January 29, 2010
So I scored that internship at the fancy Manhattan restaurant (thank you to readers for your kind words via comments and email), and tomorrow I’ll be working my last shift in the Brooklyn kitchen where I’ve come to feel at home. The next three months will be filled with some very serious schooling that I hope will help me take my cooking to another level and expose me to techniques that I’ll never learn in school. As excited as I am about all of this, lately I’ve been feeling a bit glum about leaving Brooklyn behind, for two reasons: I’m going to miss the company of the chefs and cooks who gently mentored me and made work fun, and, most of all, I’ll miss the satisfaction that comes from creating something from start to finish. You see, for a pastry cook (or intern), the biggest difference between working at a high-quality, rustic style restaurant and working in high pressure, fine dining is that at the former you are involved in the entire plate – the cake, the ganache, the swoop of sauce, and the candied garnish that goes on top. In fine dining, where one plate may have 20 components, multiplied by the number of items on the menu, I may have my hands in a few tiny pieces of the finished product, but I’ll never be able to look at something and say “yeah, I made that.”
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January 17, 2010
For the past few weeks, I’ve been inching slowly (and sometimes, painfully) back into the robust workout routine that I observed before I got myself involved with all this culinary school business. These new miles of pounded pavement have been making me feel ravenous between meals, and I’ve been on the lookout for snacks that can satisfy, while being tasty, nutritious, and low in calories and fat.
Ironically, when I first encountered this healthy, nutritious snack, I was sitting down to a celebratory dinner of epic and caloric proportions at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant/working farm/theme park for food dorks like me who are into sustainable, farm-to-table cuisine. Tuscan kale chips, artfully suspended above antique wooden blocks by a thin piece of wire, were the first of the parade of amuse bouche that we enjoyed that night. Everyone in our party was delighted by their simple beauty and surprised by how delicious they were. They were the perfect introduction to the flavor and feel of the restaurant.
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January 12, 2010
Speaking as someone who is learning to cook for a living, I’ve got a sad, embarrassing confession for you: I’m just not that into cooking meals at home these days. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I’m on my feet at 5AM and I’m baking biscuits by 6. Or maybe it’s an over-saturation of the senses, the intoxicating smell of pan-caramelized apples wafting up at me, and the constant bombardment of sauteed garlic, homey herbs, and savory braise smells of the creations from another cook, desensitizing my desire for good food. Whatever the cause, when the time to cook when the day’s end rolls around, I’ve been struggling to muster much enthusiasm.
I’ve come up with a counter-intuitive solution to my problem by challenging myself to only cook dinners that I’m genuinely excited about eating. They don’t have to be hard recipes or take hours to make, in fact most of them so far have been made up on the fly. They do need to be dishes I’ll look forward to eating, meals worthy of opening a moderately priced bottle of wine to enjoy midweek. To select these recipes, I pause and ask myself, as I’m heading by the store on the way home, “what am I hungry for?” And then, I make that thing. So far, it’s been a success.
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January 8, 2010
I’ve been away for a while, much longer than the week off that I’d planned on taking. I needed to take a break from the pace of the FCI kitchens and my internship, to travel up north for family time and to reunite with old friends, to cook without pausing to take notes or click the shutter, and to eat some amazing food at this seriously good, seriously charming neighborhood eatery, and this destination restaurant/shrine to local cuisine. We capped it all off by ringing in the New Year with champagne and Brian’s now famous paella, and then, before I knew it, I was right back in the thick of things and feeling very disorganized.
I try to take a realistic approach to making resolutions come January 1, avoiding things that I know are futile, like super-restrictive dieting, or resolving to stop compulsively biting my nails (been there, done that). Instead, I like to make lists comprised of a mix of goals and big moments yet to come in the year ahead. Today’s recipe for creamy, hearty breakfast quinoa parlays beautifully into two lists I’ve made this year: my personal list, and my EVK-specific list.
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December 21, 2009
In case you missed the 24 hour news coverage, New York got a little bit of snow for the first time this year. At some point during yesterday’s shift at my pastry internship, the pastry chef, sous chef, and I poked out heads out of the bulkhead from the basement kitchen and watched with delight as the first flakes fell down onto the sidewalk above. I spent the rest of the shift fantasizing about an evening holed up at home in my PJs, drinking red wine and watching the storm from the comfort of my couch.
After a long week, it feels really nice to be forced to hit the pause button and seal yourself away inside to hibernate and wait out the storm. I used this time to try out this pretty recipe, since neither rain nor snow is going to keep Christmas from coming, and I’ve got sweet (chewy, coco-nutty, fruity) promises to keep.
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December 17, 2009
Whenever I put a variety of cookies together, I try really hard to include something for every kind of cookie taste. For example, I always include some kind of buttery and crumbly sable, something uber-chocolate, something gooey, something jammy and fruity, and something nutty and spiced. I’m never short on ideas for these categories, but I always freeze when it comes to bars. I love including a bar cookie, no question, but with the dizzying variety, from cheesecakes to lemon bars to brownies, it’s almost another food category entirely and I just can’t decide.
This year was no exception, and an exhaustive research session with my stacks of cookbooks only left me feeling more bewildered. That’s when I decided to combine two of my favorite recipes of all time, this one, and this one (which resulted in EVK recently being featured on Saveur.com). The cookie love-child that resulted was absolutely worth my angst.
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December 13, 2009
I’m trying hard to keep my holiday baking interesting this year, and my strategy is to integrate unexpected, fun pieces into my cookie presentations. Gingerbread men, rum balls, and peppermint sandwich cookies all have their place, indeed it wouldn’t feel like the holidays without them. But, as your second, or third, or tenth holiday party rolls around, you might start to get a little tired of sampling them.
That’s why I’ve decided to offer up some different ideas for hand-held holiday treats. They may not be the first ideas that come to mind when you think about seasonal indulgence, but you’ll also notice that they tend to disappear first from the dessert table.
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December 11, 2009
There are cookie recipes everywhere I turn, a sure hallmark of the holiday season. They’re on the blogs, they’re in my email, and they’re are all over my food mags. They’re at my internship too. It’s the holidays and everyone loves the excuse to bake, including yours truly. I love setting aside whole days devoted to baking, then turning up the music in my apartment, plotting my recipes, and then stocking the fridge with a dozen different doughs that I turn out, one after another.
I’ve been in pastry school for three months now and I’ve been a pastry intern for two. When I come calling with my cookie plates this year, people rightly have high expectations for the treats that I bring and I don’t want to let them down. So I’m pulling out the stops. I’m assembling all of my favorites together on one festive silver platter, and that platter could never, ever be complete without meringue mushrooms.
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December 8, 2009
When I was a kid, I was envious of those who were Jewish. It has nothing to do with my interest in the faith, the appeal of its strong community, or the preservation of very old traditions. Rather, it came down to simple mathematics; with eight being decidedly greater than one, I was convinced that Christmas-celebrators were being shortchanged days of celebration.
Now I’m grown up and about to marry a Jewish man, and through our courtship I’ve discovered something entirely different to envy about the chosen people – their delicious and comforting foods. It’s a stretch for me to choose, but if I had to pick my favorite from the mass of sumptuous kugels, brisket, noodle pudding, lox, and knish I’ve enjoyed, I’d still have to say that latkes (potato pancakes) are the dish that I look forward to more than any other.
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December 4, 2009
This Thanksgiving, for the first time in my thirty year long pie-eating career, I had a pumpkin pie breakthrough. Each year of my life someone has baked one and I always partake, unable to resist what I’d imagined and build up in my mind as a creamy, airy manifestation of pure pumpkin flavor. And year after year, I’m met with disappointing first bites that are some variation of overly-spiced, too-sweet, oily, or lumpy-textured pies (many of which are made by otherwise great cooks). And so, I’d come to accept that what I hoped pumpkin pie to be was not actually what it was.
But for Thanksgiving this year, the pumpkin pie gods were smiling down on me. As the only guest at the table who has logged over two months in pastry school and done some time in a real restaurant kitchen, I was put in charge of desserts. In my role as pastry chef of Thanksgiving, I seized the opportunity to create the pumpkin pie of my dreams, with the help of this book
.
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