and the practical part of the final exam was that each of us was given a chicken. Using what we knew of food science and how it related to cooking meat, we had to provide the chef instructor with a fully-cooked chicken that had a crispy outside and moist inside. Any cooking method was allowed – provided it ended up as requested.
Basically stuff moves in all directions across the cell membranes. For more information, visit the nice people who made this diagram: www.exploratorium.edu
The answer to this style of cooking is brining. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of brining birds, allow me to give you a crash course. (The rest of you can skip this paragraph.) Brining involves placing a bird in a salt/sugar water solution for a few hours before cooking it. While you may initially think this would dry out the bird (salt water draws water out of the bird) the result is actually the opposite. To get scientific about it, water is initially drawn out of the bird, and then the salt (and water) in the brine solution comes back into the bird. The salt then denatures the proteins in the bird meat slightly. This denaturing means that when the proteins are cooked, they can’t coil up as tightly - the action which squeezes water out of meat. If not as much water can be squeezed out, more stays in the bird. And with the extra water that came back into the bird in the brining process, the result is a much juicier end product. OK, lesson over.
Brining was obviously part of what I had to do for this exam, and I decided that a brined fried chicken would probably give me a super-crispy skin as well. (The fact that we had a large deep fryer on hand helped me make that decision as well…) But for this chicken, I wanted to add more flavor with my brine, so I brined it in buttermilk, which up until now I had only ever used in the coating. The result was a brine that stuck to the outside of the chicken as well - adding another layer of flavor under the crispy fried coating.
For the coating, my time in NC taught me that flour is the way to go. But there is no reason not to add some flavor in this step as well. I may not have a secret recipe of seven herbs and spices, but choosing flavors I like is not all that difficult, and of course you can adjust this to your preference as well.
In the class final exam, the recipe worked like a charm, and I presented my chicken to the chef instructor who agreed it was fabulous. (I received second place in the course behind what I personally thought was a horridly over-salted Guinness-brined chicken. But the guys who won were good friends of mine, so I was happy for them…) But after chef tried the chicken, there was another student from the class who took a bite as well. He loved it so much that after one bite he looked at me and said, “That’s so damn good, I gotta go home and slap my momma!”
The name of this chicken was immediately carved in stone for all eternity.
Slap My Momma Fried Chicken
Brine:
3 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup salt
2 Tbsp sugar
4 cloves garlic (chopped coarsely)
1 Tbsp paprika
2 bay leaves
1 tsp cayenne
1 Tbsp chopped fresh sage
1 chicken cut up into 8 pieces, or about 8 thighs and/or drumsticks
Coating:
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp baking powder
3 cups flour
1 Tbsp Old Bay seasoning
1 Tbsp chopped fresh thyme
1. Combine all the brine ingredients in a large non-reactive bowl, add the chicken pieces and allow chicken to soak in the brine for 3 hours in the fridge.
2. Take the chicken out of the brine, shake off excess brine (especially large pieces of garlic that may be sticking) and place on a rack on top of a sheet in the fridge, uncovered, for 2 more hours. (Don’t rinse or rub off the brine, you want that flavor to stick around.)
3. To coat, combine the egg, buttermilk and baking powder in one bowl, whisk well. Combine the flour, Old Bay and thyme in a large flat plate. Dredge the chicken in the liquid, coat with the flour and fry in a 350 degree deep fryer until done - about 3-5 minutes. (You can also fry it in a Dutch oven with about an inch or two of fat in there - you’ll just have to flip the chicken to cook both sides, and I would recommend a higher cooking temperature with this method - like 375 degrees.)
I doubt you will actually slap your momma as a result of eating this - in fact, I sincerely hope you don’t. But I’m sure you’ll want to call her to share this recipe. Because what good is a plate of fried chicken, if you can’t share it?
As the first person to arrive in the morning at the restaurant, I find myself as the de facto one in charge simply because I have the key to the door. It is a new experience for me to have to be the “go to guy” for all the problems that present themselves in the early morning hours. The first such problem is usually akin to something the people from the night before left for me. Either a pot of chicken stock that they meant to simmer on the stove the night before that was set too hot, so most of the pot is now empty, or it was set too cold, such that the stock has not really cooked itself. This morning was a “too cold” morning as one of the burners under the giant stock pot had gone out.
Duck confit - not the healthiest thing for you, but one of the tastiest!
Inspecting the ovens, I also found that two pans of duck confit had been left in the oven overnight as well. Fortunately they were still warm, and the duck was not overdone seeing as how it was submerged in duck fat, so no loss there either. But it is just another thing for me to work on before I can begin to work on my own station.
I set into the usual prep work of getting soups together and making some dressings and blanching asparagus and so forth, but this week is harder than most others as my lunchtime sauté/salad worker is on vacation. So in addition to doing all my usual work, I also have to do her set up as well, and then run that station through the lunch hour as well. But I am getting ahead of myself…
The delivery vans are what arrive next as we take in the food for the weekend in hopes that we have enough to get us through the busy Saturday and Sunday night rushes. Saturday deliveries are always anxious moments for me since any mistakes (mine or theirs) usually can’t be rectified until Monday morning. This morning the only mistake was that one of my delivery guys forgot to bring our lamb tenderloins and duck legs. Well, with the confit that had spent the night in the oven I knew that we were OK on duck legs in general, and the lamb was a new product we were planning on trying out, so these mistakes were not the end of the world. But all the same, I gave the driver enough shit for the error that he was able to track down which truck these items actually had been put on, and was able to get them to us later that day. (I’m not trying to be a dick, it’s just always better to resolve these kinds of things quickly…)
As only half of the asparagus that needed to be cleaned had been trimmed so far, I returned to my station to set back to working on that once again, when Oscar, my morning grill cook, pokes his head around the door behind me and says, “Papa,” (he calls everyone that) “can I see you in here for a second?…”
With his calm demeanor and desire to talk privately, I was assuming all he wanted was to talk about some future days off. I gladly joined him around the corner. Oh, would that it were holiday time was all he wanted. In front of me were Oscar and Nicolas (the morning dishwasher) looking at the coffee machine as it was pouring massive amounts of coffee all over the floor.
“Do you know what’s wrong Papa?”
“No, but Jesus, I’d say the first thing to do is to shut it off!” I yelled as I ran across the puddle of coffee to hit the power button.
Nothing more sad in the morning than spilled coffee.
I grabbed the filter out of the machine, handed it to Oscar and told him to dump it, as I tried to figure out what the hell had gone wrong. (It later turned out the urn the machine was “filling” was already full, but was not showing that on the front of the urn, so they had started brewing an entire batch of coffee into an already full urn…) With shoes soaked in coffee, I called for Alemo to come with a mop to get this mess cleaned up. Fortunately, we only lost about three pizza boxes and a few cake boxes to the spill. Oh, and most people had to forego their morning coffee seeing as how it was now in a mop bucket…
Back to my station, and now the pizza cook wants to know if we have any more tomme cheese for the weekend. “No,” I reply, “You’re just gonna have to stretch it for the weekend.” If I am going to make food cost, I have to run a few items tight. Heck, I have to run everything tight. It is a never-ending balance where I guess for each item if we can make it with the supply we have through the next day. This is especially hard on the weekend where I have to think three days in advance, and it is inevitable that we will run out of something. My goal is just to make sure it is nothing major - like hamburger meat or pizza cheese - and if that means annoying some of my cooks by making them work a little harder with their supplies, than so be it… All I knew was I had a soup that needed my attention now.
Creme Brulée - again, not too good for you, but damn tasty!
With the soup soon in a state where I could turn my attention elsewhere for a few moments, I ran across the street to the bakery that we receive our desserts from in order to place my order for Monday morning. I was pretty much out of everything again, so in addition to setting myself up for next week, I asked if they had a dozen cupcakes to spare for tonight. They did thankfully, but they needed some of their brulée dishes returned to them. This was of course a fair trade, so I ran back to my station, and got one of the line cooks to make the exchange later in the day for me.
And so it goes through the day - I take one step forward in my station, and 17 other minor disasters/annoyances/obligations rear their ugly heads in an ongoing conspiracy to make sure I don’t get myself prepped in time for service. But that is part of the life, and a part that I really kind of enjoy in a sick way. By making decisions on the fly and cleaning up the accidents as they happen, I am shaping the restaurant in my own style in some small way every day. Sure, I am not re-writing the menu or changing the layout of the kitchen, but those things aren’t expected of me.
All I know is that when one of my cooks comes up to me in a panic because we are out of balsamic onions, I get a great feeling inside. Suddenly I’m the only chef in the world who knows what to do to make everything right. I’m the guy who is going to make sure that this one ingredient in our grilled cheese sandwiches is made properly, and finds its way into those sandwiches in time for our customers to enjoy them at lunch. It may be an awful burden for some to bear, but I’m thrilled to have the chance to face it so many times every day.
(Except when this means I have to run out to the grocery store at 6 pm because I didn’t order enough basil to make it through the weekend. Seriously - how was three pounds not a large enough order? Grrr…)
P.S. In case you want to know how to make them too, here is how to make yourself some great balsamic onions:
Balsamic Onions
Thinly slice 4 onions - red or white, your preference.
Sweat them in a sauce pan with some butter until soft and translucent.
Add in 1/2 - 3/4 cup of brown sugar, and heat until the sugar melts all over the onions.
Cover with balsamic vinegar and simmer to reduce until the vinegar is thick and syrupy.
Use the onions in sandwiches, as a topping for pork chops or chicken breasts, or even serve as a before dinner hors d’oeuvre with cheese and crackers. They are just wonderful!
Yesterday was the one year anniversary of Deglazed. Wow, how far we’ve come in that time!
I started out with only the idea I was going to try and become a chef, and I was still in culinary school. A year later, I have worked in three kitchens, am a culinary school graduate (you may all call me “Chef Matt” now… ) and am now working as a kitchen manager in my current job. You can see how much things have changed from this excerpt from my first post:
I’m not going to lie to you - at no point in this blog I hope - I am scared out of my ever-loving mind. I have a wife, a house, a salary, a retirement plan and all the cushy accoutrements that my friends and I like to refer to as “the golden handcuffs”. To put it simply, I am really throwing a monkey wrench in my own life here and for no other good reason than I simply want to follow my dream.
Sure, I still left a lot of “comfort” behind, but I’m no longer scared of the unknown as I now know what it is I have to deal with daily. I’ve learned a lot - and learn more every day – that’s helped me to feel comfortable with this new life I’ve created for myself.
You’re all Lebowski achievers in my book!
Also, I have to thank all you loyal readers and commenters for making this blog a fun, interactive, and hopefully informative resource. Sure, my wife has gotten made at me at times for coming home at the end of along night, only to have me go straight to the computer to write down my latest mess-ups on the line for your reading enjoyment. But all the same, that is what has kept it as true-to-life as I want this blog to be. If I were not showing you the real adventures as they happen, then this blog would serve no purpose at all.
So as we head into year two of Deglazed, I can only imagine how much things will have changed by this time next year. Will I be the head chef somewhere? Will I have my restaurant? Will I have given up the whole thing and headed back into online marketing? I can never be sure of what the future will hold for me - this past year has been proof of that.
But it’s a pretty safe bet I won’t go back to the way things were.
Thanks again for all your support! I hope to keep this blog alive for many years to come!
The traditional checker-board pattern of chef’s pants. YAWN!
After two years of culinary school and almost one year on the job as a cook, my standard-issue checkered style chef’s pants just aren’t cutting it any more. The stains in them are deep and dark, to the point where one might actually think the original design of the pants was “brown stain” - and that somehow a few checker-board patterns have been scratched into them here and there.
It was time to go shopping for new pants!
Fortunately, chef’s pants are the one item in the entire world of fashion that fit my style - or lack thereof - perfectly. Them and Hawaiian shirts. I am by no means a slave to fashion. In fact, a college roommate of mine once quipped that I was “not even a migrant worker to fashion.” Chef’s pants are indeed the kind of thing that if worn in public would make you the object of ridicule, and would send anyone who stared at them long enough into an epileptic fit. The crazy patterns and wild designs are there to hide dirt, stains, splashes and so forth.
A long time ago in this blog, I mentioned how Vic at Cafe Tirolo used to wear shorts in the kitchen. I thought then, and still think now, that this is a terrible idea. Being around hot splashing oil without full coverage on the legs is never a good idea. My new pants were indeed going to be of the “long” variety, and preferably designed for kitchen use.
Since they’re not paying me, I don’t have to say where I bought the pants from, and quite frankly, it’s not that important. The key was to get patterns I liked on pants that fit. And here is what I got:
Good for sneaking up on polar bears too…
1. Arctic Cammo
These pants still fit with the black/white/gray motif that most traditional chef’s pants follow, only these have the added benefit of giving me the look like I may have a slightly dangerous side to me. Getting the reaction of “Whoa, maybe he knows how to kill me with his bare hands, I better do what he says,” is always a good thing in the kitchen. Of course I am about as dangerous as a teddy bear, but I don’t mind pretending. Also, the camouflage pattern is not only perfect for hiding stains and other kitchen mishaps, but they are also ideal for hiding me in the walk-in whenever I mess up.
The first day I wore these, I had to go to the grocery store afterwards - something I usually hate to do in a chef’s outfit since people always stop me to ask questions. But with these pants on, all I could think about was the quote from Napoleon Dynamite, “You think anybody wants a roundhouse kick to the head when I’m wearing these bad-boys? Forget about it.” Nobody asked me any questions - in fact nobody even came near me. Sweet.
Good for sneaking up on… clown fish?…
2. Tropical Fish
These pants have the opposite effect of the arctic camouflage pants with respect to hiding. Unless I suddenly find my kitchen awash with a waist-deep tropical reef, hiding in this color explosion on my legs is next to impossible. But that is not the effect I’m going for in these. These are my “Hey, here comes Chef Matt!” pants. If I am going to have some sort of managerial presence in the kitchen, it is good for my employees to know where I am so they can ask my questions or get help from me when they need it. And if I ever need to disappear to watch them when they don’t know I am monitoring their cooking - I always have the cammos.
Loud, bright and covered with fish. Gotta love ‘em.
In fact, these new pants have been so much fun; I want to get another pair! Or if only so I have to do laundry less frequently. The only problem is, there are three patterns out there I really like, and I can’t afford all three at this time. (Chef’s pants run about $35 a pair…) So I decided it would be fun to let you, my faithful readers, select which pattern I get next!
Your vote counts here, so choose wisely. The winning design will be purchased, worn around the kitchen, and modeled on this very site by yours truly. Here are the contenders:
1. Hot Tomatoes
I have always been a fan of the hot pepper chef’s pants, but then again, they are a bit overdone. All the same, the classics never go out of style, so if you think this is the best option, then so be it.
You know there is a complete lack of fashion sense in this industry when pants that look like this can actually be thought of as “classic.”
2. Carrot Fish
Hard to see what is going on here, but basically these pants have orange fish swimming one way, and fat orange carrots “swimming” the other. All on a black background. These pants are so loud, they make a Van Halen concert seem like the campus of Gallaudet. Sure, I already have a pair of pants with fish on them, but the absurdity of these is hard to pass up.
3. Pacific Rim
These pants look pin-striped from a distance, but up close they have some cool writing on them in a variety of Asian languages. No, I can’t read what they say, and I am sure it is akin to “this stupid white guy thinks he is all mystical and shit, but actually paid $35 to wear pants that say how much he sucks.” If that’s the case, then you should definitely vote for these!
So now to put my polling software to good use, here is your chance to weigh in and make sure I continue looking like a fool in the kitchen for many years to come!
Poll closed - see below.
Thanks for voting, and I’ll be sure to let you know who wins, and when I have the new pants!
Update 7/17/07: Your votes were tallied, and as I promised, I bought and modeled the winning pants. To see which pair of pants won - and of course to check out my lovely legs sporting them - be sure to read the follow-up post.
