Chicken of the Woods

A chef once asked me to name five kinds of mushrooms. I thought oh, this will be easy. Shitakes. Button. Morels. Truffles. And. And. And. I know I knew more but I couldn’t think of any. I was drawing a blank.

I always remember the chef's question whenever a new mushroom makes its way into my life. This time it was Chicken of the Woods.

It was yet another Thursday morning when our produce delivery came into the restaurant. I was gathering the receipts for the produce and spotted the three cases of mushrooms I had forgotten to put away. I got the first box of chanterelles, orangey and dirty; they had to be cleaned with a damp rag then torn apart for sautéing. That box went over to my station. The other two boxes I didn’t recognize. I peaked inside the top box like a kid looking into a hole for the first time; interested and anxious. They were flat, slightly orange in color, and web like. I took one out of the box, touched it, and turned it all around examining it.

“Oh lobster mushrooms” said the sous chef.

“No. No. No. They’re Chickens of the Woods.” Retaliated the executive sous chef.

“No. Their lobsters” said the sous chef again.

And the debate went on until it involved every culinary school graduate and mushroom connoisseur in the kitchen.

“That’s it. I’m looking it up on my blackberry”

Chicken of the Woods it is (though it said this the whole time on the side of the box where I was trying to show them).

Chickens of the Woods are weird mushrooms that look like shelves or chicken’s feet. They are indigenous to the Pacific Northwest and when eaten, taste like lemony chicken. They are part of the laetiporous genus, can range from 2-10 inches across, can weigh up to 100 pounds (they weren’t that big at my restaurant) and are considered a delicacy in Germany and North America.

If you can find these webbed mushrooms you can cook ‘em anyway you would cook a chicken. You can also use them as a great way to give that vegetarian dish more flavor. And if you have left overs, you can freeze ‘em.

Oh. And there are also “Hen of the Woods” which are totally different. But those are for another time and another argument.

Enjoy and be curious!

Nepitella: Wikipedia doesn’t even know what it is

Nepitella was handed to me while I was at work by the Chef du Cuisine in a plastic container that “to go” salads are often placed in. My job was to pick the Nepitella that would later be mixed with salad greens. I looked at it funny. It looked like mint but it had the shape of oregano…if oregano was heart shaped.


Turns out that nepitella is in fact a mint; a wild mint. It’s majority of fame stems (pun intended) from Tuscany, Italy, where it was used in dishes but the origin of the plant is from Southern Europe. The plant itself can grow up to 18 inches and dons lavender blue flowers at the ends of each stem. When not involved in a recipe, the plant was used for medicinal purposes in the Medieval Times as a digestive aid, to promote sweating, and for insomnia.

You can grow this in a sunny location but finding it at your local gardening store may be hard. You can order nepitella online between March and November. When you order, be sure to get more than you expect, that way you can stop using pepto bismol for that indigestion.




*info provided by http://www.crimson-sage.com/shop/?shop=1&itemid=100157

There's always room for family

As I jump from restaurant to restaurant as a cook, I meet people who challenge you and humble you. Yosanda and Brad are some of these people.

It’s well known (and if not, now you know) that people in the restaurant industry don’t get great compensation. Most of the people who I work with have families in other states, and even countries, who they are trying to support. They send money back for their families while they live alone trying to make ends meet.

Yosanda is from El Salvadore where she leaves behind two children; a son and a daughter. She works five days a week prepping potatoes and peeling vegetables for the night cooks to use for service. On the other side is Brad. Brad had a career change and after lots of education, is breaking into the cooking scene. But in addition to student loans and basic living expenses, Brad finds himself sending money back home for his mother who needs hospital care.

Co-workers seem like they are constantly changing in my life. But there will always be co-workers that you make a connection with and make you grow. The more I became close with these co-workers, the more I realized that no matter how little you make, you’re priorities always stay the same; there’s always room for family.




* Some of the names in this post have been changed.

For Sandra, it's not just about the cooking

As I mentioned on my previous blog, people can have a bad day. We forget a major assignment; we arrive late to a meeting; people step on our gardens; things happen.

This morning as I began setting up my station for lunch at the restaurant, one of my coworkers, Sandra, came over to talk. Sandra is about five foot four and 22 years old. She is one year older than I am. She is also from El Salvador. Sandra tells me how she is thinking about getting another job at a restaurant that pays better. She explains to me how frustrated she is with the tasks she does and the uncertainly of her job hours. I explain to her that I will be leaving too to begin another step in my culinary training. She suddenly looks disappointed. I asked her what she was thinking.

She explained to me, in both English and Spanish, that since her English isn’t that good she can’t get out of the restaurant industry even if she wanted to go into something like catering. She tells me that I am lucky because I am educated and speak English. She says I’ll be a chef soon.

Sandra, like many restaurant cooks of her nationality, are gifted cooks. They comprehend, just as any white educated person, how to make vegetable stock, bisque, saffron risotto, dice carrots, and how to make a hollandaise among many other culinary feats. But Sandra struggles to break out of the legal immigrant glass ceiling. She has a job, pays her bills, and puts food on the table for her husband and child. But she will always be a line cook. She will never, unless she learns her English, be a chef.

The restaurant industry is not glamorous. It is a life of hard, backbreaking work that tests your character and your soul. It forces you to realize, among many cultures, how lucky you are.

Right now I work along side them. I work the same odd, labor-intensive hours as Sandra. But I will leave the restaurant to finish my culinary education and work to move up the culinary hierarchy. And at the end of a bad day I will be able to speak English; I will be able to display a diploma. Sandra, along with my other coworkers, will not. They will continue to work those long hours with bad compensation for a long time and not take any action.

Sandra later told me she wants to work on her English. I told her that was a great idea.

Onions, Starvation, and Big Brother: A Tough Day At the Office

What do professional cooks consider a bad day? You might think it was breaking a sauce, getting a burn, forgetting to entirely make something for service, or being to slow to get your orders out. While all of these are frustrating scenarios, a bad day for me in the office is being watched.

I've gotten burned; I've broken sauces; I've been forgetful and I have been slow. All of these can be fixed. You can put vitamin E on burns, you can rebuild a sauce, you can forget things, and you can get faster. But the one think a cook can't shove off his or her shoulders is being watched. Like Big Brother from the novel 1984, my Chef De Cuisine was watching my every move, making sure I was moving about the kitchen for my last hour of preparation perfectly and precisely.

The annoyance thickens especially when you last ate at 8 a.m. (a solid six hours before hand). This was my case. I last had half a bagel around 7:30 a.m. It was approaching two in the afternoon and my stomach was yelling at me ferociously.

I had completed the task that was assigned by the chef and looked over to my bluefish Caesar salad that the sous chef had prepared for me. Looking at it like I had never seen food before, I grabbed the fork and went in for the kill. Stabbing the lettuce and throwing it into my mouth, I savored the one bite. The one bite. "I want those onions done by three o'clock,” said the Chef De Cuisine. Twelve minutes to cut twelve white onions. Good God help me. I. Am. Starving.

I held my knife like a weapon in which I was about to use in battle; with a firm grip and eye piercing focus I went though those onions like I had twelve minutes to live. A little dramatic you may say. But we ALL have been hungry before and we all know what that's like.

The afternoon shift arrived and the gal working my station at night asked what needed to be prepped. So as I went for the list...."Are you done with the onions? You're already five minutes over" said the chef.

"Yes Chef" I replied. (The usage of this phrase is basically the only phrase you use to a chef higher than you. All the time)


I cleaned my station of the onion parts, the cutting board, and knife. I told Amber what she needed to prep and then I asked the chef where the onions should go. I then grabbed my now room temperature fish salad and snuck into the back. Against the dishwasher I ate my droopy salad in peace. The only thing I had to deal with now was the 50-minute bike ride home.

Farid and Foccacia

I have a habit of buying bread at 4pm. This is not so wise since the bread was probably made 12 hrs ago and won’t be as fresh as buying it in the morning. But since my job requires me to be at work before 8 a.m., I rarely get to the local bakery before work.

In an effort to stop buying shitty bread and also buy locally, my partner suggested making our own bread. And since I know little about making different breads, I headed into work at the usual time on my day off to kick it with our restaurant’s artisan bread maker (who heads into work at 6 a.m.).

For the greater good I headed to work and met Farid. Farid stands about 5’9, has “just got back from the beach” skin, black/graying hair, and a mole on his left cheek. Farid was born in France and worked for a bakery while pursuing his accounting degree. Luckily for us, he stayed with his day job and followed his path into bread making to Paris. Eventually, he would move to the Unites States where he would perfect his skills in the kitchens of many well-respected chefs in the nation’s capital.

Farid is warm and welcoming when I arrive on a cloudy Monday morning. He had one mission for me to fulfill and that was focaccia. Focaccia is a rather simple bread but time consuming, as it relies on lots of waiting around.

Foccacia is a flat bread and often topped with herbs and or vegetables. Its name comes from the Latin focus meaning “centre” and “fireplace”, where most breads were originally cooked. The origin of the bread is believed to have come from the Etruscans or ancient Greeks but currently is a delicacy of the Lugarian cuisine.

My first task was to measure out the dough ingredients: flour, yeast, salt, and olive oil. For this one we weren’t placing any vegetables or herbs on it…going “au natural”. The next task was mixing the “biga”, pronounced "bee-ga". This is the secret weapon. The biga is prefermented dough that gets added into the dough I just measured out. The biga is a combination of flour, a small amount of yeast, and salt. It sits over night (preferments) and then gets added into the mix with the dough. Then that dough is placed on a sheet tray with olive oil on the bottom and top and gets patted down with my hands. This is the other “secret” of focaccia making. Apparently it is a better technique to flatten than to pound it with your fists. After that is done you wait 15 minutes and do it again and then one more. The more you flatten and wait and flatten, the better the texture of the bread. I was then advised by Farid to place the dough (which he packed up for me, along with about 24 ounces of yeast) in a warm area since no home cooks are likely to have proofers in their homes. The bread should sit for at least 7hrs or over night. He swears by overnight.

I’ll be baking it at 400 degrees for 20 minutes tomorrow evening for dinner. And I can’t wait.

The recipe we used was:

1-to make the biga: 18 oz total
flour
small amt yeast, pinch, salt
sits over night, (90min to rise, in warm place and plastic wrap the container always)

2-to make the added dough:
3 lbs= use sheet tray
1.8 oz salt
½ cup olive oil
1 oz. yeast

Home cooks are advised not to make any bread over one pound, as it will be hard to mix. But if you have a commercial mixer at home that can mix 4,904,903 pounds of dough….GO FOR IT!

Hello. My name is Allison. And I am a Locavore.

Over this recent year I have unintentionally fallen into a way of life, a culture, if you will, of sustainability. My partner works for a non-profit organization that works to save and protect the habitats of trout and salmon in the United States. I, on the other hand, have been working with sustainable seafood and organic, fair-trade produce at the fine dining restaurant where I cook. These influences have resulted in me taking on a fascination with sustainability and the importance of buying in-season, local, and organic produce. It has made me into a locavore.

I, along with my partner, try to consume only produce that is grown locally and of course, in season. The result of doing so supports local farmers from monstrous corporate farms, decreases pollution from transportation of the produce, and protects the land from being harmed and becoming unfarmable (along with other more in-depth factors).

Many books and articles have been released this year that discuss the impacts and precautions consumers should take to protect their land and support their local farms. Some such books are “The Ethical Gourmet” and “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver. These books are extremely helpful to anyone who wishes to eat better and smarter. Vote with your fork; buy locally; be a locavore

Restaurant Chefs and “Other Chefs”

Heaven forbid you become a chef and not want to work in the restaurant business. The peer pressure can be intense.

“Corporate chefing is lame. All the famous chefs come from restaurant backgrounds.”

The Sous Chef who said this is mostly correct. But so what? Does a chef really have to only work in restaurants for him or her to be noticed? And if so, must every chef be willing to give up their holidays, weekends, and nights to “build a legacy” as the same chef later put it.

I have had to face many questions as I follow the decision I've made to advance in the culinary field. One of them has been "to what degree am I willing to give up time with friends and loved ones?" To many chefs, running a restaurant kitchen is something they know they have to do; they know they have to express themselves in that way. Other chefs, like personal chefs, still want to express themselves through the culinary arts but aren’t attracted to that kind of lifestyle and the necessary hours.

I walk into work while all the lights are still out in the dining room. I guide my bike through the hall and past the sky-lit open kitchen where we cooks stress, sweat and labor, while trying to make it look easy. While the city stretches and yawns to the start of a new day, I put my bike away and change. I tighten my apron and tie it in a bow then roll up my white sleeves and climb the stairs to my station. In about an hour I will see the freshest produce the Mid-Atlantic region has to offer. It gets my giggly and sidetracked from my prep list just thinking about it. That’s the best part of mornings in a restaurant. You see the food handed to you from the hands of the farmers before it is braised, sautéed, sweated, boiled, blanched, reduced, or baked. You see it pure.

That is the most intoxicating factor of being a restaurant cook or chef. I am trying not to be narrow minded about the places that food can take me, but that purity of ingredients and the hard work and perfectionism it takes to turn it into meals - that will be hard to leave.

“Order the Wahoo” " The Wa-Who?"

Eating outside the box has more benefits than you think!




I always order something when I have no idea what it is. Or at least I try to.

I have many reasons to support this action. First, you learn what it is and how it is prepared. Second, you learn if you will ever order it again.

At the seafood restaurant I work at, we offer a lot of fish that people have never had before. The main reason we have so many of these off the beat fish is because they are all sustainable. Meaning, all the fish we prepare are fish that can be maintained to be in existence indefinitely. In other words, you wont find Dover Sole on the menu. Ever.

Restaurants and their chefs are becoming more aware of the impacts that their businesses have on the environment and are doing something about it. Either by buying more locally, making more in house, or practicing fair trade and organic produce, chefs are making segway in the age of fast food and global warming.

Granted not everything you had never tasted before will be from a local farm. But you can make the effort to try. You would be surprised how many ingredients are local that people have never had before.

Micro Greens: Easiest Garnish Ever!

You know those small leafy things that often come on top of your soup or entrée? You know, those obnoxious, fancy, delicate looking greens that look like small lettuce? Those pricey greens are micro greens and my roommate discovered them when she was weeding/ thinning the arugala we had planted in the garden.

Micro greens are very common in restaurants. They are an easy way to increase the aesthetic of a dish without creating oils, aioli, reductions, or so on. Though pricey, micro greens are simply the remains of types of lettuce after it is thinned. In order to make sure lettuce and other produce grows well, it cannot be blocked by another produce. In order to prevent this, removal of parts of the plant are necessary…here enters micro greens. Since micro greens are too small for any other purpose, using them for garnishes makes perfect sense.

In the case of our garden, our micro greens were of arugala. The inch long plant sat in my hand like King Kong holding a human. I put my nose to it but I couldn’t smell anything. No aroma of peppery and bitter bite that makes arugala so different from other greens. So I did the next best thing, ruling listening out, I ate it. Bitter it was. The arugala plant that felt so tiny and delicate in my palm was a sharp peppery son of a plant. Its taste was so pure I wish I had better prepared myself.

Arugala makes a great micro green because it’s flavor is so intense. If you have a garden of your own I suggest trying this out (Only if you are growing lettuce that is). And as for dining out, next time you get a garnish of micro greens, try to taste what plant is being microed!

Black Radishes & Purple Peppers: The rewards of buying locally

What drives me as a cook is seeing ingredients I’ve never seen before. I left my first cooking job because I came to the end of the road with ingredients. We were continually using ingredients I had seen or worked with before and I knew there was more out there.

It was at my second cooking job that I really saw ingredients. Every Thursday morning our produce shipments would come in. At 9 a.m. on the dot eight different purveyors would squeeze through a narrow alleyway into a tiny kitchen and unload all the produce on the pastry counters. And in my 22 years, it was the first time I was really seeing what fennel, carrots, radishes, and kidney beans really were. They were roots; they were long and vivid; they were black radishes; they were purple peppers; and they were unlike anything I had ever seen in a supermarket.

These basic forms of produce are so much different than the produce you find in a supermarket. And it’s this way because of the unfortunate power of consistency. Consistency is nice. It is a way to make everything almost the same almost all of the time. People like consistency. And like sex, consistency sells. Consistency is also why we do not have purple peppers in supermarkets.

Consistency is what supermarkets like Giant, Shop Rite, Pathmart, and many other chain grocery stores favor. In a quote from “The Ethical Gourmet” by Jay Weinstein, he explains the power of supermarkets over farmers: “Supermarkets also favor suppliers who can deliver consistent produce in predictable quantities. By shunning local growers whose quality is better but crop size is unpredictable, these markets are starving the local farm economies, making the farms ever less able to produce the desired volume”.

Essentially, large corporate supermarkets are not selling you purple peppers or black radishes because local farmers, whose farms often produce such produce, (due to irregular seeding and genetics) are irregular. As this may not come as a shock, these unpredictable pieces of produce (say that 10 times fast!) will almost never be found in large chain stores. Thus, making your best chances of finding weird, unusual produce, in a restaurant or on a farm stand.

My experiences with discovering real produce have created the need to find more of it. About 85% of the produce (all organic and fair trade) we received in the restaurant in Washington, D.C. came from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. The importance of buying locally and supporting local farmers is paramount if you ever wish to really see fennel tower to 4ft, taste spicy black radishes, and taste mildly sweet purple peppers. You’ll be helping farmers, reduce air pollution, and oh ya, taste produce that is unlike anything you have bought in a chain grocery store.

Restaurant Week: Great for you; not so great for cooks

Beads of sweat drip down my back and chest. My head throbs from my concentration and meticulous precision. My legs ache from the hours of standing while burns cover my wrist and thumb.

It’s restaurant week in the district and cooks everywhere are questioning why their owners ever put them threw this.

Restaurant week in Washington, D.C. is an affair that attracts everyone from business people to college kids to the hottest, trendiest, and most expensive restaurants it has to offer. Over 200 restaurants participate in this food fest for the sole purpose of good public relations. As a cook who has participated in two of these “food weeks”, I can attest that high revenue is not a result of participating in restaurant week. Rather, to attract customers, gain their respect and hopefully have some returning diners.

As for the cooks, the cooks are put through a 7-day headache. Sure only a selection of dishes are offered, but if you have to do it for 6 more days, the preparation of food you have to complete, while still maintaining that you serve the best ingredients, is often burdening. And that’s not to say your restaurant doesn’t also have a set menu for dinner. If so, different and abundant preparation has to be done for that menu as well.

Hell, I’m lucky enough to actually get to another restaurant that isn’t the one I work at for restaurant week. And while I’m there, dining on my first course, I’ll savor my freedom.

Make reservation and take advantage of this week if you live in D.C.

Your stomach will thank you!

"86"ing and other kitchen jargon

Reactions from a scene in “Office Space”:

“Ha. He’s going to fabricate the fish on his desk!”

“He’s going to do what?”

“She meant he’s going to gut the fish on his desk?

“Oh”

Like any field, cooking has it’s own terminology. And when you get a bunch of chefs together you may not think they were talking about food.

If you ever want to pass for a professional cook, or just confuse your friends, here are some of the terms that are used in a professional kitchen:


86 the (insert dish name here):
to take off the many because there are no more left

In the hole:
a table has ordered a dish that is being served either second, third, or so on

In the weeds:
when you get lots of orders and you are falling behind in your cooking

Fire:
to make; start cooking

Hold the fire:
don’t make until chef tells you to fire dish

On the fly:
dish is to made first and quickly

Pick up:
now you will be making the dishes that were in “the hole”

In the window:
food is placed on a shelf under the heat lamps and ready to be taken out

Expo:
short for “expediter”, this person shouts the orders to each cooking station and is responsible for all food being sent
out to customers

If you ever find yourself in a professional kitchen, you’ll be sure to hear these terms. Use them in the kitchen and the cooks will be impressed…use them at home and no one will have any idea what you’re talking about!

enjoy and be curious!