Great expectations

Since I've been through culinary school, cooking for people comes with high expectations. Which stresses me out. Twice in the past week, I've been invited over for wonderful meals where the cook has expressed intimidation about cooking for me, because, in their words, I'm a chef. As any self-respecting cook will tell you, graduating from culinary school does not make one a chef—especially not me, who had no intention of becoming one to begin with! I still cook simple, unfussy, relatively homey food...I just have a few techniques under my belt now, so I have more confidence (and consistency) when preparing it.

My Dad was our new apartment's inaugural dinner guest. He and my Mom were both in town the weekend prior and took us to a memorable meal at Gramercy Tavern—my Mom and I had the outstanding vegetarian tasting menu, which I heartily recommend to carnivores and vegetarians alike. After that great (and large) meal, I wasn't looking to try anything fancy at home a few days later. But naturally, I still wanted to impress—at least a little. After all, my Dad was the benefactor who put me through culinary school.

I made my pretty-much-signature creole-spiced chicken with lemon-caper sauce, which I've written about here before. I had a box of really good Italian polenta from work (great perk: lots of freebies to take home!) which I know my Dad loves, so I cooked it with some chicken stock, a little pecorino cheese, and thyme. Then I made the Ina Garten broccoli that Zack and I love so much. We started with a big salad of romaine, hearts of palm, red peppers, grape tomatoes, delicious sugar snap peas from the Manhattan Fruit Market, and some toasted slivered almonds for crunch. Zack dressed it with his own "signature" balsamic vinaigrette.

Except for the fire alarm going off yet again, the dinner went off wonderfully, with both guys (Zack and my Dad) going for seconds. Don't get mad at him, Mom—this was a pretty healthy meal. However, I'll admit that the awesome dessert I made (above) wasn't particularly low-cal. This was inspired by my friend Andrea, who had us over for dinner a couple of weeks ago and ended the meal with homemade ice cream sandwiches that I was still thinking about the next day.

Though I love trying interesting ice cream (and fro yo) flavors, Andrea used simple vanilla and the results were so outstanding that I decided to do the same. When's the last time you had a classic ice cream sandwich between two chocolate chip cookies? It brought me back to visits from the Good Humor man during childhood summers at the pool—but these were so, so much better than the good ol' chipwich. See, look how happy they are! I think (hope!) that the meal met our dinner guest's expectations.


The night before our dinner, I made a simple chocolate chip cookie recipe and flattened the dough out on the pan so the cookies would be a little thinner than usual. For the filling, I bought Ciao Bella vanilla bean gelato at Whole Foods. Wish I could say these were totally homemade, but let's be real—I don't have room for an ice cream machine even if I had one. I let the gelato soften up, spread it on the cookies, made sandwiches, then wrapped each one individually in foil and popped them in the freezer. We've been treating ourselves to bites of the leftovers all week now.

The future of Mise En Place?

I pulled up my blog today and sadly confirmed that its lapse in posts is pushing the three-month mark. I won't make excuses for my temporary abandonment of Mise en Place—or maybe I must, just to fill my loyal readers in on what I've been up to these past two and a half months.

You see, the day after my last day of culinary school on August 14, Zack and I hopped a plane to NYC where we had four days to find an apartment, otherwise we'd be homeless come September. We made our deadline: we arrived in New York on a Saturday and signed a lease on Tuesday morning. That night, we packed up our backpacks and flew nearly 24 hours from New York to Bangkok, kicking off a three-week trip through Southeast Asia.

Our travels through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia were incredible, so vastly different from any trip either of us had ever taken. We packed a lot into three weeks, visiting major cities and smaller ones, staying in a range of backpacker guesthouses and boutique hotels. After exhausting ourselves on this whirlwind tour, we spent the last few days relaxing on Koh Samui, an island off the east coast of Thailand.

But of course, the question you all want to ask: What did we eat???

Pad Thai on the street in Bangkok

I discovered pad thai back in high school at a now-defunct restaurant that my friends and I loved, called Oodles Noodles. I'm into spicier food now, but I still love the dish. There was pad thai to be found on every street corner in Thailand. Some of it looked kind of shady, with raw pieces chicken sitting out all day in the hot sun and all. We enjoyed several commendable versions during our time in Thailand, but I must modestly say that the best one was that which we made ourselves in a fabulous cooking class we took in Chiang Mai:

Our Pad Thai in Chiang Mai

It was so fresh and had the optimal combination of Thai flavors: sweet, salty, tangy, bright. It wasn't gummy or too sweet, perhaps because our cooking teacher's recipe didn't include any tamarind paste. I definitely preferred the dish without it.

Chiang Mai, a city in the north of Thailand, was one of our favorite food stops on the trip. The Northern cuisine is different from most of the Thai food we see here in the US. Their signature dish is a chicken curry with noodles called Khao Soi. I've yet to spot it anywhere here, so if you know of a Thai restaurant in America that serves it, please share! This dish is ultimate comfort food. Zack doesn't like curry and he slurped this up happily—it's a curry in a class of its own. We ate this at a well-regarded restaurant that was not much more than an open-air garage, where we met a very nice ex-pat couple (originally from New Orleans!) who steered us towards the best dishes on the menu.

Khao Soi in Chiang Mai

In Laos, we stayed in a picturesque town called Luang Prabang, a former French colony. The town had a European feel to it, and the restaurants all served a combination of French food and Lao food. We wanted to sample the authentic Lao flavors, but in the end we weren't all that moved by the cuisine. One signature dish involved dried Mekong weed (seaweed from the Mekong river, which borders Luang Prabang) topped with sesame seeds and spread with spicy jam. Though a bit funky in taste and texture, it was kind of addictive and ended up being one of the few Lao dishes we liked.

Mekong weed in Luang Prabang

We did have a wonderful French meal in Luang Prabang, at a restaurant recommended by the New Orleans couple we met in Chiang Mai. It was called L'Elephant and served classic French food—we ordered both escargot and frogs legs. Everything was excellent and could have come from a first-rate French bistro. Because of the French influence, Laos also offered bread with meals...something we had been missing in this world of rice and noodles. The baguettes served for breakfast at our lovely hotel, the Apsara, were warm, crusty and wonderful.

Baguette with jams and butter in Luang Prabang

Onto Vietnam. Our first meal involved learning to roll our own fresh (not fried) spring rolls, and I subsequently wanted to order fresh spring rolls for every meal thereafter. Zack got really sick of them after a while. In addition to numerous fresh spring rolls (often called "summer rolls" at restaurants here at home), we sampled lots of pho, the fragrant noodle soup that's often referred to as Vietnamese penicillin.

A waitress demos how to roll in rice paper in Hanoi

At a famous Hanoi restaurant called Cha Ca La Vong, we thoroughly enjoyed the only dish on the menu: fish sauteed in a hot pan with greens right at your table. You eat it over vermicelli noodles and add any condiments you like—chilies, scallions, fish sauce—much like with pho.

Fish over noodles in Hanoi

On an overnight boat trip to Halong Bay—one of the most beautiful places I've ever been—we stopped en route to a fish market along the bay to pick up dinner. It was a seafood feast: fresh crab, shrimp, squid, whole fish, all simply prepared.

Fresh seafood on our boat in Halong Bay

One of our favorite meals of the entire trip was in Ho Chi Minh City (still called Saigon by most Vietnamese). Every article or book we read and every person we knew who had been to Vietnam told us we had to eat at the Temple Club—and you don't get that kind of reputation for no reason. It was what I'd call refined Vietnamese food, in a white-tablecloth setting that feels like a private club, but the flavors weren't dumbed down at all. We, of course, ordered way too much food in an effort to sample a range of the menu. And the whole bill, with wine, was about what we'd spend to go out for (designer) pizza at home. I must have been too engrossed in the meal, because the only picture I got was of this spring roll sampling platter—four different kinds, both fresh and fried—easily the best spring rolls of our entire trek through Southeast Asia.


Our next stop was Cambodia, where we explored the local Khmer food—pretty close to Thai but a bit less spicy, with some unique dishes like Amok Fish (in a light curry) and this salad below. We also had a ridiculously overpriced French meal at our hotel in Phnom Penh—by ridiculous, I mean that it was pretty much American-priced. The highlight of Cambodia was touring the ancient temples of Angkor near Siem Reap—we arrived at 5 a.m. to see the sunrise over Angkor Wat and toured with a guide for 12 hours. Honestly, what kept me going through the whole day of walking was an awesome bowl of oatmeal—my first in three weeks, probably a record—that I had for breakfast at a touristy place outside the temple gates.

Banana flower salad in Siem Reap

Now that I've filled you in with a long tangent on the culinary highlights of Sara and Zack's 2009 Southeast Asia Adventure, we'll move on to the intended topic of this post: the future of Mise en Place. Zack and I got back to the States about a month ago and made it through the exhausting process of moving out of our Atlanta apartment, driving up to D.C., waiting for our movers to arrive in New York with all of our belongings—for two weeks (!), but that's another tangent that I won't bore you with—and finally, moving into our new place in Manhattan.

The day after our stuff finally arrived, I started work in the culinary department at Food Network. I wish I could blog here about it, because I'm getting to see so much cool stuff, but I help with shows that have obviously not aired yet and thus giving away any details whatsoever might put me in big trouble with the higher-ups. I can tell you, though, that I've already met Bobby (seems like a real nice guy) and Giada (sooooo freakin' thin!).

So, we finally come to the future of this blog. I've loved writing it for the past year and being my own editor for the first time...and I've especially appreciated all of your feedback and comments. I'm determined to keep it going even though my culinary school days are over, so my proposed plan is to try to transform it into a bit of a catch-all about eating and cooking my way through NYC. I'll write about great food finds in the city, meals cooked in my "cozy" kitchen (it does have a dishwasher, though!), and anything Food Network-related that's kosher to broadcast to the world. Or, um, to all 12 of you.

I've had plenty of foodie adventures here so far. Like the other night, when my use of the stove repeatedly set off the fire alarm in our apartment, but I refused to throw in the towel and continued to saute my chicken. Zack: "Turn off the stove!" Me: "But this chicken is only half cooked! Let me just finish it and then we'll figure out how to shut off the alarm." Later, our doorman reassured me that everyone has this problem when they first move in. Now I have the vent on full blast for any cooking whatsoever.

I'm adapting to the city's lack of good supermarkets by ordering groceries through Fresh Direct, then hitting up the awesome Manhattan Fruit Exchange near Food Network in the Chelsea Market building for produce (I'm not down with letting a delivery service pick out my fruits and veggies, thanks). I've already found two great sushi spots (an imperative!), and Lindsay introduced me to an adorable breakfast place, also in Chelsea Market, where she works too. Eating egg white wraps before work with her is a major perk.

Up next: we're having our first guest over for dinner, despite the lack of a table or chairs in our apartment (we're getting bar stools soon, and maybe even a small foldable table!). Fortunately, our dinner guest is my dad, who will be in town next week, and he's already confirmed that he will be fine with eating on the couch, as we've been doing for the past three weeks. I'll fill you in on the menu, complete with recipes if I like how it turns out.

Sound good? If you have suggestions as to what you'd like to see written about here, please comment away! It's good to be back.