A New Favorite

Now that I feel pretty comfortable in the kitchen, I am starting to come up with some specialties at home. One meal that Zack and I love is this chicken with lemon-caper sauce. I switch up the sides that I make with it, but there's always a green vegetable and right now I'm on a cous cous kick—try the Whole Foods brand whole wheat cous cous, it is awesome.

This meal couldn't be simpler to make, but it is definitely better due to the skills and techniques I have taken from culinary school. Fortunately, I can easily impart this wisdom onto you!

For the chicken, buy some boneless skinless breasts and butterfly each one into two halves (one will usually be bigger than the other, but that's fine). Then pound them to an even thickness using a meat mallet. This makes the chicken cook evenly and quickly, and pounding meat also tenderizes it. I almost always make chicken this way now rather than cooking whole breasts. Another plus: two of the pounded cutlets seems like a very generous serving, but it's really just one breast. You feel like you're eating more!

I originally improvised this dish off of a recipe from epicurious.com. In a shallow dish, mix some flour with spicy Creole seasoning—like Tony Chachere's. You're just using this flour for dredging, so about 1/2 cup flour plus 1 tbsp seasoning should work. Season the chicken breasts on both sides with salt and pepper while you get a saute pan very hot on the stove with a little oil. Right before placing each piece of chicken in the saute pan, dredge it quickly in the flour mixture, shaking off the excess flour. Cook each piece until golden brown on both sides and put aside on a plate, covered with foil.

Once the chicken is cooked, add about 1/2 cup of chicken stock, the juice of 1/2 a lemon, and a tablespoon of capers to the pan (add more capers if you love them). Buy chicken stock, not broth, if you can—it creates a thicker, more flavorful sauce. If you're ambitious and make your own chicken stock, even better! I buy a carton of it and then freeze the rest in an ice cube tray for later use. I think I got this idea from a Food Network show, and it is a great one for keeping chicken stock—a kitchen staple—on hand at all times.

Stir the sauce ingredients in the pan, scraping up the tasty browned bits from cooking the chicken. Let it reduce for a few minutes, until it coats the back of a spoon. If the sauce isn't thickening enough, you can always throw in a pinch of flour, just make sure to stir so there are no starchy lumps.

See how easy and healthy this is? The sauce and the chicken are an awesome flavor combination. In the picture above, I made the broccoli using ideas from this recipe from the Amateur Gourmet, one of my favorite food bloggers, who got it from Ina Garten (the Barefoot Contessa). He calls it the best broccoli of your life—how could I resist trying it? The lemony, crisp-tender broccoli did not disappoint.

For the cous cous, I always like to add a little something to make it more interesting. I had some corn and tomatoes on hand, so I decided to make a summery cous cous "salad" by adding the corn, halved grape tomatoes, and thinly-sliced scallions to my pot. When making cous cous, add extra ingredients after it has steeped and you've fluffed it with a fork.

So there you have my online cooking class. As you can see, I still use recipes, but now they're just starting points. For example, I didn't print out the "best broccoli" recipe, just read the Amateur Gourmet's blog entry about it and got the general idea.

If you are inspired enough to make this easy meal at home, let me know how it turns out!

So Not Artistic

My sister—a studio art major in college—got the artistic genes. I am definitely lacking in that department. I've always been much better with words...I've loved writing ever since I was in kindergarten, and back then, the illustrations that went along with my stories were always pretty crappy. Now I just take pictures!

Much of Garde Manger is about presentation—making food look pretty, designing platters, and creating decorative elements that aren't even meant to be eaten. This stuff, like show pieces and aspic platters, is time-intensive and pretty old-school. Few modern chefs do any of it anymore, and I have to say I agree with them—focus on the food, people. Still, I have learned some cool but pretty-much-useless-to-me techniques this week, like how to carve this apple bird:


We made aspic platters before in Garde Manger I, but that time we worked in groups and this time in GMII we each had to present our own individual platter. These things are such a pain to make that one little cafeteria-tray-sized platter took the entire 5-hour morning of class. We each had to print out a picture that we would replicate on our platter. Chef S. advised us to pick a "cartoony" design, because they are simpler to trace and have less intricate details to worry about.

I certainly took his advice and chose a picture of the cutest animated character ever, Nemo. Aspic, if you remember from last time, is just gelatin bloomed in water. You make different colors using natural dyes—for Nemo's orange body, we just pureed a bunch of carrots with water and strained it. I poured a white aspic background (made from gelatin and bechamel sauce), then traced this picture of Nemo onto my platter and then filled in with orange. Each time I used a new color—for the eyes, mouth, etc—the platter had to go back into the walk-in cooler for it to set before I could trace and cut out the next layer. You have to pour the aspic really carefully or it will bleed into the other colors. For the tiny sections, like the eyes and lines on Nemo, I used a squeeze bottle. Patience is definitely required.

Cut-out of the original Nemo photo that I printed out

My finished Nemo aspic platter

Who would ever serve food on this? I have no idea. But Nemo did turn out pretty decent (in this photo you can't even see the parts where the colors kind of bled!). I would love to never make another aspic platter in my life, but alas, we have to do it again next week for part of our practical. Tomorrow, we are doing ice sculptures, and I am legitimately freaked out. Can you imagine me trying to make something pretty out of ice with a chainsaw???

Earlier in the week, before getting into all of this stuff, we did make some great food. I really like Chef S.'s teaching style—he never assigns recipes and gives us free reign to make pretty much anything given his loose parameters. On appetizer day, he gave us an hour to make him one appetizer and one amuse bouche, the one-bite "gift from the chef" that usually starts off an upscale meal. We could use any proteins and ingredients in the kitchen. I made this salmon ceviche with (made-from-scratch!) spicy mayo for my appetizer. Yes, I made dreaded mayo, even though I hate it. Adding a bunch of Sriracha does make it more tolerable, and it goes really well with fish—hence why it's a staple at sushi bars.

I guess I am a tiny bit more artistic when it comes to plating because Chef S. really liked my presentation—the cucumber design was inspired by the tuna tartare that I made on Valentine's Day, and I topped the ceviche with thinly-sliced scallions:


Then, for my amuse bouche, I made a crab salad using a little bit of the mayo and served it over a thin slice of avocado in this pretty Chinese soup spoon.


Once we had presented and discussed our dishes, we thought it was time to start cleaning the kitchen and go home. But Chef S. told us that we now had to clean off our plates and make him a second appetizer. We could use some of the same products, but it had to be an entirely different dish. Fortunately, I had saved my spicy mayo and some of the crab leftover from that tiny crab salad. My first thought: crab cakes!

Being from Maryland, they've always been one of my favorite dishes. My mom also loves them, so I dedicate this appetizer to her. I bound lump crab with just a little bit of the spicy mayo and panko bread crumbs, then added seasonings and finely-chopped scallions (if you can't tell, they're one of my favorite ingredients—I think they improve almost any dish!) Then I formed the mixture into little patties—I wanted these to be appetizer-size mini crabcakes—and pan-seared them until each side was golden-brown. I must say, they were awesome. I finished off the plate with a simple cabbage slaw and dots of spicy sauce.

Mom, these are now my signature crab cakes and I will make them for you soon!

Finger Food

The results of our class's canapé quickfire

Deep down, it's everyone's favorite way to eat. Think about it...what's the best part of any catered event? The little bites that are passed around on trays at the cocktail hour almost always surpass the sit-down meal or buffet line. In fact, last weekend I went to a wedding, and although there was lovely upscale food to be had at the main buffet, most of my table opted to hit up the kids' buffet for chicken tenders and sliders. Finger food is always more fun, whether it's fancy hors d'oeuvres or french fries.

These past two days in Advanced Garde Manger, we've worked on fancified finger food—canapés and hors d'oeuvres. Tomorrow we'll get to the amuse bouche, the one-biter that is supposed to "wake up the palate" and kick off a fine-dining meal. On Day 1, after a longer-than-usual lecture introducing us to the class, Chef S. gave us one hour to make canapés. We could use anything in the kitchen and each had to present three identical canapés to the chefs (see photo above). This little challenge was a lot of fun—like a Top Chef quickfire, but with a much more forgiving time constraint.

Canapés are one-biters described by Chef S. as tiny open-faced sandwiches. They have to have bread or some kind of base, a spread, a filling or "body", and a garnish, all assembled into one compact bite. One of the proteins available was smoked salmon and I knew right off the bat that I wanted to work with it. Kind of safe, since it allowed me not to really cook anything, but I knew that smoked salmon would work well in canapé form, especially when I saw that we also had cream cheese in the reck!

I cut thin slices from a baguette and then cut those into perfect squares and brushed them with olive oil. They went into the oven to toast so that my bases would be crisp and sturdy enough to hold the other components. With bagels and lox as the inspiration in my head, I chopped some chives and capers and added those to plain cream cheese for my spread. I sliced the smoked salmon thinly and made little spirals of it to stick to the spread, then julienned some cucumber for garnish. They turned out so cute! Admittedly these smoked salmon toasts were far from ambitious, but the chefs liked my presentation and the little bites definitely tasted good—it's kind of hard to mess up this classic combo.

"Bagel and Lox" canapés

Today we expanded upon our repertoire of finger food, going beyond canapés and into a variety of hot and cold hors d'oeuvres. I made little spanakopita triangles, the delicious Greek phyllo dough pockets filled with a spinach-and-feta mixture. I added chopped scallions, fresh parsley, a little mint, and marscarpone cheese to the traditional mixture—got some guidance from a Greek classmate. I feel like these are often bought frozen and thus have become a cocktail party staple, but they really are so much better made from scratch and so easy to make...

Just buy some packaged phyllo dough (our Baking & Pastry instructors don't even attempt to make this stuff) and layer about four of the paper-thin sheets on top of each other, brushing each layer with melted butter. Then cut the dough into strips, place a spoonful of filling on one end and fold the strip into a triangle like those paper footballs you used to flick at people in school. Once I hit my groove with the filling process, my spanakopita triangles looked better and better. You could really fill these with anything—an all-cheese pocket, a mushroom filling, even something sweet like honey and ricotta for dessert phyllo pockets.

Spinach mixture

Folded triangles ready to bake

Finished product

We also made paté a choux, an easy dough that's basically the only one ever used on the non-pastry side of the kitchen. It's the dough used for all kinds of puffs, gougeres, profiteroles, etc. Pipe this dough out so it looks like Hershey kisses and bake it, and it doubles in size to create little puffs that you can also fill with just about anything—our class did everything from a red pepper-goat cheese mixture to crawfish salad to curried chicken. So easy. Now I'm inspired to throw a dinner party with all one-bite food...how fun would that be?

More hors d'ouvres...paté a choux puffs and Scotch eggs (a pub staple—boiled, breaded and deep-fried)

Double Practical

I think I've turned a corner in my culinary career. We have so many practicals in International Cuisine that I don't even get nervous about them anymore. The class is split into two parts—the first week and a half was European food, and we're now into the second half, Asian cuisine. Each part has two days of practical exams, taken in groups. Chef K. is not as, shall we say, regimented as many of the other chefs at the school, so he basically gave us all an extensive mystery basket of ingredients from which to choose freely.

Last week, our first practical day required that our group of five produce a coherent four course menu: appetizer, soup, salad, and entree. On the second practical day, the chefs threw in a dessert course, bringing the total to five. Still manageable, though I was relieved when one of my group members volunteered to tackle the dessert. There were barely any parameters beyond those menu requirements, so we could be as creative as we wanted in coming up with our dishes.

I'll focus on the courses that I personally contributed to my group each day. We all pitched in with everything, helping each other to prep, taste and adjust each dish, but on both days we had each person take responsibility for one dish (two people on entree). Day one, I knew exactly what I wanted to make when I saw some mussels in the reck (kitchen speak for requisition—the food order that is delivered on a given day). I loved the mussels that I made back in Meat Fab, and although I haven't cooked mussels since, I knew I could create a good variation on that recipe.

With the ingredients provided, we decided to go with a French menu, so I cooked the mussels with shallots, garlic, white wine, parsley, and roasted tomatoes. The roasted tomatoes made the sauce really flavorful—the first thing I did when we got our products was to cut them in half, brush them with olive oil, and put them on a sheet pan to roast slowly in a low-heat oven. They stayed in there for close to an hour and came out bursting with juice and sweetness.

French-inspired moules with toasted baguette (the next best thing to frites)

The rest of our menu that day included a cream of carrot soup with dill cream, seared duck breast with cherry sauce, and a salad of roasted peppers garnished with a sauteed shrimp. We scored a 96. Chef K. claimed the mussels were so bad that he ate all of them :)

Day 2, we went with my go-to cuisine, Italian. I had an idea for the salad course and went with it—an elegant take on panzanella, a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, and day-old bread that I've always loved. I saw lobster in the reck and thought that it would pair well with this refreshing, light salad.

Lobster Panzanella

In their critique, the chefs told me that this had great flavor, just too much lobster. I used the full tail for some reason and definitely agreed that this was pretty decadent for a salad in a five-course meal. Other dishes that day included a vegetable soup with lentils (awesome), ricotta-and-mushroom ravioli (not a huge success), chicken cacciatore, and zabaglione over fresh berries for dessert. Since my salad was not very time-consuming to make—mostly just knife cuts for the vegetables and whisking up a dressing—I also cooked the sides for the chicken: sauteed spinach with pine nuts and parmesan risotto.

I guess it's a good thing that I'm finally comfortable with these cooking challenges, because my biggest practical of all came last Friday when I went up to New York for an interview/test day at Food Network studios. Le Cordon Bleu requires that we complete a three-month externship in the culinary field after we finish our 12 months of classes, and while most students seek out top restaurants, I wanted to do something in the realm of food media.

The opportunity to "try out", so to speak, for an extern spot at Food Network was really cool to begin with, but later that same day I found out that I got the position! I won't go into the details of the extremely fun yet exhausting day that I spent at their studios in Chelsea—don't want to give away FN's test day secrets to my vast readership (ha, ha). I had a blast, though, and I'm pretty excited about this next step in my culinary adventure.

Next Rachael Ray? Not so much. I'll be behind the scenes, doing some editorial stuff and some hands-on prep for shows, which is exactly the happy medium I was looking for. But who knows...if you watch enough Food Network, maybe you'll catch a glimpse of me in the background sometime this fall!