Bloomington/Normal Day 1: Flat Top

For work, I was sent to Bloomington with my family.  This meant that while my wife had meetings, I was allowed to take our two kids someplace and keep them busy.  The last time I had gone to Bloomington, was about last year or so for the same reasons.  Anyhow, on the first day, we were looking for dinner and decided to try out the restaurant right next door to our hotel, on Tonawanda Avenue.  The restaurant was called Destihl and we walked in, asked for a seat for 5 and then the hostess asked if we had a reservation.  I had said "no" and then she told me that they only take reservations and without a reservation it would be about an hour till we could have a table. 

A personal peeve of mine, is when a restaurant hostess or seater tells me that there is a wait and then you look around yourself and see 3 or 4 booths open that could sit 2-4 each, and a large table/booth against the wall that could seat 6.  We will call that table/booth combo "Spot A", because it will become important later on.  So, we left and walked just across the street to a place that looks like a steak house, called FlatTop.

FlatTop is an interesting place.  It is so interesting that it could work in other cities, like Saint Louis.  You walk in, get a table and then order.  Their special item is a food bowl, prepared on a giant flat top and then delivered to your table. 

So, what happens is that you grab a long wooden sign on a post and write your name on the sign.  Then you go up to the very large bar where they have all kinds of rices, noodles, vegetables and meats and pick your stuff that goes into your bowl.

Not only did they have everything labeled nicely, but behind this bar, on the wall, they had a whole sign describing the calories of each prepared item or sauce along with the spicy level.  So, you fill your bowl up and then take it to the bar surrounding the cooks.  There you can make any last minute changes, like turn your bowl into a soup or a salad.  Whichever change you make, you place a colored plastic stick into your food, so that the cooks know how you want it prepared.  So, they cook it, and get it to you just as you had ordered it.

I would give the place, atmosphere, food and everything else a 3 out of 5 stars.  The only issue we had with it was that since the flat top cooking area was a certain size and they have a lot of vegetables and things that appear to be raw, it takes a lot of time to get everything cooked.  Since it is the only cooking method of the food there, it is possible that you may have your bowl at the cook's bar, ready to be cooked, fr as much as 5-15 minutes before there is a space on the cook-top to cook it.  I went back for seconds after the first bowl was finished within 2-3 minutes.  The second bowl sat there, waiting and waiting and after it was delivered to me, the rest of my table had eaten and was ready to go. I would give the service as far as the cooking is concerned, maybe a 2 and 1/2 stars out of 5.  Someone has to know that this is a problem and they need to be thinking of solutions.


http://www.flattopgrill.com/locations.html

What it is really like being a chef or working at a restaurant

I saw this online and it only started to bring back memories:
http://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/understanding-cooks-best-kitchen-advice?ref=facebook-868

 

 From the time that I was 16 years old, I started to work at a restaurant. When I think back to this place, from seeing and dining in so many other restaurants, it really didn't seem like a true restaurant, but it was.  I did so because it was easy work and fun when your friends worked there as well.  My older brother worked there and as such it helped me get my job there.  I didn't think of it at the time, but it helped light the fuse for my love of food and cooking.  I tried to avoid the kitchen as best as I could because I was young and 16 and didn't want to do anything back there that pulled me away from my friends and the windows looking upon the outside world.  There were a couple of times that my brother was pulled into the back to help and when he came out at the end of the day, he looked drained and smelled like a trashcan.  I just didn't want that and I did try really hard to avoid it, and did so at that location.  What happened when I was about 18, was that while school was one thing and I had friends there, my friends did not live by me and work with me.  The friends I had acquired at this one location, in Shrewsbury, were the friends I would go out and party with on summer nights, weekends and vacations.  That was my social network, it was Facebook and Myspace before those sites were even invented.  I don't try to sound old and ancient, but before there was the internet and even cell phones that did anything other than make and receive calls, there was a physical meeting of people at locations. 

My friends were all together and we were making friends with managers and then all of a sudden, they moved my favorite manager.  They transfer managers and move them around like chess pieces. (Wait, maybe not because that implies that the district supervisors who manage whole city's worth of restaurant locations would be capable of any intelligent thought.)  But my favorite manager was sent to another location, on Manchester Road, in West County and I was still stuck here in Shrewsbury.

I begged to be moved there and when I was, I noticed that things seemed different and there, I did volunteer my services to the kitchen when they had a cook call in sick.  I thought it was really cool that 2 guys would run the cook's line and maybe 3 on a busy day and there would be as much as 10-15 in the front of the house just working on the products of those on the cook's line.  So one day I was working and the cook called in sick.  There was a certified trainer back there and they needed someone to go back and I took the chance.  I slapped a hairnet on, a cap, a thick apron and went to the cook's line.  I worked there in what seemed like perfect harmony with the other cook.  He was on the ovens and I had steamer and fryer.  I was having trouble keeping up with the food taking and when the manager, probably in a drunken stupor came before me and pulled me over away from the cook's line.

"John," he says. "Recipes are just instructions.  If you can read, just do what they say and everything will be fine."

That is all it takes and that thought, that saying, coming from an a-hole such as he was, was the most remarkable thing I ever heard about cooking food.  That and my co-worker that night, Terrell, told me that cooking was "just having fun."

The rest is history but I can tell you this; the restaurant I worked for, Old County Buffet, was an all-you-can-eat restaurant.  People would pay as much as $10 for dinner and eat $100 worth of food.  I was frying 4 chickens at once in one fryer and about a pound of french fries in the other, while mixing 4 pounds of mashed potatoes in a large stand mixer.  My steamer was filled with 10 pound trays of corn, green beans and carrots and that was the tough part.  On a busy Friday or Saturday night, the line servers were taking food out of the Sham faster than I could cook it. 

The feeling and thoughts and memories, all came back when reading that article.  So, let's look at my favorites from that site:

[It gets really hot]- At the locations where I cooked, and at the restaurant itself, they did not have AC in the back of the house.  So, whether you were working on the oven and the grill or getting a burning facial with the fryers and steamers, there was no saving your body from the heat.  What we did, was use the meat freezer.  About 10 feet from the oven side, against a wall, was the meat freezer.  All of the meat was there, frozen, along with boxes of other stuff like vegetables to be steamed and so forth.  Let me tell you this: working for 8 hours on steamer side and then walking into a freezer is amazing.  It is so cold that the sweat on your hands actually starts to turn into frost after a few seconds and it feels wonderful.  It was a great pick me up during those hot summer days on the line.

[No matter how hot it is, don't drop it]- What a great piece of advice.  I have dropped a large sheet pan full of baked chicken before.  It was so hot, out of the oven, that I burned myself on one of the doors on the side of my arm.  I dropped one side of the sheet pan and it fell down, as hot, molten, chicken fat and juices ran all down my apron and my leg and on my shoe.  While that sounds like I could have been saved, I wasn't.  The lava was so hot that I besides the food costs I wasted, I had to run around the corner, get my arm fixed up and take my shoe off to make sure and stop everything from burning my foot and leg.  What a day.

[Even in scratch kitchens, 98% of everything is prepared ahead of time]- Every night, before we closed and locked up, the cooks would prep for the next day's crew and shifts.  On steamer side, you had to get about 2 boxes of frozen vegetables and get them into some quarter pans to prep for the next day.  The oven side cook would get his chicken laid out and on pans for the freezer to be ready for the next morning.

[You must over-communicate]- My line, which was the cooks I worked with whether I was scheduled to cook or if I was sent back to help as kitchen supervisor, always spoke clearly and loud.  I had my guys yell when coming around a corner.  When you have dishwashers placing cleaned pans on a rack that is the same rack where my cooks were going to get food going, and having guys with grease and food stuff on the bottoms of their shoes walking into a wet and soapy area, it makes a huge difference between being quiet and yelling "coming around!"  When you had something hot, you yelled "hot coming around!" And when my team or myself opened a steamer or oven, customers in the dining room could hear us.  For good purpose because my team, had a flawless injury streak.

Also, a good one on here for people who are in this line of work or thinking about it: Don't date outside of your house.   This just means that if you are on the cook's line or dishwasher (back of the house), don't try dating someone who is in the front of the house, like a cashier, line server, or server.  It will make it very difficult to communicate and keep appointments.


 

10 things I am for sure sure about food.

Last Saturday night, as Alton Brown took the stage at the Fox, in St. Louis, he gave us his redone rendition of 10 things he was sure about food.  He complained about the list because he first made it 23 years ago and every day, he thinks of something where he changes it and so, it is never the same list twice.  That list, his ten, have been replaying over and over in my mind as I think of different ones that apply to me and my life.  Some of my 10 things, are the same as one of his and and such, I bet the same as many other chefs around the world.  So, my list, of 10 things that I am for sure sure about food, here we are:

1.  Just a pinch of salt.  Salt is and was always the most important item on Earth.  Wars in Ancient times were fought over salt.  Salt when added to a hot bath can make it hotter before it gets hotter. I know that I have added salt to a humidifier in my children's room, so it can get a hotter point and create steam easier.  When people didn't have salt, or refrigerators, they had to bury their food in the ground, in order to save it.  Salt, allowed people to save and preserve their food without keeping it in a cellar.  Salt is a natural enemy of bacteria.  Salt is used in mouthwashes after dental visits and is even used as an aid in cleaning wounds.  It even was considered to be such a pure thing that Lot's wife was turned to a pillar of salt in the Bible.  Salt is added to baked goods as it helps to retard the yeast and slow it down.  Salt has a chemical makeup that enables it with the power to pull water.  Chef's add salt to a pan of vegetables in order to pull moisture out and "Sweat" them.  Have you ever salted a driveway before a snow storm?  Have you seen the moisture around each piece of salt?  The salt pulls moisture out of the concrete or blacktop of a driveway.  When salt is added to food, it allows the food to taste more like itself by concentrating the flavor.  This is why salt is added to everything.  Furthermore, salt SHOULD be added to everything.  Remember, just a pinch of salt or even a light sprinkling will do.

2. Taste your food.  You may think or be the best chef in the world, but if you do not taste your food and properly season it (see number 1), then no one will like or even take a second bite of your food.  Taste is often tied to memories and those memories replay when the edible item triggers them.  People would most surely have different memories on whether they had a good hamburger seasoned with salt and pepper versus a bad hamburger that just had ground beef.  Furthermore, a person is more likely to remember when they had that good food that tasted good versus one that tasted bad.  People think of these fond memories and it comforts them: comfort food.  Those nice feelings and memories and most often tied to good tasting food.  No one talks about how they had fond memories of eating hamburgers that tasted like dog food and smelled like manure.  If you prepare any type of food, make sure you taste it at least once.  Anyone, from a professional chef to a home cook needs to know what to change or add to a dish in order to make it the way they want.  If you own a restaurant, make sure that everything you send out is from something you tasted so you know that you are serving only the very best.

3. Food is fun.  Don't let anyone ever tell you that cooking is hard work, alone.  Yes, peeling 20 potatoes and cooking them, ricing them, mixing them with other things to make mashed potatoes is work, but the end result is so much better than the work. Think of it this way: Do you like money?  Does having money enable you to have fun?  Do you work for your money?  Is work fun? (maybe not)  Therefore: the reward from work, lets you have fun.  The same applies to cooking.  No matter how much work you are doing for the food, even if you grow everything and cook it all yourself, it is work.  However, whether it is the joy of tasting and eating or the joy from watching others taste and eat, that work should give you fun.  I like food, I love to eat food.  But even more so, I have fun doing things to food.  I like to try to cook new things and place new combinations together.  I think that is fun.  I like to cook tasty things and give them to people and watch them enjoy the food.  Good food should fill your heart, soul and stomach.  It should make you feel like doing a happy dance.  Food is fun.
  
4. The best cook in the world is....  When Alton Brown came up on stage to explain a statement, he suggested that "your wife is the best cook in the world".  The idea being that within 6 months of his marriage, he mentioned that his wife might need to add some oregano into some pasta sauce and she was so flustered that she left the kitchen and "didn't come back for 6 months".  Now, while I understand that husbands always tell their wives that they are the best cook in the world, this example doesn't work for me and my wife.  My story is this:  I have been an avid cook, huge fan of cooking, ever since I was a kid.  I was sad when I went to school because they stopped the "home-ec" courses and there wasn't a cooking school to be found in the area.  So, I self taught and learned on my job.  Now, while me wife and I were engaged, she did cook food for me, but when I went to her house, she wasn't allowed to cook, only her mom was.  Now, when we were married, she cooked almost all of the time, as every once in a while I was allowed to cook.  She made a really good pasta sauce and everything she made was honestly really good.  But, when she became pregnant the first time, she obviously didn't cook.  (I personally believe any husband who makes his pregnant wife cook is just being a ;%#.)  So, I took up the reigns and started cooking every night.  I cooked foods for dinner and lunch to take to work.  When my wife had our first child and she was home with him, I still cooked so she could recoop.  Then when she was pregnant again, I kept cooking.  I like to cook and can take criticism about my food if someone doesn't like it or if they do.  That being said, I do believe that the best cook in the world still isn't me.  I think for anyone and all of us, the best cook in the world who is someone who cooks with love.  The last thing you want, as a husband, is the competitiveness by telling your wife that she is the best cook in the world, thus making your mom and mother-in-law and any other females in the family, go complete Cutthroat Kitchen on each other to be better.  

5. Breaking bread is the best welcome ever.  What I mean by that, is that the best way to welcome someone into your family or just your house, is to feed them.  I have been in houses where you enter and stand there, literally, standing around, or sitting around and talking.  I have even been to family events from my past like this.  Nothing lets people relax like the addition of food.  I think the best example of this, is when my family went to Lebanon.  (Going to Ireland was a close second.) In Lebanon, we visited people who were cousins of cousins, didn't speak a lick of English and the only one in our group that spoke Arabic, was my father-in-law, who was from Lebanon.  So, here we are in people's houses, in the middle of no where, not another house as far as the eye can see in either direction and out of no where, someone come sin with a small platter of food.  The hospitality of people in Lebanon simply astounds me.  When Andrew Zimmern goes to Middle East countries on his Bizarre Foods show and you see him go to a random tent in Ethiopia and get treated like a king with a pillow to sit and food to eat, that is how it is in real life.  People know that giving food or at least offering food is a great way to open up and start discussion as well as tell the person who is being offered "I don't know you, but I care enough about your health that you should have a bite," I think.  Think of it as if you ever had one of those grandmothers whom every time you visited would offer you a bite of something or a something to eat.  Always offering in a good natured grandmotherly sort of way.  From as far back as ancient times to stories in the Bible, breaking bread is always something that people do, to bring them together.  Alton Brown suggested that the greatest tool in the kitchen is a kitchen table.  It is that table that brings families together.  I change my statement as such because while a kitchen table is important to bring families together, if you don't have a table, or are without your family, any sharing of food will bring people together.  

6. Organic, gmo, vegan friendly and gluten free are all just names of B.S..  Here are some fun things to know.  First of all, to be labeled by the organic food club, you have to become certified.  That cost will run you anywhere from $200 to over $1,500.  That certification also has to be done every year.  So, you may be a farmer, who has used the same seeds for generations, never used chemical pesticides and even talks nicely to your plants.  But, if you don't pay to be certified, you cannot be organic.  There are many other producers who make food as healthy and even more healthy than "Organic" labeled ones, but they just didn't get the label. The term "GMO" refers to a "genetically modified organism".  The term has lately been considered a derogatory term for Monsanto products.  I have a friend who works at Monsanto and some of the things that he is proud of, that the company has done, is making a seed of rice, that will grow and yield in less water.  What about corn plants that will produce the same amount of corn, no matter the type of climate?  Imagine how famine in the world could disappear.  It isn't a conspiracy, but from what I have seen in science sites, articles and journals, there hasn't been any real proof that a GMO corn kernel, from a GMO grown corn seed and plant, can harm or kill a human being.  If a corn plant has been genetically modified so that it will grow into a mature and vegetable bearing plant with half of the water of a normal one, how will that affect a human?  Will the human be able to drink and survive only on half of the water than a normal person?  Also, in regards to GMO pesticides, most plants have a natural pesticide develop in them, that does harm some insects and not humans.  Vegans are a variety of people of whom I have no understanding.  If you are staying away from ALL animal products because of the harming or injuring of animals, then are you wearing vegan friendly items or using vegan friendly items?  Is your shower soap vegan friendly?  Do you wear or use anything plastic?  Plastic comes from oil, which in turn comes from animals.  What type of car do you drive?  Gasoline comes from animals as well.  Do you wear jewelry?  Is there any shells, elastic or plastic in that as well?  Gluten-free is not an allergy.  There is a real condition where some people who cannot digest Gluten can become sick from it.  But that condition is rare and most likely the people who claim to be gluten free could have something else wrong with them, like diabetes.     

7. Kids will eat what you eat.  My kids do not eat.  We sometimes joke that they grow from photosynthesis.  Yeah, if we go to St. Louis Bread Co. or over to Noodles & Company, they will eat large amounts of food, but it seems everywhere else, that they mostly pick and complain about their food. When I would go out of my way and make extra nutritious things for my wife and she would sit near the kids and eat them, we are always amazed at how my kids will ask if they can have a bite and then sometimes finish off her whole plate.  I never before saw a child so eager to eat some mushrooms or brussel sprouts.  Kids watch what you eat as well.  So, when you give your kids some healthy sandwiches from Quiznos and you are eating a a double quarter-pounder with fries, then they start to wonder why they have to eat healthy and you do not. Like the above example, I have seen that if you want your kids to eat or eat healthy, then you should too.

8. Anyone Can Cook  It not only was the name of a fictional book in the Disney movie :Ratatouille, but it is a motto that I truly believe.  I have seen all manner of people who can cook and you always hear stories about people thrust into situations and then in order to survive, they had to cook.  I think that cooking is the easiest thing to do, now.  When I first started at a restaurant, several years ago, I avoided the cooks line because I was afraid that I was going to screw up something with food.  Well, my manager threw me back there one day to cover a cook who called in and when I started to panic he pulled me aside and showed me a recipe.  We had all of the recipes laminated so they wouldn't get messed up on the line.  He explained it to me straight "you look at what the recipe calls for and put it in and do as it says; an idiot can do it.  Its not rocket science," he said.

So, as simple as it seemed, it just didn't hit until then.  If a recipe calls for a cup of this and 1/8th cup of that, as long as you put the right amounts in, then it will turn out just fine.  That instantly set off a switch and since that day, I have been able to look at about any recipe and make the food.  Because of this, I believe that if you can follow instructions, exactly, you can cook.

9. Always try new foods.  My wife and I have been pushing this ideology since my oldest could eat food.  I grew up in a household in St. Louis which had the same thing for breakfast every day and then the same meal for lunch for school every day and then dinner followed a schedule.  So my mom would cook pot roast for dinner on Monday and then on Tuesday it would be spaghetti and so on, ending with fish sticks on Friday.  It was never real fish and the only idea I ever had of seafood was from Red Lobster.  So, my family, which oddly enough came from a German/Austrian side and a German/Scottish side, didn't do that much in terms of food experimentation or new foods to us, for that matter.  You would probably guess that with those 3 cultures, we would have something new, but no.  My parents were stuck in a cuisine rut and had no interest in trying new foods.  This made it difficult for me, as I was willing to expand my thoughts and palette and I was trying everything I could.  I was trying real seafood, different cultural foods and even strange ingredients.  I tried everything and just like Andrew Zimmern, I will try anything at least twice.  Just as number 7 shows, your kids will be more apt to try new foods, if they watch you try new foods.  If you try something and you do not like it, don't say things like "ewww" or "yuck", because that will give others the predisposition that it is how you describe it; nullifying any want to try it themselves.

10. Foods are holistic.  I took some classes back in 2008, for a degree in Holistic Nutrition.  While it may have seemed like a questionable course and much less a not accredited college, the theory and that little bit of proof and research shows that something that are wrong with us can in fact be treated and cured with food.  It is called holistic nutrition or holistic healing and it is an idea or theory that food can be supplanted for medicine when it comes to healing the body.  Think of the #1 cold remedy: chicken soup.  If you go to a doctor over a cold, they will tell you that there is nothing they can give you.  You can always go to a pharmacy and take some decongestant or ibuprofen or something to help ease pressure if any.  But, people always say to take chicken soup.  The fact is that lately scientists have done the testing and found out that chicken soup, when homemade, is filled with an amino acid that is found in chicken, which helps the body loosen mucus.  Not to mention all of the antioxidants and all sorts of vitamins in the vegetables that are in the soup as well.  What is important to look for and watch, is that every year scientists make a discovery where they find some plant somewhere, which has been shown to help with [blank].  It could be a plant extract that helps treat AIDS or a type of legume that helps fight cancer or something like that.    

So, that is my 10 things.  It took me a week to come up with.

My Christmas present

A few years ago, I was interested in the technique of Sous Vide cooking and purchased a small cookbook with instruction and recipes.  Mind you though, that I had purchased this book before I had a sous vide machine.  My thought process was that I would read up on it and then see about getting a machine or even just the circulator.  (If you have questions, just raise your hand and I will answer what I can.)

Sous vide cooking, is a process wherein food is prepared, in a vacuum chamber in water.  It is science to know that the best conductor of heat is water.  So, the most efficient way of cooking something is to put it into water and cook it.  The main pro of cooking with sous vide, I think, is that it is scientifically accurate.  When you want to cook a pork roast, you set the oven to 425 degrees F and then cook for an hour in hopes that the internal temperature gets to at least 150 degrees, right?  Doesn't that sound strange when you think of it now?  You need to place something, for an hour, at 425 degrees in order for it to just get to about 150 degrees.  It sounds as if there is a lot of wasted heat, right? (About 275 degrees worth.)

So, what sous vide does, is cook the item in a vacuum sealed pouch, which means that there isn't anything to interfere with the cooking, like air.  The lack of air, means that everything in the pouch is sealed in and can only interact with each other, producing more flavorful items.  The sealed pouch is placed within a water bath when cooking.  The water bath is the conductor of the heat and is what really cooks the food.  Because the pouch is sealed, it also means that the contents of the bag do not leak out.

With regards to my statement up there ^, about the loss of degrees, sous vide is more accurate because it keeps with the temperature. The cooking time may take longer, and in fact be several times longer, but it gets an item that cannot be overcooked and will always be juicy and moist.  My pork example up above, from a recipe I had found online, suggested that I cook it at 425 degrees for one hour to get the internal temperature to at least 150 degrees.  Now, while in an oven, at 425 degrees, the first thing it will do is heat the house.  Yeah, my 1,600 square feet of living space raises a few degrees when the oven is that high for an hour.  So, what the sous vide machine would have me do, is vacuum seal the pork in a bag, so there is no air and nothing to interfere with the cooking process.  Then, if I wanted it to get to 150 degrees, I set the water temperature to 150 degrees.  This way, the water gets to the temperature that I want the meat to be at.  Makes sense, right?  Also, at 150 degrees, and in a vacuum packed bag, submersed in water, there is no way that it can dry out or even overcook.  It probably would take about 4-6 hours, but what you have is a full proof cooking method that just takes longer.  Got it?

Also, in terms of bacteria growth, when food is cooked it should be eaten fairly soon afterwards.  Cooked food has a countdown timer, of when it becomes unsafe to eat.  Placing the food in a hot bath for a long time, can actually pasteurize the food and kill all possible bacteria, making the food safe enough to cook and leave out for a longer period of time.

The circulator is just a larger version of the heating element that goes in a sous vide machine.  You used to just get your own water bath in a container and then place this circulator in it and it would do the work for you.  This machine though, is all in one (and quiet), so you can cook food without the extra heating of the house or noise.

So, I thought I would spend the next few days, testing it.  Some things that can be cooked, are carrots.  Normally if you want really tender and juicy carrots, you throw them in a pot of boiling water and cook them for say 15-20 minutes.  Well, think of the heat required to bring water to a boil, then keep it a boil with the carrots in it.  The house I live in wasn't the best build.  So, with the gas stove on, say for about 45, then it starts to heat up the kitchen, which in turns heats up the house. I always cook on gas and with our pots and gas, it takes almost 20 minutes to bring the pot of water to a boil.  So, you then have to get the carrots in there for another 20 minutes and there is steam and heat and everything to warm up a house.  So, with the machine, you put everything inside and close the lid.  Now, I would have to figure out how much energy is required, exactly, but I would be safe to say that at this point, we are saving on electricity or at least heat, by cooking the food that needed to be boiled, in the sous vide.

So, the sous vide machine works basically just the same way as a pot of boiling water does.  You can take a bag of vacuum packed carrots and place it in the water bath in the sous vide for 50 minutes at 185 degrees and after those 50 minutes, you take the bag out, let it cool a bit, cut it open and take out the contents.  I also stuck some butter and brown sugar in with the carrots. Now, that gives you perfectly tender but not too mushy carrots that are sweet and tasty and juicy.  On the other hand, to get that same butter and brown sugar sauce with tender and juicy carrots by using a stove top, you have to boil the carrots for a bit, I'd guess for about 20-25 minutes.  Then, in a separate pot, you would need to melt the butter and mix it with the sugar, being careful not to spill, get yourself splattered with melting sugar and so forth.  Even, if you were very lazy and microwaved the carrots, they would have taken about 5 minutes on high.  Then, if you steamed them, they may still be a tiny bit dry, not juicy and such.  Then, if they were different sizes you would have some cooked fine and others still hard or raw.  Then, you could get the butter and sugar and place in a nice bowl and microwave them, but then you need to stop every few seconds and stir it.

Not only does the sous vide machine cook them accurately and correctly, but it is also safer and you can forget about it.  You place the food you ware cooking inside of it, set a timer and leave it.  EASY!  Also, of note, is that I cook pears at 185 degrees also.  This means that for that same 50 minutes, I could also cook some vanilla and cinnamon pears, in a separate bag, in the same water.  I'd have some savory carrots and sweet pears done in the same time, in the same cooking space and I don't have to watch, mess with or fuss about either one.

Pretty impressive, eh?
    

Was it overplayed???

When I was younger, I liked to listen to regular music on the regular radio.  Not any of that satellite radio, but the stuff for normal people.  When it was time for Linkin Park's second album to released to the public, the radio stations started to play their music all the time.  What do I mean by 'all the time'?  I would remember that a Linkin Park song would play once every 30 minutes.  The radio stations played the song so many times that I started to hate and dislike the song.  To this day, I hate that band and all of their songs because they were so horribly overplayed.  All of their songs sounded the same as they were all emo songs with random rap pieces inside.

As a foodie and chef I became a fan of the first season of Top Chef.  The show was unlike anything that they had on TV at the time.  There were previous competition shows on but none of them consisted of a reality show and competitions each week.  It was interesting to see these great chefs, all working hard and working for their goal of their own restaurant or their own line and it was interested to see how ill-informed some of them were.  I remember seeing some chefs not knowing what some ingredients were or even how to prepare some. 

The first season was good as it was a true test of the show, but after that, the regular seasons just started to go slowly downhill.  Like anything that is put together, the show tried to get the best of the chefs they could acquire.  Obviously, they tried to get the best they could for this season, so any other seasons that feature any other chefs would have been either not thought of as of then or second choice.  The show also started to become what I hated: it moved away from a cooking show and into a reality show.  The producers knew that keeping contestants who would create or keep drama in the show, would help with the ratings and therefore couldn't be let go.  The first season, was perhaps the first season in which there may have been drama between contestants but it wasn't a pivotal part of the show.

As the season went on, you could clearly tell that it became a show of airings and ratings and not real cooking.  Contestants were not required to cook different things but could slide by on the same thing.  For instance in season 5, the only line that stuck with me is Fabio's "This is top chef, not top scallop."  Almost every challenge, Jamie cooked scallops.  Here is my thing, if I was a judge I would say "we know you can cook scallops, try cooking something else.  If you don't, you will be eliminated."  Hey guys, I don't know how to cook scallops, but I can do sugar free jams really well.  If I was on the show and made a sugar free jam with every dish, wouldn't people get sick of me?  People were sick of her, but the producers wanted her on and so she stuck.

Top Chef Masters was a true cooking competition show and the most fun to watch.  It wasn't because it was all REAL professionals, but it was great because they were not cutthroat.  There was no drama as these were all professionals working for charity.  They had nothing to lose and everything to gain.  These chefs of 'Masters" showed off in the faces of every Top Chef regular contestant, how to do the show properly.  Sometimes these expert contestants were even more experiences than the judges, but they didn't care, they were having fun.  I was doubting my own choice to become a chef until the first Top Chef Masters show came on and I saw and gained respect for so many of these chefs.  These chefs, in their many restaurants, big houses and fancy cutlery were more humble and nice and showed off more cooking than the rest of the show.  It was so worth it.  After that first season, when Rick Bayless won, my wife and I went to Chicago to experience his food at his restaurant and it was amazing.  I loved every minute of it and that started my foodie quest in trying new foods and new flavors.

What about Top Chef season 99? Well, as long as there are chefs who dislike each other, fall in love or are gay, on the  show, it will continue on.  What does the show need?  Well, they have been in the major cities in the US but will avoid anywhere that doesn't exist, like St. Louis for example.  They would sooner to Atlanta, Detroit or even Compton before St. Louis.  It is no surprise that as the show went on, ratings dropped: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chef

There was even a Top Chef Desserts and the show was just bad.  They took their choices for dessert chefs and it was difficult not finding a gay man or a woman in the bunch, I think one guy was straight in the whole set.  I don't have anything against the LGBT community but the show turned into one big drama fest instead of a cooking show.  When I watch a show, especially a show based on a cooking competition, I don't care about your personal life, I want to see how you prepare things.

Over and over, the same formula for drama without focus on technique came up and the same mistakes were shown and by half of the season of Desserts, I stopped watching.  The only show I watched since then was the second season of Top Chef Masters.

So, that is my opinion.  If they did a new Top Chef, that focused on real cooking and had real chefs and restaurant owners as judges; not Padma, but Emeril, Bayless, Moonen or even Mr. Beard, himself.  They should get contestants who are capable of cooking with any protein and do it well, not just seafood or even scallops.  They need chefs who can do desserts.  They need no drama, just cooking.

Semi-homemade blogging..

Unlike chefs who have their own restaurant, I like to make thing at home instead of buy them.  Why spend the money on bread, donuts or even a plate of perfectly cooked steak and potatoes when you can do it yourself?  I tend to want to justify my passion for cooking by wanting to create good things for my family and friends.  However, also being a father, I understand that after I am finished with my job and come home at 6:30pm that I don't have the most of time in order to prepare something great for my family.  While short cuts seem like a great idea, more often than not they are but still don't count as much.  For example: I could tell people that I made my own pot roast, with gravy, steamed vegetables and fresh noodles.  To the average person, unless they taste it, they will only understand that I could have heated up an already prepared pot roast, threw some veggies into a steamer-bag and then boiled some water for the noodles.  For a time when I want this dish to taste fantastic, I would do my own meat, steam my own veggies the long way and even make my own noodles.

This past Sunday I woke up with my 4 year old as my wife and the 2& 1/2 year old continued to sleep.  I was craving doughnuts already and when I looked over and saw the package for her dry coffee creamer, I had an idea.  It was Vanilla Caramel flavored and I thought how cool it would be to make vanilla donuts with a caramel sauce.  Well, like many others around town, since the original doughnut shop in town closed, like so many other local joints, the grocery store's baking department has taken over. Even in this town, the local grocery store's bakery department has their own doughnuts and Krispie Kreme.  The issue with either one is that it is chalk full of calories and fat and has more ingredients than their should be in a doughnut.  While the doughnuts I make are baked, I also try to make them better tasting that those store bought ones.

Did you know that flour has a smell? Packaged all-purpose white flour has a distinct smell to it as does whole wheat flour.  They smell good, on their own.  Most people don't know that flour has a smell and most adults have never touched or seen flour, other than second hand.  More and more things are made outside of the home and then brought home that people have seemed to forget what home-made is. I know that in this day and age, when sometimes both parents have to work, coming home from long hours and then cooking doesn't seem ideal to either one.  The solution is to buy something already made.  I know that in some cases, Sandra Lee's show is a big hit as it appeals to these hard working people who don't want to spend an hour cooking after spending 8 hours working.  But as I said above, sometimes the extra time and effort is worth it.

This is my kitchen and I currently had 6 things cooking at once.

In the hour that I had on Sunday night, I prepared whole kitchen worth of food, to all come together to form just 3 dishes.  Everything was done by hand and the true nature of semi-homemade.  I believe that some current cooking shows think that semi-homemade cooking is making pot roast from store bought and cooked pot roast, a can of gravy and a box of instant mashed potatoes.

Here we had freshly made pizza dough, being mixed and ready in my bread machine, a large pot of boiling water and noodles, some sausage cooking in a small skillet, some meat sauce being prepared in my sauce pan, some tomato sauce in a small pot, some finger sized potatoes in the steamer and some beef, beer and sauerkraut in the crockpot.  The pizza dough and sauce were made from scratch.  The sausage was store bought and so was the cheese, finished, it was a nice sausage pizza for the kids.

Sausage pizza, anyone?

The pasta was finished and cooled off and went well with the bolognese sauce, which was homemade; the pasta was store bought.

bolognese sauce

There were potatoes in the steamer, since they go well with anything.

The last thing was in the Crockpot.  We had marinated some beef pieces in beer 24 hours before and poured that beef in the Crockpot with some dark lager and some sauerkraut.  We left it on low and cooked it for about 11 hours.  It looks so yummy.

I think overall, if you plan on making anything at home that is semi-homemade, please do something or make some part of it.  Don't get lazy and not do any part of it, like certain cooking shows would like you to be.

So, what's for dinner?

I admit, that the photos I take for this blog are not the most professional looking nor do they always sometimes make the food look really tasty. Like the above picture, that may not look that delicious, but hey, that was the cactus dish I made, before adding the quinoa.  It had chopped onions, tomatoes, green chilis, garlic, and salt and pepper besides the chopped cactus in it. While I did take a course on food presentation, to be honest, I have so little time each day to experiment and cook fun things that I don't have the added hour or so to plate this dish and then clean it up and take the most awesome photo of it I can.  And let's face it even further, if you are a stay-at-home person or just the one who cooks at home, chances are that you don't have the time to make it look really nice either.

I posted a status message about this on Facebook as for some reason, just a pan full of onions cooking smells so good that I once wondered about making a relish purely on diced and cooked onions; and did it by the way. The problem with that photo is that onions are pale and pretty much colorless.  So taking a picture of them doesn't show a lot of color and such so they look like a blob or just not so appetizing.

Now when I am out and reviewing restaurants, I pull my tiny camera out and take pictures of the food and the place, on my own, and quickly as to not get thrown out or have anyone complain towards me.  These in-restaurant food photos tend to have the lighting off a bit or the color and again, as most restaurant reviewers don't want to be recognized, now with the growing number of food bloggers, and the increasing number of people bringing cameras with them wherever they go, I find it easy to take a snapshot and get away with it.  What I can do in the future, is try to take better photos at home, with a better camera.  This way, when I am doing something, you can get a better view of it.  Even my wife suggested using a stand to place a camera onto it so that I could record my process of cooking or doing something fun, like make caviar and place it on here for all to see.  Either way, with luck and more time, better photos will be on here.  Or maybe, when I finish each dish or thing I cook, I can plate it and take a good photo or two.

The problem with being human...

It is inevitable and it is not easily taken care of. We will all get sick sometime in our life and whether it is once or many times a year, it always strips our soul of everything that makes us happy and generally makes us feel like crap.  Within the past 3 days, my wife and both of my little ones came down with a flu knock-out that has me in a strange position: the last one.  I am the last one in the house and the timer is clicking down. They all think that I will get it, but I am hoping that they are wrong.  For you see, I strongly believe in holistic healing, which means that I'd rather eat an item than take a pill that has what that item has. I never understand the women who are at risk for bone issues and they refuse to drink milk.  They will sit and fight to swallow two calcium pills or chew some bad tasting supplements but won't drink the milk. 


My view, as a chef, is to make those healthy things into things that are so delicious that no one knows.  Imagine eating a chocolate chip cookie and getting your vitamins for the day.

But enough speculation....what have I been doing?  Well, being hope for a few days, with nothing to do makes a person like me, want to cook.  Right now I have some BBQ pork in a crock pot, home made BBQ sauce with that.  I made some fresh bread this morning, some hoppin john last night and likely will make some gelatto and some other goodies as well.  A chef, with plenty of time and supplies is a dangerous thing.

the secret recipe...

 In the world of cooking there is the sub-field of molecular gastronomy and as this sounds like any other cooking field, this one is fairly new.  Especially when it comes to making fruit caviar or turning things into powders or foams, this form of cooking seems to be very new, about 5 years new. It is so new, that while there are a few sites out there and a few blogs, there isn't that many recipes that deal with everything.  For example, the way to cook chicken has been around long enough that there are probably over a million different recipes involving chicken. However, imagine wanting to make strawberry caviar and not finding a single recipe.  What do you do? Experiment.

 I started by taking out the juicer from our basement and after cleaning it, I juiced some strawberries.  I added about 2.5 grams of sodium alginate to the 250 grams of strawberry juice and made chunky strawberry juice.  It almost looked like a puree' which means the alginate didn't dissolve properly.  I mixed the calcium chloride into the water and then got my things ready.  When I first did caviar, there was still a salty taste on the beads even though I thought I washed them off. Now, after they are 'cooked' I place them in a giant bowl of water, so the salty residue on them becomes diluted in the water and they only have their juice taste.

 When I placed my syringe into the juice mix, it was chunky going in, but when I squeezed it out, 2 feet over the bowl, they did form perfect drops or spheres as they fell and splashed a bit.  Out of 250 grams of juice, I messed up once but still had enough to fill a 4 ounce jar with strawberry caviar. 

 The issue was two fold:  First, I read online that the caviar could be heated, and not break the bonds. That much is true and I found this out by adding a bit of water into a 4 ounce jar, adding the caviar, sealing them in and then processing the jar like I do all of my other jars.  After 10 minutes in boiling water, the jar came out and was all ready and the little pearls were still jiggling around in the water, so it worked! The other issue had to deal with taste.  Since there wasn't a clear and easy recipe on strawberry caviar online, I had to improvise and the frozen strawberries that I used, after the caviar was done, didn't have a very 'strawberry' taste.  It tasted like watered down strawberries, which isn't something I enjoy that much.  It is a lesson though that I do need to either get better strawberries and get a better juice mixture or, as my wife suggested, storing them in something.  My wife was shooting ideas out like storing them in jars with some sweetened water or perhaps something tasty like wine.  Those ideas didn't go unheard and now that I have the chemicals and the fun when doing things like this, more flavorful strawberry caviar in red dessert wine, may be something you can buy soon, from me.  

An imperfect sphere...

Ever since I saw an episode of Top Chef, in which the chef made some food into spheres, I was hooked, thinking it was the best way and a brand new method. After all this time I thought that food was cooked the way it was given, as in, the only way to change the texture of food was to do it by juicing it or mashing it. A carrot has the carrot texture unless you juice it or mash it then it has a liquid texture and mashed potato texture.

So, as great chefs like the ones at WD50 and El Bulli have shown us, using chemicals we can drastically change the texture of things. After reading a free downloadable book on textures and hyrocolloids, by Martin Lercsh, I was very interested in other hydrocolloids. Recipe upon recipe of spherification gave ideas for me to try. One of the recipes used olives and making olive juice and then dripping it into ice cold oil, making the spheres form there. A good idea and worked for the mixologist in the video, but not for me.

I did the next best thing, finding a place that sold a mixture of an unknown percentage of sugar and sodium alginate, I thought it was pure sodium alginate but was mistaken, I used it anyway, using twice as much as the recipe called for. I also bought some calcium chloride for use as well. The recipe had me taking a soda, boiling it a bit, then adding the sodium alginate, or in my case, adding a bunch of the mixture.

I let it cool so it would start to gel. I then mixed water and the calcium chloride and dripped the soda mixture into the water one.
Little spheres formed perfectly and floated to the bottom of the bowl.
I then poured the whole bowl over a sieve and collected the water in another bowl, underneath, to be used again. I rinsed the caviar off in water, then dipped in a separate bowl of clean water. When I had enough, I placed them in a white dish and thought they looked like caviar, my wife, the sushi lover, thought it looked like flying fish roe.
However, the taste wasn't what I had expected: The small balls of strawberry soda flavor, had a gummy shell but a juice on the inside, like a paintball. I rinsed them off multiple times but still, there was a salty or sour flavor afterwards, which could have come from the calcium chloride since it is a salt. I have read online that people say that it has no taste, but it clearly does. It was an interesting process and I am very happy to have done it, but this may not be something I would do many many times.

Gordon does make it easy...

While not a huge fan of his shows and his attitude, I am still a huge fan of Gordon Ramsay's recipe collection and blunt honesty of showing, telling and doing things. In his book here, above, he has some great recipes. I have done the bacon wrapped chicken legs and converted the recipe to work well with just bacon stuffed chicken breasts. I've done the risotto of wild mushrooms and my wife loved it. I've done the pasta and bacon with peas, which is a lot like a pasta carbonara. I even just last night did the hot chocolate fondant, which produces two small cakes with a creamy chocolate center. I will be honest in that in the large number of recipes, I can pick through and select the ones that look good and easy to do, and I have not been disappointed with any of them.

The link is below, get the book if you like simple recipes with fresh food.
Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy

The History of Taste

What you see above is an example of a great book: mixing history and food together into a great history of taste as why we eat what we eat. Not so much for the physiology of how we as humans developed a taste for something in particular, but more so how and why people cooked and ate the food they did. I finished this book, just this week with a last chapter focusing on everything from the 19th century until now.

The first chapter or so explains how humans at some point began to have the need for fats in their body, which then help the brain and nerves evolve and grow. It was suggested that the earliest form of fats, was sugar in the form of nectar or wild honey. That started it all as while humans started to evolve they needed more and more nutrients and it was discovered that cooking food made it easier to digest. I know that in the past 20-30 years, there have been a large number of experts who suggest that raw food is better for your body or that no meats or fat are better as well and while I can live with their opinions, history has showed us that humans are meant to eat meats and fats.

Around the middle of the book, it starts to look at food and eating by different cultures. For instance; the ancient Greeks believed that eating meat was obscene and was evil, so they ate mostly lentils and vegetables. The Romans and other cultures had no problem with meat and ate large amounts of it as well as other foods. In ancient China, kitchens were made with a "demon" painted on the wall or decorated somewhere in it. The demon was to represent a spirit who was cursed by eating too much food so when food is eaten and prepared in an ancient Chinese kitchen, the people must take only what they can and will eat and no more, as to not waste it as well.

With information and recipes dating back a thousand years or more, for added insight, the book explains and answers some great questions, like who invented ice cream? The Arabs invented ice cream almost a thousand years or more back. They developed a way to cool water using salt and then to freeze cream and sugar, producing the first ice creams, or to be technical, it was gellato.

It is larger than an average sized book and with about 370 pages in it, it makes for a long read, if you are busy or a good afternoon read if you have the time. Highly recommended:

 Food: The History of Taste (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Bon Appetit magazine

Most of the time when I get the bon appetit magazine, it is fun to look through and that is about it. Filled with recipes involving black truffles and swordfish and articles detailing the photographer's trip to the Tuscan countryside, little is listed about what can be done with normal items. This recipe, we came across, in this month's issue is labeled as Moroccan Carrot Soup.

This soup, uses all simple ingredients, like chicken stock, carrots, fresh nutmeg, and a few others, but nothing expensive or even remotely costly. This recipe was quite easy as you place all ingredients in a pot, cook until tender and then place in a blender. The picture shows a before and here is what it looked like after it was blended and heated back up.
The soup overall was delicious as this recipe was right on track. So, I will look harder in the magazine and it is nice that they are throwing in recipes that do not involve $100 worth of ingredients as I think I spent $10 for
all of this.

A night with Mr. Batali part 2

After a long night of cooking, many good things were made that will provide my family some good food for the week, or at least most of it.

The first thing made was the stuffed celery, which was basically turkey, bread crumbs, parsley, salt and pepper and then made into meatball sized balls. Then they were stuffed into and between two pieces of celery, dredged in flour, then egg, then flour again and fried in a pan until all sides were done. Then they were all put into a pan again and had olive oil, tomatoes, parsley and garlic sprinkled on top and around and cooked, covered for 30 minutes. They were awesome like a great 3 & 1/2 star meal prepared by me.

The next one was the butternut squash pasta which required me to make my own basic pasta dough, then roll it thin in my pasta machine.

I then cut the strips into squares and dabbed a bit of stuffing into each one. The stuffing was two butternut squashes that were cooked in the oven, then mashed together with some parmigiano reggiano cheese, freshly grated nutmeg, salt, pepper and then that was it.

That was cooked in a pot of water and then placed in a pan with fresh sage leaves and butter, where they were coated with the sauce. That dish was good, considering that I think I gave The Stable a 3 or 3 & 1/2 stars for the same item, only mine tasted as good, so that is what I would give myself.


Making foods like this not only helps me learn how to cook new things, but also gives me a better idea of how food should be cooked and taste, when I go to other places.

Mr. Batali is joining us for dinner all week...

Well, not really. What I meant, is that I have all of the week's worth of food for home dinner and work lunch all picked out of Mr. Batali's book:

Molto Italiano: 327 Simple Italian Recipes to Cook at Home

Which is a big title on a book, but what is big about it, is the food. 327 recipes is a lot of recipes and while I admit that some of them are as simple as some lightly cooked asparagus in a citrus and lemon garlic sauce, some are also slightly more complicated like recipes asking you to make your own sausage and then your own pasta and combine the two of them together.

With some recipes like a ground beef mixture stuffed into tender cuts of celery or my personal favorite which is cut pieces of veal scallopini with a whole sage leave inside as you fold them over and then bread and fry each piece. Everything in the book, looks good, even the seafood and I don't eat seafood, that much nor like most of it that I have tasted. But, what I can do is try to add a picture on to here as to each recipe I do, from stuffed celery to butternut squash tortelini.

Anthony Bourdain

Of all the shows that I watch on tv, there are mainly two that I cannot miss: Good Eats and No Reservations. Last night's show had Anthony Bourdain interview and ask bloggers, chefs and foodies, why they are obsessed with food and writing.

I think my excuse doesn't follow an idea of obsession, other than to help people make good decisions. I learned recently that speaking bad of a restaurant wasn't a good idea and people don't want to hear about which places to avoid but which places to attend.

I have been obsessed with food as soon as I could drive as I wanted to explore the city and move out and away from the small circle where I was only previously allowed to be. College helped me with this as then, I had my own car and could drive with friends anywhere. I moved from going to MacDonalds each day and started to go to Applebees, which had a very good variety and quality of food versus the previous fast food location. While going to college, I worked as a manager at an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant and saw the workings of how a restaurant should be run, from ordering the right amounts of meat to cooking the meat properly and serving it to the customers on the line. I learned how to order meat based on previous days' guest count, I learned how to prepare the meats once from the cooler for cooking and learned how to serve them.

While in College, I went for almost 2 weeks to Ireland, for a quick tour and enjoyed myself as well as the food. It was European style and a bit like the American food I was familiar with. It was in college that I fell in love with and married a Lebanese woman and jumped right into the Mediterranean food cuisine. A few months later came my first trip to Japan and I experienced what Japanese had to offer in the way of food and also saw how girls in Harajuka really dress, not like Gwen Stefani envisions that they do.
About a year after that, with my mother-in-law opening a spa, I worked on a degree in holistic nutrition so I could help out. On my own also, I worked on a certificate in Catering, which gave me the culinary knowledge to do what I could with strange and unusual ingredients that were healthy and not used in normal cooking. About this time is when my father-in-law was diagnosed with diabetes and when he couldn't enjoy desserts and my frequent snacks which I prepared at home and brought into work, it upset me. As a chef, I don't like to just make food, but I like to make food and watch people enjoy it. I don't care if I don't even get one serving, as long as they enjoy it. But what do you do for someone who can't have sugar or high GL foods? You do math.

Math: the bane of my existence and the enemy of so many other people, was the only way I could change the recipe formula around so that it still worked when I substituted and changed things. Well, along with science...

With my holistic degree knowledge behind me, I started to look at sugar substitutes and finally found one that is perfect. I also looked at things and ways to substitute one kind of flour for another so there is less GL's. The baking and the jam making, with no sugar and low GL's is still just another obsession in making people enjoy my food in every way they can. A trip to Lebanon also showed me what items could be made with sugar, as the dessert capital of the world, they had more sweets available than anyone else and with these sweets, I came to see many sugar-free possibilities.

So, is that the only obsession? When paired with writing, it is. I love to write and while I may not be very good at it, like all skills, practice makes perfect. My stories may not be technically correct but at least I can write a small article about something, like the dangers of high fructose corn syrup. This collection of writings has become my new obsession as I try to make favorite desserts into sugar-free designs and then blog about it for everyone to read about, hoping that someone who is diabetic will see and then buy my products in the future.

On the show, Bourdain spoke with many food bloggers who had low self-esteem and write about food as when girls were not there for them, food was. I can't say that and actually say quite the opposite and in the case of food, like them, I want people to go to the best places, so I rate them and their dishes in hope that people go there. Over the two, I admit that for about a month, I was obsessed with making a sugar-free and low fat gooey butter cake, which sounds impossible. How do you take almost a pound of butter and sugar and make something that tastes as good without either one? I admit, I failed in every attempt to deconstruct all of the ingredients and then replace them back without the butter and sugar, took a couple of attempts and decided to quit for a month or so until I have better ideas. But overall, my boring time at work, in between normal working and the random photo shoots, I do try to recreate dishes I see on tv, in the movies or hear about. That is my obsession.

molecular gastronomy

Molecular gastronomy isn't a new term but it is new that you may have heard it. Originally known as the science of food and cooking, it has become a term for new science techniques applied to food. For example: while adding gelatin to foods and liquids is nothing new, it seems that using it in new ways is. In this video with Jamie Boudreau, he takes a simple liquid and adding gelatin to it, makes it a jelly-like consistency that when added to an oil, causes the item to come together and form balls or "caviar" that help make any dish new and exciting.
http://www.smallscreennetwork.com/video/26/molecular_mixology_aviation/#vcx_xocz9tdg4081

In this site, carrot caviar was made using a similar idea pattern but different solutions.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Carrot-Caviar/

A hydrocolloid is the term that describes gelatin es and things like agar or pectin that can tern a liquid into a solid or a jelly-like state. So, for any of you experimentalists out there, try playing with your food.

Is it a gift or a skill?

I was first introduced to the world of cooking as being something fun when I sat in my friend Sean's living room, with a bunch of friends, to watch Iron Chef that evening. It was the first time I had ever seen the show and this was also one of Sean's great co-ed sleepover parties so there was both men and women lounging all over the room to watch. This battle was over some sort of fish and like always, the greatest of Iron Chefs was to battle: Chen Kenichi. As I sat there watching, I became enthralled at the amount of knowledge this chef had for cooking strange and unusual ingredients. Even after the episode was over and everyone was moving downstairs for more activities, I turned back to the TV, almost hearing it call out to me, like a siren's call. It called to me, wanting to seduce me and take me down, to kitchen stadium, down leagues and leagues where I drown a happy tasty death.

From that show's first burned image in my mind, I have always loved how trained chefs can take any ingredient and do something with it. I shall not comment on the fake and staged show that is Iron Chef America as they know ahead of time what the ingredient is, they make dishes that they have already made before and they only have to make one of each, unlike the old school version where they had to make everything there on the fly. I wanted to so badly become a chef, like the Iron Chefs, as one who would be given a chicken breast and come up with multiple things to do with it.

Unfortunately, I am not an Iron Chef nor can I come up and cook everything well. I am slowly learning a new appreciation for seafood and some of it, I just don't like so I don't cook it because I don't know how it will turn out or is supposed to taste. I also don't like cheeses that much as my tastes changed as I grew up and I grew out of it. I remember eating cheese, lots of cheese when I was young but then growing up, I learned a dislike for most of them.

What does make me proud is that when I hear some of the biggest chefs in the world, talk about what they do, they complain. I remember Bourdain complaining about how he can't do pastry or baking at all. I have heard other chefs, even Iron chefs say that they can't do cookies or even a simple jam. Well, one man's poison.....

I can do baking and can accomplish it quite easily. I can make batches and batches of cookies even without a recipe work fine. I am about 90% good in that if I find a random recipe, 90% of the time I can make something delicious out of it. Making jams is just as easy if not easier and to hear a large number of people and chefs exclaim at how difficult it is. That makes me feel good knowing that I can do something they cannot. It still makes me humble though because in the same way, I can't cook the foods that they can. So, while I may be able to make a jam or dessert that would best compliment a meal at Mesa Grill, I wouldn't be able to come up with any of the dishes.

So, like me, go out there and try to cook something. If you can't cook a steak properly, then move on to something else. I think everyone has some cooking skills, you just have to figure out what facet it covers.

The science behind a cookie.

Cooking is both an art and a skill. It uses creativity, risk, science and math in order to pull out a good dish out of just about anything. Just ask Morimoto about the strange ingredients he is given and the wondrous concoctions that he creates. The biggest thing that draws me into cooking is the science and math, which is thrown together under the gastronomy term: the science of cooking. While there is a simple recipe to making chocolate chip cookies, the hard part is not making them with white chocolate chips instead of milk-chocolate, but instead taking out many or replacing many of the ingredients becomes more of a trail-and-error with science and math.

For example: I am working on a low GL chocolate chip cookie. Whoa, wait, what? What's a GL? Okay, let's start from scratch. A GL is an abbreviation for a Glycemic Load, which is the amount of sugars that enter your bloodstream and how long it stays in your body before being countered by the insulin your body releases. So, if you eat something that has a high GL, say of 50, then that means that even after your body releases insulin to deal with the sugars in it, it will take a longer time for those sugars to dissipate than an item that has a lower amount of GL's. Now GL's measure the sugars in an item and if there is too much sugar in an item, more than your body can handle, the excess sugar in your blood stream can mess with your body, causing headaches, fatigue, mood swings or get stored as fat. So watching your glycemic load levels day-to-day can help you feel healthy, stay healthy, and help you lose wait.

Now, my recipe for chocolate chip cookies calls for 3/4th of a cup of packed brown sugar. A cup of brown sugar has about 1 tablespoon of molasses and 1 cup of white sugar. Well, that means that a 3rd of a cup of brown sugar has about 1 & 1/2 teaspoons of molasses. Molasses is relatively low on the GL scale and when mixed with something that can act as a sweetener in its place, like 3/4ths of a cup of Stevia, you get something that tastes like brown sugar, but has almost no GL's and almost no calories.

But while the math is there, I had to play around with the science. Sugar plays an important roll in cooking and baking. In cookies, it helps create the texture. The first step is to mix butter with the sugars, to creme them together. The idea is that the sugar mixes with the butter while it pulls air into the mixture. The sugar helps to tear pockets in the fat and air fills the gaps. This creates a creamy texture for the base of the cookies. When they tell you that the butter needs to be room temperature, this is important as the temperature and the softness of the butter determines how easy it is to create the fluffiness of the cookies. If the butter is too cold, you will have super fluffy cookies that would come up as large and crunchy and if your butter is warm then your cookies will become flat and soft and chewy.

That texture, shows through to when the cookies are cooked as well. As if the cookies have air pockets made from the sugar and butter, then the air heats up and cooks its little cell, creating a crunchy cookie. If there are not as many air pockets, then the air only heats up it's immediate area, which normally is just the whole cookie, allowing for cookies that are still soft and chewy.

In the case of my stevia/molasses use, it functions the same way, as far as tearing through the butter to create the air pockets for the cookie. However without the addition of unnecessary calories, it works better for everyone will delivering the same thing. The glycemic load of the molasses and stevia would be 4.5 GL's. Whereas the glycemic load of 3/4ths of a cup of brown sugar would normally have roughly 113 GL's.

What this is leading up to, is a low GL sugar-free chocolate chip cookie. One that doesn't taste like the sugar-free cookies in the store, but one that tastes like a normal fat filled, sugary and rich cookie. No one one a sugar-free diet will touch a sugar-free cookie, unless it tastes good. As my mantra of a chef, "if it doesn't taste good, don't eat it", there is no reason that diabetics and dieters should be forced to eat anything different than the rest of us.