Current Read: In the Devil's Garden

This book is an interesting account of the history of foods believed to be forbidden!

Japan's pumpkin

I recently encountered an odd looking squash called the Kabocha. It looks like a flattened acorn squash or a green pumpkin. Known as the "Japanese pumpkin", the word kabocha may refer to the squash or a western style pumpkin. Originally discovered in American, the squash was taken back to Europe by Christopher Columbus and then made its way to Japan where the word stuck.

It's like many squashes, hard and orange colored on the inside with seeds you need to scoop out. It grows all year round but end of summer, early fall is when they are at their pinnacle taste. But to get that great taste there is something you need to know... that is.... that "...when kabocha is just harvested, it is STILL GORWING! So, unlike other vegetables and fruits, freshness isn't as important. It should be fully matured first, in order to become flavorful. First, kabocha is ripened in a warm place (77°F for 13 days, during which some of the starch converts to carbohydrate content). Then it's transferred to a cool place (50°F and stored for about a month in order to increase its carbohydrate content). In this way the just-harvested, dry, bland-tasting kabocha is transformed into smooth, sweet kabocha. Fully ripened, succulent kabocha will have reddish-yellow flesh and a hard skin with a dry, corky stem. It is heavier than it looks. It reaches the peak of ripeness about 1.5~3 months after it's harvested." (Information of ripening from Wikipedia)

Containing beta-carotene, iron, calcium, and vitamin C, the squash is a great nutritional ingredient. I love to make soups or just simply roast them in the oven with molasses, brown sugar, or just honey. Yummmmmmm.

Budd Light=Clarified Butter

(above picture is a bowl of clarrified butter and its original form in a stick of butter)


Most people have heard of clarified butter but don't really know how to make it. Here i'm going to break it down for you and make it a little less intimidating.

Clarrified butter is a must have for many high end restaurants for their dishes. With clarrified butter you are essentially melting the butter and seperating the fat, milk, and water (the three components of butter). By heating it up and melting it slowly, a white yellowish thickness appears on top of the butter. This is what pure buttermilk is. Slowly strain the buttermilk off the top with a ladel. You can discard it or save it in a seperate container.

After you have removed all of the milky viscous on top, most of the water should have evaporated from the butter. What you have left is clarrifed butter. As the sous chef told me: "You want it to look like Budd Light. If it looks like Samual Adams you have done it wrong."

The advantages of clarified butter is its long keeping quality (several months refrigerated) and its high smoke point (can be used in frying and sautéing without burning). The disadvantage is that it doesn't have that same rich flavor of regular butter since the milk solid (the butter) has been removed, but it does have a more buttery taste than other oils.(provided by Wikipedia)

The process is used all over the world:

In England, clarified butter is used in the process of potting, whereby foods such as shrimp and hare are conserved in pots of butter.
In Brazil, it is known as "manteiga de garrafa" (bottle butter) and is featured mostly in cuisine from the Northeast.
In Iran, it is known as "yellow oil" and is used in place of other oils.
In India, it is known as "ghee".
In Egypt, it is known as "samnah". It replaces oil in frying and sautéing due to a perceived superior flavor. (wikipedia source)

It's easier than you think! Good luck!

The mucho mucho caliente picante: the tasting of the chocolate javanero

“These are the second hottest pepper in the world”, the farmer said as he handed me a pint size container of Chocolate Javaneros (pronounced ha-ben-air-os).

Wow was all I could think of as I took them from him and placed them in the walk-in refrigerator at the restaurant. The second hottest pepper in the world.

The mucho mucho caliente picantes, as Sandra like to call them, were one inch by one inch with thin green stems. The javanero is one of the spiciest chili peppers in the world. Most of them hail from the Amazon basin in South America but today most are grown in Mexico and Belize with some grown in U.S. regions like Texas, Idaho, California, and in my case, Virginia.

My “wow-ness” with the fact that it was the second hottest pepper in the world made me so curious that I borrowed one from the pint that was delivered. I had to try it.

I brought it home and sliced it open. There were a lot less seeds inside compared to that of a Bell pepper. Armed with milk (as it helps to sooth burning hot feelings in the mouth) and some chocolate raisins for chasers, my roommate (who is from Arizona and knows a few things about hot peppers) and I were arm and arm as we placed a pinch of the pepper in our mouth. Immediately we were not fazed but at the 30-second mark an intense burning occurs on your tongue, lips, and surrounding mouth. So much that you begin to have numb lips. I reached for the milk and waved my hand around in a fan like motion toward my mouth. I am sure I looked ridiculous. My roommate had a tear drop from her left eye and we both winced. Then we grabbed some blue jell-o but that didn’t work too well.

The hot, intense, it wont leave my mouth feeling, lingered for about two hours. We washed our hands 4 times but that proved to be insufficient. If you ever handle these peppers be sure to have milk and gloves around for a quick recovery.

As for those who have confirmed the hottest pepper in the world, the naga jolokia, I’ll just take their word for it.

Another time; another argument: Hen of the Woods

I walked into the veg walk in on Saturday and stared directly at the cardboard box in front of me labeled “Hen of the Woods” in bold black ink. Finally, I thought, I had met the match of the infamous Chicken of the Woods that had been long debated in our kitchen no more than a month ago.
Not resembling Lobster mushrooms or Chicken of the Woods, the Hen of the Woods is flaky and more 3-dimenstional than the previous. It grows in clusters at the foot of trees; mostly on oaks and is indigenous to Japan and North America (mostly in the northeast). The mushroom is also very commonly known as “maitake” which means dancing mushroom in Japanese. The mushrooms have grayish white caps and can grow up to 50 pounds.
Research has been conducted to site that the mushroom is rich in minerals like calcium and vitamins, like B2, fibers, and amino acids. Typically in Japan or China it was used to enhance the immune system.
Now I’m just waiting on “Rooster of the Woods” to pop up.

The Ginger Tree

I don’t welcome Fridays. In the restaurant industry it means getting ready to serve a lot of food. But this past Friday I was pleasantly distracted by an unexpected visitor from a farm called Eco Farms.

I was head down into a large tub of beets, peeling them with a dry cloth, when I looked up and saw a middle aged man in jeans, Timberland construction boots, a zip up maroon hoody, and a yellow piece of paper starring me in the face.

“Good morning chef.” He said
“Good morning” I chuckled (he clearly didn’t know I was NOT “the chef”)

He held out a paper order for me to sign, one copy for him and one for us. I signed it and then looked at what he had brought us: three pounds of arugula in a clear plastic bag labeled in nice penmanship, a pound of radishes about one inch tall and half inch wide, and lastly, a tall tree of ginger.

I picked it up from the root and saw the labeling. It was the first time I had seen fresh ginger. From the root, which we all recognize as “ginger” in stores, came a tall stalk of greenery, which then had six or eight pineapple like leaves shooting off of each side of the stalk (as you can see above).

As the farmer and I gazed at the beauty of the plant, he told me it was a biannual plant (meaning it takes 2 years to go from see to plant to seed again) and that he had picked it in the first year. By picking it in its first year, the ginger plant had not developed the brown skin like aesthetic on the root. In grocery stores when you buy ginger, you are buying a brownish root. The brown is the skin that develops later, on the plant.

Ginger, having been originally cultivated in China, is used in many cuisines and dishes across the world. Young ginger, like what we got at the restaurant, is juicy with a mild taste. “…They are often pickled in vinegar or sherry as a snack or just cooked as an ingredient in many dishes. They can also be stewed in boiling water to make ginger tea, to which honey is often added as a sweetener; sliced orange or lemon fruit may also be added. Mature ginger roots are fibrous and nearly dry. The juice from old ginger roots is extremely potent and is often used as a spice in Chinese cuisine to flavor dishes such as in seafood and mutton” (wikipedia website). In addition to culinary uses, ginger is also used to treat nausea and morning sickness.

With China producing the most amount of ginger in the world (25%), it was nice to see that some farmers around the mid atlantic region were taking the initative to grown some ginger of their own.

Food for Thought

Working in fine dining has exposed me to a lot of things, in regard to the industry and to the social responsibility that I have with cooking food for people and myself. Fine dining is, when it comes down to it, just food. It's pretty and it's delicate but it's still just food. I think that my time in fine dining has made me appreciate food more for the role it plays in my life.... in making me be able to get up everyday and go to work, earn a living, see, breathe, hear, feel, touch, and taste the things I want to...it's a source of energy and power.

It's easy to get caught up in the mirage of fine dining and the lifestyle and hype of restaurants and chefs. Terrines, soufflés, roasted pork bellies, and crème brulee should get their recognition (they can be a pain to make), as long as at the end of the day, we realize that it's just some eggs, sugar, and cream.

Now reading: The United States of Arugala

This book give you an understanding to the rise of the food culture and food industry of the U.S. through a very fun author.

Rat-atouille for all.

I have a confession to make. Two weeks ago there was a rat spotted in the kitchen where I work. Now, every restaurant when they open has things that need to be taken care of. In our case, it was just an animal who had gotten through a hole somewhere.

When the chef realized that a furry friend was doing some fine dining of his own, he sent for the pest service and trap. A trap, fit to encase a bear, was placed in the pasty kitchen where it had been spotted. Using candied pears and some tart dough, the bait was placed. Now all we had to do was wait. We waited. And kept waiting (I don’t think the tart worked that well). Everyday we hoped that it wouldn’t be the day the rat came out to play.

Days went by and no rat was running around the tables or through the open kitchen. We had fixed the problem. And on the menu that night was a dish non other than ratatouille.

Casper the friendly eggplant

The first time I saw white eggplant I was working at my current restaurant that gets tons of weird organic fun produce. It was the day I also saw purple rain eggplant. Both these eggplants are cool looking and yummy.

Eggplants are related to the tomato and potato. It originally came from southern India and got introduced to the Mediterranean by people from Saudi Arabia. We now refer to it as “eggplant” because some fruits in the 18th century from European cultivators were yellow or white...resembling goose eggs.

The white eggplant is traditional, white skinned, and oval shaped. It has two types: Casper and Easter egg. I felt the one I had gotten in N.J. was more of a Casper than an Easter egg.

Eggplant is grown and sold mostly by China but if you can get it seasonally and locally, which is very possible, try to do that. And when you eat it, it will most likely decrease your cholesterol, as it has been proven effective.

While you can cook eggplant all kinds of ways, I like to either grill mine or do a kind of eggplant parmesan and dip it in egg yolk then cover it with breadcrumbs and put them in the oven for twenty minutes until they get soft and deeeeeeelicous.

Impromprtu Buy of the week: Kohlrabi

I had seen it before. I just don’t remember where or when. But I saw it again in New Jersey and this time I bought it. I didn’t know what it was, like most of my impromptu produce buys, but I got it anyway…I had to finally find out what it was.

My girlfriend and I were at the second stop of farms in N.J. when I saw what appeared to be an apple like cabbage hanging out with other cabbages in the September sun.

What I didn’t know at the time, was that I was holding an odd looking piece of produce called a Kohlrabi (pronounced ko-hi-ra-be).

A kohlrabi is, I later found out via cashier at the farm, part of the cabbage family. This guy will grow anywhere, but a town in Michigan has titled itself the “Kohlrabi Capital of the World” and had festivals to celebrate the cabbage offspring.

The name kohlrabi is derived from the German Kohl, meaning…. cabbage. The plant is part of the broccoli and brussel sprout clan, which is essentially coming from the mustard plant.

When an online reference said it was sweeter and milder than most cabbage hearts (just the inside of the cabbage…no actual hearts in these guys) I took it and bit into it. Looking back, I don’t think I would tell someone to do this if they were trying it for the first time. It’s true that it is milder and sweeter but I’ll stick to cooking it before I bite into it raw again.

Cook kohlrabi like you would cabbage….make a slaw out of it, cook it down and eat it with corn beef hash or feed it to your cattle out back (some kinds are grown to feed cattle).

Enjoy and be curious!

Jersey Fresh

This past weekend my girlfriend and I set out to New York for a wedding engagement party in Long Island and then a relaxing weekend at my parent’s house in New Jersey. Excited to relax, we spent the weekend catching up and shopping…local shopping that is. We spent the whole day on Saturday bouncing from farm to farm picking up fresh seasonal produce from farmers all over Morris County. The end result was a bountiful collection of fresh corn, squash, carrots, pickled items, peppers, and sweet potatoes.

But the last stop on our farm excursion was at a farm that goes by the name of “The Cider Mill”. This enchanting apple farm and bakery welcomes you with the smells of fresh doughnuts, pies, and apple cider. As we parked the car on the grass parking lot, we saw a familiar face from the distance. The face was that of one of the fellow partiers from the wedding party we had attended the night before. Surprised to see him, despite the small population of the town, we joined him and his two friends under the apple tree. Little did we know that one of his friends was the head baker and maker of the apple cider that the farm was so famous for.

After introducing himself, he asked if we had ever tasted the doughnuts. Since we hadn't, he disappeared to return with a generous donation of fresh doughnuts produced by the mill some four hours ago. As we dined on fresh doughnuts and juice, we realized how nice it would be to live in a place that allowed for the specialization of individual ingredients like this apple farm. We took our time with the treats; Washington D.C. could wait a little longer for our return.

Attack of the Radish: China Rose Radishes

Radishes seem to be like mushrooms; you never can see enough of them. Last week I added another radish to my repertoire: the China Rose Radish.

A bulk of 6-inch high and 3-inch wide pink and white radishes came in a plastic bag from a farmer two hours away in Pennsylvania. The radishes were the largest of any kind I had ever seen and thus sent me home with the interest of finding out more about these rooted vegetables.

Turns out that the China Rose Radishes, also known as the "daikon", is often carrot-shaped, grows 8 to 14 inches long, and 2 to 4 inches in diameter.

Radishes are grown all over the world and in every season, making this a great veg to grow for any farmer or cook. No evidence can be found on the exact origin of the radish but archeologists believe that since the radishes' cousin, the mustard and turnip were found in west Asia and Europe, that the radish may have its origins there.

Radishes grow best in full sun with moist, fertile, acidic to neutral soil. And for cooking, the whole radish plant is edible, though most people only consume the taproot bulb like part of the plant. Steaming and raw preparation is usually done for radishes. Expect a peppery strong flavor from these plants, which usually pairs nicely in a salad.

below: our garden fresh radish




Bon Appetite!

Tedious Tomatoe Task

“Alli. I have a great job for you” The sous chef said with a grimace.

Six pints of small orange cherry tomatoes looked me in the face on top of my cutting board. My mission before leaving the restaurant was to score the top of each tomato by taking a pearing knife and slightly cutting into the tomato’s skin, as to not puncture anymore of the tomatoes.

Another cook assisted me in this process. The next process, not so much.

After scoring the tomatoes, my partner in scoring was sent home. I, on the other hand, was told to finish the tomatoes by myself. I took the tomatoes to the pasta cooker (a device that looks like a fryer but has water in the bottom instead of oil). I placed them into the two-handled pasta container and dropped them into the hot water. This point was key. If I left the tomatoes on too long they would be orange mush later. If I pulled them before they were done, the tomatoes would be unable to peel (this was the point of scoring them).

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. And so on until I hit the number seven. The sous chef, keeping an eye on me, say I pulled them out and placed them in an ice bath, shocking and stopping the tomatoes from cooking.

I then hauled them over to my station and with a tweezer and began to slowly and tediously take the skins off of the tomatoes. By scoring them in the beginning, it gave my tweezers the edge to grab off the skin of the tomatoes without breaking the tomatoes. There were a few casualties but overall the job went well. It only took me about 40 minutes with the help from a fello chef.

But after this job, I will never look at cherry tomatoes the same way again.

Disclaimer: This blog is guaranteed farm fresh!

I recently read an article in National Geographic that some travel companies are paying bloggers to write positive write ups on their experiences with tours, hotels, and so on.

As a blogger myself, I couldn’t imagine writing something so biased. I would just like to assure you that you are infact reading a legitimate farm fresh blog from a cook who has no monetary gain by writing these entries.

What I’m Reading: Coming Home to Eat

My newest reading venture is a book called “Coming Home to Eat” By Gary Paul Nabhan. It appealed to me because it talks about the issues or eating locally. The author explains his year long mission to eat only foods grown, fished, or gathered within two hundreg miles of his home. Since after working with sustainable, organic, and local produce in the restaurant, I have become more aware of the importance of practicing these guidelines. My roommates and I try to adhere by the 250 mile rule for produce. Most of our produce comes from our garden or from Maryland, Virginia, or Pennsylvania. Anything outside of that for say cheese, come from New York.

I ust started the book but if you have any other book suggestions feel free to comment some on this site!

Slurries and Rouxs: Good to know for both home and professional cook

(slurry of flour and water above)

At my last job the sous chef made me add slurries and rouxs to soups and sauces all the time. He made me learn to do this because it is an important technique in French cuisine. The purpose of slurries and roux’s is to increase its viscosity (thickness) when making soups and sauces.

A roux (pronounced roo) is a mixture of flour and fat that, after being slowly cooked over low heat, is used to thicken mixtures like sauces. There are different kinds of roux’s…white, blonde, and brown. The color changes on the length of time you let the mixture cook. White and blond roux’s are made with butter. The brown roux is made with butter or pork or beef fat. It is cooked to a deep golden brown and used for rich dark soups and sauces, more specifically for the famous gumbo dish down south.

A slurry is very similar. It is a thin paste of water and flour that is stirred into hot soups and sauces as a thickener. After the slurry is added, the mixture should be stirred and cooked for several minutes in order for the flour to moose the raw taste.

Just remember that a roux uses a fat like butter instead of water, which is used in slurries. It depends on flavoring and richness of your dish. But both are very similar (which is probubly why I confuse them all the time).

These are good techniques to know if you need to thicken something you are making. But also know that liquids like olive oil can be used just as well to emulsify your sauce or soup. Just be careful with olive oil because its taste can easily overwhelm your dish.

Good luck with your slurry and roux’s!