Mmm...Knives.

On the first day of culinary school I got the greatest present I never knew I wanted. A bag full of knives! Sure there was other stuff in there. I didn’t know the names for half of them. But on pulling out my first (of course the largest) knife and unsheathing it, I’m sure I had the same half-dazed look on my face like I’d just had my first kiss. I’m not sure you can talk about knives without the inevitable phallus connotations and I’m not going to try to. It all comes down to this: Knives are sexy and powerful. And being able to accurately wield a forged steel 11 inch instrument of doom makes you a badass.

Oh, and when that convenient store clerk asks “what’s in the bag” and you deadpan “knives” with a little shrug, there’s a bit of Tarantino in you that giggles.

So, here’s a compendium of the knowledge regarding amassing your steel phalli.

Purchasing- There are tons of knives out there that cost more than my rent. Unless you’ve got a trust fund or you’re one of those people that purchase kitchen equipment for social climbing purposes, you don’t need these. On that note, don’t go to WalMart either and buy the knives in plastic packaging. You’re much better of finding a kitchen supply store and buying around a $70 chef knife and paring knife of the same quality. These knives are easily honed and sharpened, so spending a good bit of money on them is a good investment. These two will be the knives you use for 90% of your cutting. Anything that says “no sharpening needed” is a load of crap. Please ignore this guarantee.

If you want a really expensive knife, go to the knife store and talk to the people who work there. Ask tons of questions. If they don’t pull out the knives and have you try them, do not buy at the store. They probably don’t know what they are talking about.

A good flexible boning knife is essential if you will be boning a lot of fish. Make sure it’s got a good amount of give by putting the flat side of the tip and pressing down until the blade makes a half parabola. The more give, the more flexibility you have cutting fish.

Then there’s the serrated knife used for cutting breads. This knife is nearly impossible to sharpen. Once the edge goes, you’re going to have to get a new knife. Spend accordingly.

There are tons of different types of knives and many different features. The best way to find your own knife is to go to the store and handle the knives. Pay attention to the girth of the handle. Does it fit easily in your hand? Are you left handed? Do they have left-handed knives? Do you want a lighter or heavier knife? The weight will not make too much of a difference unless you are chopping for hours at a time.

One thing about chef’s knives is the curvature of the blade. The more curved the blade, the better rocking motion you can get on it. You want to use this rocking motion to cut herbs finely and making uniform cuts of vegetables. By keeping the tip of the knife on the board and pushing the knife down and forward, you will get a cleaner slice on the vegetables and lessen the movement of your arm. Lots of movement = tired arm.

Stay tuned for how to care for your knives…

Hot Weather Cooking Tips

I learned a few things in the past heatwave that will help those sans AC in the hot summer months.

1. If you have to cook something and it gets crazy hot in the afternoon, prepare your stuff the night before and wake up early to pop it in the oven or put it on the stove top on low heat and just keep setting your alarm to get up and check it on the allotted times. This only works for things that cook long such as braises or beans and with low heat that is relatively safe to leave unattended. Of course, I have a studio apt and my bed is pretty much in the kitchen, so I felt confident I would know if something was seriously awry.

2. If you have electric burners, keep an extra pot with cool water for when you are done cooking. Put the cold (full) pot on the burner to absorb the heat instead of letting it radiate into your kitchen. The water won't boil and the pan won't really get hot either. This made a huge difference in my tiny kitchen where cooking for 20 minutes raises the temp 10 degrees in my apt.

3. Learn how to make a damn sandwich.

Storing Your Extra Polenta

Polenta can be used for leftovers in a few ways. You can scoop it out of the container and reheat it with some added moisture (milk or water, etc.) to make it soupy and grits -like.

Or, you can press still warm polenta into an oiled container (or line the container with saran wrap) so it sets up into a hard loaf. I used a round tupperware container for this. Then, when you are ready to use it, plop it out of the container onto a cutting board and slice off pieces. Saute these in a pan with a little fat (butter or oil) until they are nice and browned on the outside. Cook longer with more oil if you want a crunchy crust.

You can serve polenta with spaghetti sauce for an italian-style gluten-free meal. Or, it pretty much goes well with anything that is served with grains.

Heavenly Polenta

I am feeling a bit smug after spending the last half hour trashing my kitchen and making the best polenta I have ever made. Before, I have usually ended up throwing my polenta in the trash because it was more lumps than loose cornmeal, but I think I cracked the code. Unfortunately, I think I also got jalapeno oil underneath my thumbnails as they are currently burning. Here's what I did. All of it together makes a fantastic dish. The polenta by itself is pretty average.

Polenta
Small dice of half a turnip
Hachet of shallot
Hachet of 1 clove garlic
Small dice of 1/2 white onion
2 cups veg stock/broth
1 cup water
1 cup polenta (large ground cornmeal)
3 tbsp creme fraiche (french style sour cream, better than sour cream)
2 TBSP Grated Parmesan cheese (or another aged hard cheese like parrano or the one I got at the local posh store called aged mahon which is divine, but $21/lb)
Salt

Toast the cornmeal in the sauce pan (just put on burner with no fat) until it starts to smell nutty. Put aside. Sweat (low heat) in saucepan onions and turnip in olive oil until onions are clear. Add garlic, shallot. Cook 1 min. Add .75 tbsp butter. When melted, add broth and water. Bring to a boil. Take off heat (this is the secret, let it stop boiling, then whisk cornmeal in slowly pouring cornmeal over whisk, then keep stirring for a while until you are sure the cornmeal isn't going to stick together) add cornmeal. Bring back to a boil. Bring down to a low simmer. Cover and cook for approx. 20 minutes or more until cornmeal is no longer crunchy. Try not to stir or take lid off pot until it is done (much like rice). Add creme fraiche and cheese. Season with salt when finished.

Cilantro/Jalapeno/Sage oil
Blanch one bunch each of fresh cilantro and fresh sage. Peel and de-seed 1.5 jalapenos (save the rest for the mushrooms) then mince. (Reserve blanching liquid for tapioca) Blend all with olive oil. Just enough to make it blend. (This doesn't turn out very hot. Maybe if the jalapenos were cooked?)

Tapioca with seasoned oil (I know this sounds weird. I only tried it because the water I poached the herbs in smelled so good I wanted to cook something in it and I had some tapioca handy. Plus they use the large tapioca all the time on iron chef. Yes, that makes me a foodie nerd.)

The way I did this was to bring a 3 quart stock pot full of water to a boil and blanched the herbs in a small mesh sieve that I just dropped in the water with the herbs in it so I wouldn't have to fish them out. When I was finished with the herbs, I salted the water and put half a cup of tapioca in the sieve and put it back in so the water covered the tapioca and stirred occasionally to keep them from sticking together. Put a lid over it and cook until clear. When it is finished, add a few tablespoins of the above oil and some salt until nicely seasoned. The texture is very odd for people with the traditional american pallete. It's kind of like roe. But trust me, it makes this dish awesome.

And the last bit...

Saute (per serving) the following in 1/2 TBSP butter:
6 porcini mushrooms (de-stemmed and sliced)
2 TBSP small diced onions
1/4 jalapeno small diced

To PLATE:
Mound polenta off center on the plate with a divet in the center. Pile the sauteed mushrooms on top of that, then top with a spoonful or two of the tapioca. Drizzle the oil over it and around the plate (to make it pretty). Top with a small dollop of creme fraiche and some more of the grated parmesan (or cheese of choice). Serve!

I know this dish is a pain, but it is so worth it. If you are prepared and not making it up as you go along, it would probably take less than an hour but still use up half the dishes in your kitchen.

On having no time...

I knew I should have spent more of my time getting up to speed on my culinary posting while I had the time, but now I don't. I'm just too lazy. Between my new job and the overwhelming amount of information being pushed into my brain on a regular basis, forming sentences just seems like a bit too much effort.

Plus I stuffed myself full of boeuf bourgignon and crepes with fresh berries and creme fraiche and washed it down with a nice rose, so I am not inclined to do anything that doesn't involve sleep.

I promise I will be back with more posts.

Clams, Mussels and White Wine/Butter Sauce

I got to do my first experimenting in cooking AT SCHOOL. To feed to my classmates. So awesome.

Everyone's group but ours had to follow a recipe, then chef stopped by our table and said "do whatever you want. make it have pasta, clams and mussels." I believe our collective jaws dropped. After hemming and hawing over the recipe we were going to make, (should it be white wine? should it be cream?) we decided to rest on it. In the morning I showed up early and wandered into the library on a whim. Why it would take me 3 months to figure out that the best foodie library in town was in the damn culinary school, I have no idea. It was way better than walking into the Powell's food section.

I ended up finding a recipe to cook mussels in white wine. I wrote it shorthand (completely avoiding telling everyone that you were supposed to just use the wine for cooking the mussels instead of as a base for a sauce because I really didn't want a reduction of heavy cream as a sauce) and took it back to my group. They approved, but now I was stuck with the daunting task of figuring just how to make this into a sauce. When I disappeared into the adjoined kitchen with little more than a sauce pan, crawfish stock and some booze, I got a little bit of that high I used to get when you'd lie to your parents about something stupid. No, dad, I didn't borrow your power saw to cut the head off my brother's army men. Why would you think that? But it was more yeah, I know what I am doing with this half gallon of sauvignon blanc and a whisk.

Long story short. It worked out fantastic. I think I really have a knack for sauces. I'll give you the full breakdown below for what I did and write down notes for myself for ways to make it simpler in case I want to make it again. It was good enough I probably will some day.

First thing I did was set 1.5 cups seafood (mostly crawfish and shrimp) stock and 2 cups white wine to reduce in a sauce pan on the stove.

Next we sauteed up about three cups each mussels and clams (no shells) in a few ounces of butter, with minced shallots and garlic (feel free to be extravagant with the butter, it all gets added into the sauce anyways and the sauce is very buttery). As they are cook, clams and mussels release lots of moisture. When done, strain the juices from the pans through paper towels and into the sauce pan. (Put the clams and mussels in a bowl on ice to stop cooking) Continue reducing. The liquid from the pans is a nice milky color and gives lots of body to the sauce.

After about 20 minutes, add an ounce of minced shallots, a teaspoon of lemon zest, and let cook for another few minutes. When the sauce is done reducing, add enough minced parsley to make it definitely a factor in the sauce, I think I used maybe a half a cup (really don't remember). Then start swirling in chunks of raw butter (monter au beurre). Balance the sauce with about a lemon and a half squeezed into the sauce. Salt to taste. (Don't use salt until the very end because I lot of these ingredients are naturally very salty).

To finish, saute the clams and mussels (just to heat) in a small amount of butter. Toss the sauce with angel hair or small linguine, add the mollusks and salt to taste. Remember, the sauce will end up much thinner than thickened, roux-based, or cream sauces. That was a concern for members of our group (until the dish was assembled). This is a very flavorful sauce, and being a butter sauce, it only needs to coat the pasta, not have a pool of it sitting in the bottom. That is very unappetizing with thin sauces.

If I wanted to try this again and make it healthier, I would substitute the seafood stock for vegetable stock, only use butter to saute the mollusks and thicken with a cornstarch slurry. It would turn out much fishier and I would use less lemon and probably a few extra herbs to make it more "green" tasting, maybe saute up some mushrooms with it as well. I think it would require a lot of balancing to get it right.

Two Steps Forward...crap.

One thing about culinary school. You are constantly fooled into thinking you know everything. For a few days, you'll be in the groove, perfecting the same types of dishes. Then, all of a sudden you make the most appalling string of crap ever to grace your kitchen. Enter the shame...

Of course, it's probably just the fact that I now have the wherewithal to identify my mistakes that is making me insecure about the rubbery shrimp I produced yesterday. And the incident with the fennel. That wasn't so good.