12.25.08
Posted in Rants and Raves at 2:56 pm by Chef Matt
Well, it’s Christmas today, and I think that instead of some sappy post about getting together and having fun with family, I will take this chance to rant about something that annoys me. This much time with family means there is plenty that is already annoying me, so why not use this forum to vent? That, and it’s my blog, so I’ll do as I wish! So Merry F-ing Christmas!
Here’s what I hate: people who are afraid to have their house smell like someone was cooking in it. God forbid!! Oh my lord, next thing you know, guests will suddenly think that someone actually LIVES in the house! Holy cow!
OK, I see SOME instances where you need to fire up the fan… |
A home is not a home until there is cooking involved. It’s just a house. It’s just a building. Go into a new home sometime and inhale deeply through your nose. Smell that? It’s called “nothing”. You have no connection to the place because none of your emotions have been inspired to connect with the place. And the first emotion that most of us make a connection with is good food with friends and family. (Hmmm… maybe I am getting sappy after all…)
When guests arrive at your house for the holidays, when you have been working on pies and cookies, and roasting a turkey, and simmering potatoes, what is the first thing they always say when they walk in the door? “MMMmmmm… smells so good in here!”
Not, “Hey, you want to turn on a fan in here? It smells like you’ve been cooking for God’s sake!”
So why the obsession with the exhaust fans people? Look, if you are making fish stock, or duck confit, or something else that generates a lot of smoke or potentially noxious odors, OK, I am with you. Setting off the smoke detector is not a goal. There are times when you need it. But the people who come running in as soon as a burner comes on and throw on the exhaust fan to full blast earn nothing but my ire.
Food may hold a more important place in my life than that of most other people - I understand that is part of being a passionate chef. But all the same, fear of any part of the food experience is a fear of food, simple as that.
Enjoy your Christmas dinner - free of any flavors or smells that might offend anyone. Losers. |
I think it’s similar the concept of “killing cuisine” that we find in those people who want everything to be pasteurized and sterilized so that we don’t accidentally suffer from the side-effects of flavor remaining in anything we might consume. Those people can go enjoy their Christmas dinner at McDonald’s, Burger King or Taco Bell for all I care.
If you don’t want to actually experience your food, then you simply don’t deserve real food.
So as I’m cooking my roast, simmering my veg, roasting my squash and toasting my pinoli, please either enjoy all the wonderful smells this has to offer (as well as the great tastes later), or get the hell out of my kitchen. It may be Christmas, but that doesn’t mean you can’t piss me off.
Merry Christmas all!
Chef Matt
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12.22.08
Posted in The Story at 2:17 pm by Chef Matt
Expanding my knowledge of British cuisine is of course mandatory while I’m living in the country. So Chris, in an attempt to do just this said that we would be having a “traditional British Sunday roast.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“You get a piece of meat,” Chris said with widening eyes, “and roast it! Then put all sorts of veg and potatoes on the side, Yorkshire pudding, and cover it all with loads and loads of gravy!”
“You had me at ‘piece of meat’,” I replied.
So Sunday finally rolled around, and I walked into the kitchen where Chris was furiously preparing foods of all types to the dulcet tones of British heavy metal played over his new computer speakers. There was a chicken that had been rubbed down with herbs and spices, and all manner of veg being prepped. I asked how I could help. Basically it came down to massive amounts of chopping and cutting of root vegetables. The menu was as follows:
It all goes on one plate, and then is covered with gravy. This is only about half of the food on this plate so far… |
- Roasted chicken
- Stuffing (dried from a box - reconstituted and all… eep!)
- Boiled carrots
- Mashed sweet potatoes
- Roasted New potatoes
- Roasted Parsnips (rolled in confectioner’s sugar and black pepper - interesting and tasty!)
- Yorkshire pudding
- Brussels sprouts (He was just going to boil them - argh. I ended up making them my way for the dinner.)
- Loads of gravy
I’ll save you the details of all the basic chopping and so forth, the one item I wanted to work on, since I knew nothing about it, was the Yorkshire pudding. I’d eaten them once or twice as a kid, and I remember liking them a lot, but I had no clue how to make them. Heck, I wasn’t even sure what they were…
I think they look pretty darn good, don’t you?… |
Chris was kind enough to show me a recipe for them, and walk me through some of the technique involved - like making sure the pan and the oil in the pan were really hot before adding the batter. But he still warned me, “Sometimes they just don’t puff at all, and I have no idea why. Good luck.” This was a little scarier, as I didn’t want to be the idiot who ruined the Sunday Roast by serving Yorkshire Hockey Pucks. But the recipe is so simple (basically flour, milk, egg and salt), and Chris’ technique seemed to be spot on - so the result was met with resounding approval from all the Brits in attendance.
Everything was progressing beautifully, until the chicken came out of the oven. At this point I offered to make the gravy.
“No worries mate,” said Chris, and he pulled out a can of gravy powder.
From left: Chris, Isabel, Dave, myself.
Can you believe after eating all that, we went out to the pub for drinks?… Me either. |
The vision of yet another freeze-dried food was more than I could take, especially with all the drippings from the chicken sitting right there in the pan! I had to assert my inner food-snob, and told him to put the can aside, I would take care of the gravy. I sprang into action, using a plastic baggie to separate the fat from the pan drippings, made a quick roux and added some stock and spices. It was so much better than what I fear might have come out of that can if I do say so myself.
And as we began to dig in to our wonderful huge meal drowned in this homemade gravy, we all wondered when we would be having our next Sunday roast.
Oh yeah - next Sunday! 
Chef Matt
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12.15.08
Posted in Recipes at 7:16 am by Chef Matt
Growing up, I had a prejudice against Brussels sprouts, and a well-deserved one, seeing as how they invariably sucked. Even my father, who would eat anything known to man, thought they tasted like gym socks. This of course stemmed from the fact that the only way anyone seemed to know how to cook them was to boil them for about half an hour - to ensure they were cooked through to the center - and the resulting over-cooked exteriors were a pallid, sulfurous mess. No offense to my newly-adopted fellow countrymen, but this was how Brits cooked vegetables (BBR - “Boiling Beyond Recognition”) and as could be predicted, it produced something completely inedible.
Scary when raw, they come about nicely when cooked right… |
I can’t remember when I had my first good Brussels sprout, but it was well into my adult life. The trick was to blanch them, and then saute them - applying a dry heat cooking method to caramelize the sugars, and to keep down the sulfur production. And I then used this method when I was at Vero to add a dish similar to this to the menu. When winter rolled around in Rustico, Chef Frank showed me his way of making Brussels sprouts, which was the same as I had learned to do it to produce great results. I was happy to learn that the technique I had worked out was the same as the one he was teaching me - sort of a “corroboration after the fact” by a chef who knew a lot more than me…
However, I have developed a recipe that seems to please the crowds, so I will now share with you the technique step-by-step with you, and I hope you will follow along at home, and let me know what you think!
Wow, so artistic! |
Step 1: You need to trim the bottoms off the Brussels sprouts. They are usually discolored and tough anyway, so trim them off slightly, and any leaves that want to fall off at this point, let them go. This is great stuff for your compost pile anyway…
Action photo! I hope you all appreciate the steam burns I gave myself trying to capture this moment for you… |
Step 2: Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Drop in the sprouts and simmer them until they are nicely cooked – but not cooked all the way through. This is a critical step – if you overcook them at this stage, we will be back at the “sulfurous mess” stage of things. So how do you know when they are blanched enough? I like to go by the smell guide. When they just start giving off that “cooked cabbage” smell, they are done – drain them, and get them into an ice bath to stop the cooking process.
This is a lot of bacon for the sprouts. You may want to do a little less. |
Step 3: In a large sauté pan, start cooking some bacon. Cook it until it is done, but not too crisp of course, because that is just nasty. Remove the bacon to a plate, but leave the rendered fat behind. This is what we will use to cook the sprouts. If you don’t have enough fat from the bacon, you can boost it with butter, oil, or best, some reserved bacon fat (which you all save, right?…)
Sprouts are sliced and trimmed of all the leaves that want to fall off. You are ready to assemble the final dish! |
Step 4: The blanched sprouts are nice and cool by now, so take them out and slice them in half. Again, some more leaves will want to fall off – let them go. Some people like to quarter their sprouts at this stage, and I have no problem with that if they are nice and big. But I like the look of halved sprouts myself. That is a question of personal preference, not divine mandate…
Since they are sauteing in bacon fat, the odds that they will be awesome are now pretty high… |
Step 5: Sprouts go in the pan! All that hot fat should start cooking them nicely right off the bat, but you want to work quickly to make sure you get all the cuts sides face down in the pan so they brown nicely. When your guests look at the sprouts, this is the side that will tell their brain that these have been nicely caramelized – so make sure this side is looking good on your sprouts – the rest is just cooking them through.
Testing for doneness. You want to see some color on that flat side. This one here needs just a little bit more… |
Step 6: You can test for when all the sprouts are ready to flip by turning over one of them in the middle of the pan. If they look good, you should be well on the way. Give them all a toss, and then throw in some halved chestnuts and heat them through.
The pan is getting more crowded now. Crowded with awesome! |
Step 7: Back goes the bacon! Really, how can you go wrong with bacon playing such a starring role in the recipe? Maybe I don’t like Brussels sprouts after all – maybe I’m just using them as a convenient vehicle for bacon… No, not really – but its presence certainly doesn’t hurt things!
The finished product - lovely to look at, and wonderful to eat! |
Step 8: Just before you pull them off the heat, toss in some dried cranberries (plumped in some warm water if you like) or some raisins. Off the heat, top with some blue cheese or Parmesan (not too much, just a little to make the texture more creamy) and some pomegranate seeds (if you like). The sweet/tart/creamy/bacony/buttery flavors and textures will not only delight the taste buds, but the resulting dish is lovely on the plate as well.
I hope this changes your mind on this much-maligned vegetable, and of course I hope you enjoy cooking them now as well!
Chef Matt
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12.09.08
Posted in The Story, Other Fun at 1:57 pm by Chef Matt
The new home. Yes, it’s a townhome, but it’s new! |
After only a week here, it would seem kind of odd that I would be talking about a move at this point. But yes, we had to vacate our temporary housing, and head for the greener pastures of our permanent residence here in Oxford. As luck would have it, Caroline and I are being put up in a nice 4-bedroom flat (which we will be sharing with some co-workers of Caroline from time to time) that has three floors and an awesome kitchen! I will be sure to get my chef on in this granite-countered gallery kitchen wonderland!
But no move can be completed without some problems right? Last night, entering the flat for the first time, Chris (one of my future flat-mates) asked me why the door keys said “alarm”. “Oh, those are for the front door, but don’t worry, the alarm isn’t active yet.” (This was what they told me at the rental agent’s.) As the first loads of luggage were being brought into the house, Chris and I were poking around the upstairs bedrooms. He was showing me the finer details of how water heaters worked in the UK, and how they put the lights to bathrooms on the outside of the bathrooms commonly. (A strategy which makes NO sense at all. NEVER give the power of the lights to the person waiting on the other side of the door!) Anyway, as we entered the last bedroom, we saw a weird box on the wall with two red buttons on it. “I have no idea what that is,” Chris said.
In the front door, the view of the front hall back through to the living room and backyard. |
Well not being one to leave anything unexplored, I pushed one of the buttons. Nothing. “Hmmm,” I said. So I pushed the other button.
Captian Foreshadowing (that would be me) might have given you the clue as to what happened next. Yes, the alarm started to go off. Quite loudly. Both inside and outside - for all our neighbors to hear. Lovely.
“I guess the alarm isn’t as off as we thought…” I yelled over the din as I came crashing down the two flights of stairs to turn it off. Opening the house book I was given, hoping it had the code I was dismayed to read the following lines: “Your alarm system is not yet online.” Sigh.
View 1 of my new kitchen. Granite and lots of room! Whoo hoo! |
We called the rental agents, and they in fact confirmed that our alarm was, in fact, not online. We held up the phone to the blaring speakers to confirm that they were, in fact, jackasses. Their advice at this point: “Well, it goes off in half an hour…”
That was a long 30 minutes. But yes, it finally stopped, and we finished our move in realizing that we had now alienated ourselves from our neighbors permanently. And only in the first 10 minutes of our living there. Personally, that is a new record for me, and I’m quite proud of it.
Here are some more photos of the new digs:
View 2 of my new kitchen. The white thing is my clothes washer/dryer. Yes, I do my laundry in the kitchen now. |
My new stove. 5 burner gas range. It really cooks bacon fast! |
My first meal I cooked in the new house. Seared Breast of Wild Pheasant with Local Apples and Seyval Reduction. And I had to eat it off paper plates with plastic silverware… |
The living room. The floor is heated! |
My work station. Until I get furniture, I am writing these from the floor next to a radiator. |
A typical bathroom. The bathtubs are nice and deep here - great for soaking away the worries of having done nothing all day… |
My backyard. They say that in spring I will get some grass on it. We shall see… |
The recycle system here is weird. One bin is for glass and newspaper. The other is for cans, plastic and cardboard/random paper. But I still haven’t memorized which is which… |
And now the beauty shots. This is the view of Oxford from my balcony as the sun begins to set…. |
And here’s the close-up as the sky is in it’s full-on orange display. |
More adventures to follow from the kitchen for sure!
Chef Matt
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12.05.08
Posted in The Story at 5:27 pm by Chef Matt
OK, as promised, a post about cooking. As I’m stuck for a few days in a studio apartment with Caroline, I was confronted with the dilemma of stocking up the kitchen to start cooking, or should I just wait for a few days, and when I get to the new place, I can go to town there?
Well, the answer is pretty obvious: I got down and dirty right off the bat.
Cooking up with what little I had in the kitchen. This really was a case of dirtying all the pans twice - I only had three… |
I headed out to my new local grocery store to acquaint myself with the space. The first thing that struck me was how much bread there was. It was like a whole aisle, and then there was the bakery aisle after that. I guess bread is a bigger thing here than in the US… The rest of the store was pretty similar to a US store, only there was liquor on sale there, and also they sold the greatest thing I have ever seen for sale in a grocery store. There was a collection of plastic tubs full of duck fat! Man, I’m going to be able to make some serious confit while I’m here!
I decided that with my limited kitchen, I should try something simple - just a beef braised with red wine, roasted potatoes and salad. There was a bit of a false start, as the night I was planning to cook this, Caroline wanted to introduce me to her co-workers, so we went out to dinner for some awesome Indian food first.
But the next night, I was back in business! I had all the food mis en placed from the night before, so all I needed to do was heat the pan, pour in the oil and brown the meat to get going. The pan was warm, and so was the oil, all I needed now was the salt and pepper for seasoning the meat…
Good Lord, don’t tell me….
Not bad for a first shot in a tiny, unfamilar kitchen with no salt or pepper! |
Yes, this kitchen had an electric tea kettle, heated floor tiles, and Jaffa Cakes - yet there were neither salt nor pepper. How was this possible? I mean at some point you have to say that when a kitchen attains a certain quantity of “luxury items”, you can just assume that the “essentials” are taken care of. This is a lesson that never holds true, and apparently is a lesson I have to learn over and over again.
A quick run to the local convenience store, and I was back in business.
The meal came out great - it was the best I could do with limited ingredients and limited space, and let’s not forget this was my first time cooking in this kitchen! I had to learn the tricks, like which burner didn’t work at all, and where the switch that controls the entire oven was located. In the end, Caroline was kind enough to declare it a success, and I have to admit, I was pleased enough with the results. But soon I will be out of this tiny kitchen, and into a giant brand new kitchen.
I can’t wait!
Chef Matt
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12.03.08
Posted in The Story at 6:49 am by Chef Matt
In an effort to go more “local”, Caroline and I decided to soak up a little of the local flavor by heading out to a pub that was offering a “Pub Quiz and Curry”. Trivia and Indian food - how could we pass this up?
First photo of me in a British pub. Not likely to be the last. (Camera phones really are crap, aren’t they?…) |
The pub’s name was distinctly British - Far from the Madding Crowd - and apparently this is an event they hold every Sunday night. As we sat down, we were shocked to see how empty the pub was. Back in the states, every night that a bar had a trivia night, it was always packed. Well, we soon learned just how “tuned in” the locals were to this event. Five minutes before the quiz was to begin, the door opened, and in walked Oxford University.
“Oh man, we’re dead,” I whispered as loud as I could to my wife while I felt all the blood drain from my head. Shoulders slumped and awaiting a trouncing of biblical proportions, I slid up to the bar, and ordered another round and asked about the curry that was being offered for ₤3 ($4.50) with the quiz.
“We have beef and vegetable,” the cute hostess offered.
“Is that two different kinds, or is it all beef and vegetable?” which I thought was a reasonable question… The look I received in return told me that perhaps I was thinking too hard on the subject of cheap curry… “We’ll have 2 beef please.”
As the host of the quiz came to our table to hand us the sheets that we were to write our answers on, we wanted to get a sense of just how badly we were about to get beaten. “Are the questions particularly… ummm… ‘British’?…” I asked of the quiz master. He kindly replied that there was a healthy mix since Americans frequently came to this event. Caroline and I once again had hope.
Some film scenes are iconic. Others jump-started me into puberty… |
We did OK in the first round, but soon we came to a round that was called “Sport”. Singular. We knew we were in trouble when the question, “Which Brit scored the 4th most premiership goals?” came up. Out of a possible 10 points in that round, we scored 1. Similarly, in the “TV & Film” category, we scored a mere 1 point, and that was only because there was one question about an American movie. (”In the 1983 film ‘Flashdance’, what was the day job of Jennifer Beals’ character?” Answer: “Welder”.)
But since this is still supposed to be a “food blog”, allow me to comment briefly on the curry. It was everything I expected a mass-produced curry that cost ₤3 a bowl to be. Edible, but hardly something to seek out…
But then again, it wasn’t so bad that I won’t be back. Only next time, I’m coming back with some British friends who know something about European football, as well as the characters on some show called “EastEnders”…
Chef Matt
P.S. Next post will have to do with me cooking something! I promise! Stay tuned!
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