Above all things—creativity, technique, encyclopedic knowledge—the quality essential to being a chef, the “fundamental, most important building block,” is generosity. “You have to be generous if you want to spend your time making someone else dinner,” he said. “Even if you’re charging, you’re still giving.”
Most people can pick up the basic techniques of working in a kitchen, but the more abstract elements of passion, service, and engagement are not as easy to learn: “I can teach a chimp how to make linguini and clams. I can’t teach a chimp to dream about it and think about how great it is,” Batali said.
“Although the skills aren’t hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.
Stir Fry Pork with Brown Rice Noodles and Kale
I used the Picle app to shoot this video. Belatedly. Mostly to test it out. Neato, etc.
The Art of Plating Food
One of the reasons I have a hard time posting pictures, is I realize they’re not that great looking relative to my own expectations. So I decided to do some homework, because I felt like there had to be some techniques I was missing. This 3-minute video shows us some quick and easy plating techniques. Hope it helps you as it helps me!
Gluten-free Red Velvet Cupcakes.
I hate gluten free baking with xanthan gum. It makes stuff taste odd and I’ve never had more problems getting recipes right than I do when I use it. So I search for recipes without it. I’ve had a lot of success making these cupcakes, so I wasn’t especially worried but…after a few failures in the kitchen attempting to improvise some recipes from regular to gluten-free, I was nervous.
But all was well. It helped that I whisked by hand rather than using my mixer for such duties, I think. I felt like I was overbeating my eggs the past few times, which is what a spiffy mixer might do. In any case, these came out pretty good and the recipe made about 9 cupcakes.
The recipe calls for almond flour. I did not use this. I just used Bob’s Red Mill All-purpose gluten free flour because it makes my life easier and nothing is more annoying than trying to mix and match flours and my local store didn’t have any almond flour. It wasn’t a problem and I’d made it before, so I wasn’t worried, but if you don’t have any almond flour don’t despair. I just wouldn’t go using rice flours because those I find burn super fast and might not be strong enough to hold this together.
Stir Fry Ginger Chicken & Kale on Brown Rice
Not a lot of science to this one. Rice in the rice cooker. I used a bit of rice vinegar (read: too much) but save for that, the kale was in a pot for about 5 minutes to boil.
The supermarket here sells chicken stir fry so I don’t have to cut it up, just cook it and it makes my cooking life a bit easier. So I threw that in a wok with some spices (ginger, pepper, salt, a dab of sesame oil) and cooked the chicken. Once it’s done, I put the kale in to mix the flavors together and after the kale wilts, it’s ready to go.
A quick easy meal. Kale is pretty underrated as a green and I needed some cream soda to wash it down. You can substitute that for beer, if that’s your thing as I’m sure it’ll work the same.
I forgot to mention that Thelonious Monk is great for cooking. I did this and make red velvet cupcakes and it was like flying on air with Monk in the background lemme tell ya.
What I’m doing: Finishing Chicken vindaloo.
What I’m avoiding: Packing for Kansas City tomorrow.
The vindaloo was pretty good. I should’ve bought basmati rice the other day though, it was the only thing missing from the meal.
Pan-seared halibut
Rarely do my creations photograph well but I took a bunch of shots of this with the iPod. It tasted outstanding.
Just a few months ago, I was imploring myself to stop eating crap. Now I just need a non-crap camera to take pictures of the good stuff I make. I’ll get on it. But this was the first good pic of something I’ve made worth sharing.
Today
Brunch: Gluten-free Lättyjä (Finnish Crepes) with butter and powdered sugar. I meant to drink tea, but by the time I got down to business…I just had a bottle of draught head style vanilla cream soda.
Tonight, I’ll make Blackened Shrimp with Kale on Jasmine Rice with baked sweet potatoes. All I have left to do is bake yams and make the shrimp. Rice is done in the cooker and kale is also finished. It almost looks like that, except I’m not using the sausage from this particular recipe because well…that’s gross.
If I was feeling ambitious and was cooking for more than just one, I’d probably make a Cantaloupe Butterscotch Strawberry Balsamic Vinegar Ice Cream Sundae. I did laundry too.
Now just trying to get caught up on some reading, with Prokofiev as the soundtrack to that madness.
I only eat collards when I go home, but I’d been meaning to make some on my own one of these days. The other day at the local supermarket of all places, they actually had them. I was very surprised to see them and picked some up to make for the first time. After making an unrelated Thai Pork Stir Fry, I decided to attempt collards (no, not to eat tonight) and well…it seems I’ve managed to make them successfully.
I can do them better and will next time. I need a much bigger pot too, which would help, but…even without that…the first sample indicates they’re pretty good. I won’t eat them tonight though. They’ll go well with some other meal later this week.
