Man Am I STUFFED!!!

Whew!  Tonite… was a good nite in the kitchen!  :)  We're wrapping up our worldwide excursion into cereal grains.  Tonite was Cereal Grains of the Americas, which included Central and South America (read: Mexico, the Caribbean).

We each made our own tortillas (man, just HOW could I screw up such a simple task!).  I managed to get only about four corn tortillas made, and I struggled with the dough for my flour tortillas until I just finally ran out of patience.  Garrrr!!!

Anyway, it didn't matter 'cause by the time we were all served, I ended up eating MUCH more than I should have!  Below is a delicious quinoa salad made by Group 3:

A colorful, flavorful quinoa salad

My team made this freakin' delicious item called Dunkanoo (sounds like something you'd get at the Dunkin Donuts!).  This is basically grated fresh corn mixed with happy good things like brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, coconut milk, golden raisins and cornmeal.  We made a mash of that and stuffed banana leaves with it, then popped these li'l packages in the steamer…

Unwrap the banana leaf to find the delicious goodness inside...

They needed to cool first so the mixture would congeal together all nice-like.  And when they did…  whoa.  Tender, sweet/savory goodness.  Sigh… I love this class!

We've made some more straightforward things, too, while exploring cereal grains, such as your basic risotto and a pretty dang tasty stuffed bell pepper called, believe it or not, Etli Biber Dolmasi…

Your basic, average, everyday risotto...

Fancy name for stuffed peppers!

Tomorrow we start a three-day run of Noodles and Dough, starting with Southeast Asia (pad thai, potstickers), then continuing on to Europe and North Africa (pierogies!), and ending up back in the Americas (TAMALES!).

Did I mention that I love this class?

Peace out.  Namaste.

The Best Damn Indian Lamb Stew – EVER!!!

That’s right, foodies!  Tonite was the first nite of our Cuisine Across Cultures class at LCB, and we got off to… an auspicious start!

This class is ingredient-oriented, rather than culture-oriented.  What this means is that, each night we focus on a particular ingredient and visit how different cultures will use that ingredient in their cuisine.  Tonight was easy: rice.  We did a Spanish Paella, a Chinese Yangzhou Chau Fan, and an Indian Gosht Pulao.

Cheryl stir-fries while Ron preps paella

We broke into groups of about four and covered each recipe.  Our team made the Chinese stir-fry, which was really pretty easy.  We made a delicious marinade of soy sauce, rice wine, oyster sauce, sesame oil, salt and sugar.  I broke down some pork into small bite-sized chunks and we marinated that for about half an hour.  We then roasted those on a pan in the oven to save time stir-frying it later.  We got the wok goin’, then did the ginger, garlic, soy sauce, shrimp, then the pork, rice and scallions on top.

Our super-delicious pork & shrimp stir-fry

Another group did the paella, which definitely scored high points with both our chef instructors and the rest of the class.  The star of the night, though, was definitely the Gosht Pulao, which is a braised lamb stew.

Yes, it really is the best dang Indian lamb stew EVER!!!

It may not look like much, but this stuff was freakin’ DELICIOUS!  The lamb was diced and marinated in such spices as cumin, cayenne and turmeric.  The group then got some ghee heated in a large, heavy-bottomed sauté pan and toasted a whole cinnamon stick, some cardamom pods and cloves.  They then added in sliced onions, garlic and ginger.  I walked past and Mark grabbed my shoulder, beckoning me over.  I just stuck my face over the pan and breathed deeply…  sigh!

Next they added in some coriander, nutmeg and black pepper, topping it all off with some diced tomato and a few bay leaves.  In went a quart of water and the marinated lamb, and they covered and simmered that mixture for a good hour until the lamb was nice and tender and the flavors were well infused.

They finally topped it off with a big ol’ pile of basmati rice and let that simmer just enough for the rice to cook through.  They served it… and the whole class just about fell over!  We were beside ourselves.  We’d all had the other items already and were feeling pretty full.  But it seems we saved the best for last and we cleaned that whole pan of stew in ten minutes flat.

This is going to be an awesome class.  Tomorrow night we’re making sushi!  Later on we’ll make arepas, pad thai, and pierogies!  Tamales, fried cassava chips, tapioca cake, a lamb tagine, sake no miso, falafel, hummus, duck confit, mole, jerk…!  And we’re making some crazy stuff I never heard of like Gaeng Ped Hoi Mang Phu, Smodampete Nypoteter, Aloo Partha, and Bang Bang Ji Si…  ?!?!

I’m tellin’ ya, this class alone is worth the price of admission…  peace out, and Namaste.

My Dinner at Chataigne

The saying basically goes that eating a meal at a culinary school’s café is like getting a free haircut from the students at the local beauty school.  I want to be offended by that comment (I mean, c’mon!  This is the last ‘class’ taught before our externship… we oughtta be better than that by now!).  But if my dinner at Chataigne was any indication, I’m gonna have a pretty tough time with that argument.

Chataigne, which means, um, a sweet chestnut (?!), is the student-run café here at Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago.  They’re open for breakfast from 8am to 9am, lunch is from noon to 1pm, and dinner service starts between 7:30pm and 8pm.  I’m stuck working the dreaded day job, so I take classes at night, which leaves me no time whatsoever to sample the school’s restaurant.  Luckily, both our evening instructors (one for Hospitality Management and the other for Psych) are fans of the idea of taking their students to the café for ‘class.’  Our psyche instructor met us there at 7:30 last Thursday evening for dinner.

We were impressed with the ambience and the service, although the food delivery itself was quite slow.  Our five-course meal took a bit over an hour and a half to finish.  Since there was only one other group in the restaurant that evening, bringing the total patrons to around twenty, it shouldn’t have taken that long.

We were started off with an amuse bouche of a duck breast canapé, coated in sweet onions and draped across a crostini.  The onions were cloyingly sweet and made the whole thing rather heavy-handed.  The fact that the crostini was hard as a brick didn’t help.  Next came an under-seasoned chilled potato and roasted garlic soup.  The soup had potential, but being chilled meant they needed to be pretty liberal with the seasoning, and it just didn’t quite come together.

The second course, though, was the star of the show as far as we were concerned.  Below is the ricotta salata and summer squash strudel with tomato coulis (forgive the nastiness of the pics, I was using a cheap camera phone in a pretty dim restaurant!).

The combination of sweet, almost tart ricotta salata, savory summer squash and tangy tomato coulis was a knockout.  This is one we could’ve certainly had second helpings of.  Third course was a mixed green salad with bacon and apple.

The combination of flavors was good, and the vinaigrette was perfect.  This set the stage for our main course, which was a choice between spice-rubbed pork tenderloin with eggplant jam, pommes anna and carrot puree, or sautéed sablefish with an herb salsa verde and panzanella salad.

I wanted to try them both, but settled on the pork tenderloin, which I thought was a little overdone.  The eggplant jam and carrot puree were both decent accompaniments, though the pommes anna was a bit on the mild side.  Overall the dish was solid enough.  The folks who had the sablefish said it was good, not over- or under-done.  But they were tré disappointed in the panzanella salad.  I took a bite: it was like a weak, flavorless salsa mixed with soggy bread cubes.

Our last course was a choice of desserts, and I had the coconut rice pudding with a raspberry coulis.  Good thing that coulis was there ‘cause the rice pudding, I’m afraid, left an awful lot to be desired.

Would we go there again?  Absolutely, and not just because it was “free” (there’s a “suggested donation” for students of the school).  From what we’re told, the menu changes all the time as the students are experimenting with different styles of cuisine.  We should get at least one more chance to go to Chataigne in the next couple of weeks when our other instructor plans on taking us, and maybe we’ll have to “miss” class one of these nights to try it out yet again.

Overall it was a decent experience, and as a student whose restaurant rotation starts about four months from now (Gasp!  Is it nearly that time already?), it was a good introduction to what will be expected of us down the road

Here is a link to the Urbanspoon restaurant review page:

Producing Palmier, Pithivier and Paris Brest with Puff Pastry and Pâte à Choux…

Reminds me of a certain Sesame Street sketch…

Anyway, it was French Pastry week for us at LCB… those of us who even made it to class, that is! I have to admit, it probably wasn’t a good idea to come to class sick, but I didn’t want to miss any more days and so decided to just tough my way through it. Problem is, I think I took out half the class with me… ☹

Yeah, either I spread it ‘round or folks were gettin’ sick anyway, but we’ve had a bit of an attendance problem these last couple of weeks. Needless to say, those of us who got our sorry asses to class made… PASTRY!

We started by making some base doughs: blitz puff pastry and pâte à choux. Then we made a few kinds of pastry cream for filling, such as a vanilla cream, praline diplomat and crème Chantilly.

Production wasn’t exactly hard, just time-consuming, and since Val and I were both running on almost-empty (thanks for the cough drops, Val!), we had a bit of trouble keeping up. We basically prepped all our doughs the day before, and we baked off the basic shapes of the pâte à choux into puffs, éclairs and Paris Brest (which are bicycle tire-shaped wheels piped with a star tip). These cooled and went into a bag for the next day, along with the base pastry cream for our fillings later.

Below we have Val verifying the proper consistency of the pâte à choux using the ill-named yet ever-popular “Snot Test”…


So the next day, we finished the fillings by either adding butter & vanilla or almond paste to each half of the pastry cream. We also made whipped cream, or crème Chantilly (since we threw some vanilla in it). These fillings went into the various shapes we had made the night before:


We used the puff pastry to make a funky, round, um… pastry ravioli (!) called a pithivier… except time ran out and I didn’t get to mine. Bummer, ‘cause it’s on our two-day practical tomorrow and Tuesday! We were also supposed to make palmiers, which looked like they’d’ve been tasty. But, alas, another one bites the dust…

And finally we have cheese straws. Pretty simple: take some puff pastry, roll it out, sprinkle on a mixture of delicious parmiggiano Wisconsiano, some cayenne and some paprika, chill it, cut it into strips, twist ‘em up a little as you lay ‘em down on a parchment-lined pan, then bake ‘em…


I mixed the cheese mixture into the dough itself instead of just sprinkling it on top, which I wish I could say was an intentional thing. Nevertheless, they were pretty tasty.

So, practical time is upon us again, and here’s what’s on the board for Monday-Tuesday:

• Apple pie
• Pear-almond tart
• A 6” pithivier
• Six Paris Brest
• Six éclairs

I’m pretty confident in most of the above, except for the pithivier (since I never got to it before, it’ll be the first time I’m attempting it now). But I’ve got all the notes, we can take Monday to prep almost everything we can, so Tuesday will just be a quick assembly day.

Now if I could just kick this dang cough…

Baking & Pastryyyyyyy!!!!!!!!

Man, has it really been since last November that I posted?! Sheeit, how time flies when... yeah. Anywho, I can catch up on Foundations III Finals later, and I'm sure no one wants to hear about my travails with English Composition and Food Cost Control/Management... PHBT! :)

Really, the main reason for this post is because a certain bench partner has been out sick two days in a row! Needless to say, these last two days have been a LIVING HELL! (I can't bitch too much... I did ditch 'er two days last week, which just so happened to be two reeeaaaally heavy production days)

A'ight, Val - we're even!!!

Last night was all about making doughs for tonite. We made mealy dough. We made flaky dough. And we made something called sucree, as well as frangipane and some lemon curd stuff, too. All of this was in prep for tonite's cooking... Apple pie, pear-almond tart, Quiche Lorraine, key lime tartlets, and some other stuff I never got to... :)

Chef laid out the production for us on the board... holy SHIT it was a lot of work! Even those with partners had trouble getting to it all, and those without... we were pretty much SOL. I decided to just start at the top of the list and concentrate on getting each item done properly... no sense in rushing and then screwing it up (though I did manage to make that happen, too!).

I started with the apple pie by peeling then slicing a bunch of green apples. I then cooked them in a pan with some butter and a little bit of lemon juice, later adding in a mix of sugar, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg (and a cornstarch slurry to thicken it up)...


I rolled out the mealy dough (the one where the butter is incorporated very thoroughly) as the bottom crust, and when the apple mixture had cooled, I filled the pan...


The last step was topping it with the flaky dough (the one where the butter is only a little bit incorporated), chilling it a bit, then brushing on some milk and sugar. The baking commenced...


Success!!! We get to save this one for tomorrow nite when we'll eat it with a creme chantilly...

Next I moved on to the pear-almond tart. I started out on the wrong foot by using the wrong tart pan (Hey! I saw a bunch of tart pans, I took one! How the frak was I supposed to know it was too big?! Oh yeah, Chef Leahy specified the size... damn). I lined the bottom of the pan with another mealy bottom crust, then sliced the pears thuswise...


Nice! We peeled the pears last nite and passed them to Chef, who placed them in a big ol' pot with wonderful ingredients like wine and sugar and various spices and such and whatnot. Anyway, she poached them in there for a while, then they went in the walk-in. We pulled 'em out tonite, Sliced 'em in half, then made cuts lengthwise starting at about 3/4" from the top and cutting all the way to the bottom. We then lightly pressed on them in one direction, and the slices, still attached at the top, fanned out...

Alright, so we filled the tart crust with the frangipane we made the night before, then topped that with the pears, like so...


Then I put it in the oven and... oh, there's my other mistake. I was supposed to chill the dang thing before I baked it! Sheesh! No wonder it came out looking like this...


Sigh! The team next to me of Steven and Cheryl, though, made an excellent pear tart...


So on I went. I actually spent so much time futzing with dough that I ended up having trouble with the next item: a Quiche Lorraine. I got the crust started, which involved filling the pan and trimming it just so. Then you line the crust with plastic wrap and fill that with these beans that will help keep the crust from 'poofing up' too much during the pre-bake phase. I got that part done, and it was already 9:30. Shoot! Dang! Golly! The next step was to cool that, then remove the beans and plastic, fill it with the quiche mixture (swiss cheese and bacon), as well as the curd, then bake it.

I did start the key line tart crust, which also had to chill, but I ran out of time so it had to be trashed!! Anyway, here's someone else's Quich Lorraine, just so we all have a good idea of what mine was SUPPOSED to look like!



So, what's on the docket for tomorrow?

• A quiz on cookies! (reach the chapter in the book and review what we've done in class so far)
• Pate choux (which will be for eclairs and such... mmm!)
• Blitz puff pastry dough (which will be for Thursday, more than likely)
• Paris brest (noooo... B-R-E-S-T! sheesh)

As a side note, I got a 93 on my written exam last week - woot!


Y'know, I talked to Chef about the whole production thing. See, theyz seen me coughin' and hackin' the last week or so, and some of 'em have even made comments about it (well, some were like 'Wow! You're such a trouper!' while others were like 'You shoulda stayed at home!'). And with Val out sick-as-a-dog (hey, she's NEVER missed a class since we started last July - NEVER!), Chef knew I was doing the best I could under the circumstances.

She doesn't ask us to bring up our production for review like we do in our culinary classes, so I was wondering how I was being graded. She tells me, "Hey, I look around the room and see who's working hard and who's slacking off. I won't bother checking your production, you're doing just fine in here."

Nice.

A'ight, I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I wanna watch Lost... Peace out, and Namaste.