Tweety Bird on Toast

Can you imagine trying to debone a budgie?  From the inside?  If you can, it’s probably because you’ve deboned a quail.  I’ve always liked quail, but I’ve found them a bit of a pain to eat – too many little bones and next to no meat for your effort.  But debone it and stuff it – problem solved!

Well, not really.  The catch is that you have to debone it.  And that’s a wee bit of work.

Chef 3 did the demo for the quails, with Chef 1 supervising from the back of the room.  Even though he’s only been here a few weeks, I can tell that he’s smart, talented, and has just the right amount of edginess that makes a good Chef.  He’s tough on organization (more on that below) and tough on clean and pressed uniforms – and doesn’t hesitate to point it out.  I’ve heard a few rumblings from other students that he’s too tough, but I completely disagree!  If I wanted a hug and an affirmation that I’m a special snowflake, I’m sure I could have found a cooking holiday or a community college night school class somewhere. 

 

There are two ways to debone a quail – from the front or the back.  Chef 3 said that he preferred deboning from the back – something about the size of his fingers, apparently.

My mind was already in the gutter that day, and I could feel a dirty joke coming on.

Chef 3:  I prefer to do it from the back.  Someone with smaller fingers can show you how to do it from the front.

Chef 1:  I prefer from the front…… for deboning.

And without missing a beat, a student piped up:  “Front? Back? It’s all boning!”

I think Chef 3 said something else, but I couldn’t hear it because we were all laughing too hard.

Once the quails have been boned (ha!), they take a little rest in the fridge while we prepare a farce à gratin stuffing.  Sear some chicken livers and déglacer with cognac (it makes a jolly flame!) and pass them though a tamis to give them a fine texture, sweat some shallots and a fine brunoise of mushrooms, combine the whole thing with some breadcrumbs and an egg, and then into a piping bag.  Fill the little birdies up with the farce, pin them closed with skewers, sear, and into the oven.

And of course, we had to make a sauce!  Sear the quail bones, add some mirepoix and a bouquet garni, mouiller with water, and let ‘er simmer.  Suer some shallots, add some paprika, strain in the quail stock, reduce, add some cream, season, etc.

And oh yeah – make some croutons (toast) and turn and glaçer some carrots and turnips.  Easy, right?

Somewhere along the way, most of the class got into the weeds.  Most people (myself included) took longer to debone our four birds that we should have, and even a few minutes delay on the front end sets you up for tumbling into the shit on the back end.  And that’s exactly what happened.

The last few minutes I was struggling to get anything on the plate.  Chef 3 was adamant that we have our dish plated by 10:45, and since we’d be working since about 8:20, that didn’t sound all that bad.  But when you’re in the shit, bad things start to happen and problems expand not just arithmetically, but geometrically.

I burned my hand on the handle of the pan of quails I had just pulled from the oven.  Excruciating, right from the tip of my left thumb to the joint with my hand, and right up to the knuckle of my index finger.  No time to deal with it even though it hurt like hell, so I just kept going.  Having to work with my right hand, even for just a few minutes, set me back quite a bit.

I didn’t have enough time to spend turning my carrots and turnips.  It’s one of my weaker skills and I know it.  I did them at great speed.  I cooked them at great speed, and the turnips were undercooked.  When the Chef was tasting my dish (and I was rubbing some kind of burn cream into my hand), he stuck a spoon under my nose with half a turned turnip and asked me to taste it.  He didn’t need to do that, because I already knew:  it was undercooked.  I ate it anyway, and it was much as I expected.  Point taken – this is what happens when you rush.

Sauce was a little runny.  A few more minutes of attention would have fixed that.  Taste was pretty good though. Stuffing was decent, but quails a bit overcooked.  More time = more attention. Looking back on it, 10 minutes saved at the beginning of the class would have given me 15 or more at the end. 

At the demo later in the afternoon, Chef 3 admonished both sections of the class for our poor organization.  Given that both sections struggled a bit, it reinforces to me that there’s a strategy behind the order of the dishes we prepare.  We get a few dishes in a row that aren’t too difficult which lets a little complacency set in, then a harder one that reinforces a few lessons.  As I said about the last workshop, it wasn’t about the salads, and this one wasn’t about the damned quails.  It was about having our shit together.  And at this point in the course that’s the lesson we need to learn.

Tweety bird was quite tasty, by the way.

Speaking Franglais

I’ve spent much of my day today studying for this term’s written exam, scheduled for a week from tomorrow. 

In my experience, cramming the night and hours before a test doesn’t work – it may squeeze one or two new facts in, but just as many fall out the other side of my brain – basic things like my email password, ability to do long division, and, on one occasion I was so burnt out after an Administrative Law exam in university that I was unable to tell a cab driver my exact street address.

A major component of our written test in Basic Cuisine was remembering French terminology, and we can expect more of the same on this term’s test.  What’s the difference between “blanc de cuisson” and “glacer a blanc”?  A sautoir and a sauteuse?  Sauter, étuver, poêler? 

It’s a lot of terminology to remember, but what’s rather funny is how the words sneak into conversation between students:

“Can I borrow your chinois?”

“That needs to go in a bain marie or it will burn.”

“Who clogged up the robocoupe?”

It gets even funnier when you realize that the verbs we’ve learned are all in the infinitive, but we just dump them in the conversation anyway:

“Hey, could you écumer my stock for me?"

“Chef wants the mushrooms caneller’d”

My standard line is that I do speak French, but the truth is that while I understand almost everything, I am a bit self-conscious about speaking.  A few years of French Immersion, a few classes in university and three levels of Rosetta Stone do give me some advantage, however.  I do feel for the folks at school who don’t have English as their first language.  I can only imagine that learning French via English would for me be a bit like learning Polish through an Italian class.

Other than terminology and definitions, I expect a good bit of the exam will be about the regions and regional specialties of France.  With a few trips to France behind me as well as an elementary knowledge of geography I don’t expect this part to be too hard.  If I were to write that olive oil was a specialty of Calais, or that oysters were common in the Rhône-Alps, I would not only expect to be wrong, but perhaps taken out behind the building and flogged.

A few dozen pages a day, a few new words a day, and with some luck I’ll sail right past this test.  After that, I’ve got bigger bunnies to braiser – the practical test is only a few weeks away.

Hell's Canapes and Leadership

I don’t miss much from my days as a political staffer on Parliament Hill, but I do occasionally miss the cocktail parties.

Nearly every night when  Parliament was in session you could score yourself a free dinner, if by dinner you mean a handful of shrimp, a mini lemon tart or two and a few glasses of cheap (but cheerful) Ontario wine.  Not exactly what was needed to make a lean, mean political machine, but these social events were a good place to have a quick conversation, clear up a misunderstanding or two, and grease the gears of a sometimes otherwise brutal business over a canapé.

Now I’m starting to understand the other side of the cocktail party business, and making canapés is hard work.

Silly, fiddly little two bite heaps of stuff on toast are a pain in the ass. They look cute, but there is something deeply frustrating about making something that is going to be inhaled in a few seconds and is more labour-intensive per bite than nearly anything else from your kitchen.

Last Thursday and Friday we had our Travail du Garde Manger workshop.  The Garde Manger is the kitchen rank usually in charge of the pantry, or in modern terms, the cold appetizers, buffets, etc.  Our group of five students had to produce a mini buffet of two canapés, two salads, a terrine, a fish dish, and a meat dish.  Recipes in the book were a mere guideline.  Four and half-ish hours to prep on Thursday, and similar time on Friday to finish.

The major lesson from the workshop, I think, was about coordination and leadership.  There is no possible way to justify five people spending nearly 10 hours working on a handful of dishes, especially goofy little bites of whatever.  It wouldn’t be profitable for any kitchen to do what we did.  They gave us enough room to get creative, and more than enough room to hang ourselves, and did we ever!

I clued in to the point of the workshop partway through the prep on Thursday.  I looked around and realized that, left to my own devices, I could probably produce as much (or more!) food in the same amount of time if I wasn’t constantly negotiating ideas with my classmates or duplicating prep work that was going on just two stations away.  When you are working with economies of scale, it matters if two people are dicing shallots, or if there are four pots of water boiling on the flat tops. Leadership and coordination matter.

The Chef (the new one, who I will call Chef 3) was very pointed in his evaluation.  He asked our team to take a look at the presentation by the other team, and for them to take a look at ours.  We were asked to determine how much we might pay, per person, for each presentation.  $20?  $30?  A simple calculation revealed that what both teams prepared would surely lose money based on the hours we worked.  Some of the dishes on both sides were well-received, and others were mediocre or just plain didn’t work.

But the point of the workshop was to learn about teamwork, and I think the point was taken.  The leader of our group was charming and (I think) very talented and smart 18 year old guy who will be a good chef someday, but didn’t really get his bearings as group leader.  I overheard Chef 3’s conversation with him at the end of the class, and the Chef was quite right: leadership is not about taking on the most difficult tasks, or telling people what to do – it’s about coordinating, using people’s talents to the full extent, and finding the gaps and filling them in.   But that’s only something that comes with practice, and only comes with confidence in your own abilities and some gravitas – a little weight behind your words.

The workshop reminded me about the lessons I’ve learned in my years in politics.  In politics, they throw you right off the diving tower into the deep end – and you either sink or you swim.  I didn’t learn what it meant to lead until a campaign manager told me that she was handing me a winning campaign, but that it was my job to make sure that our supporters voted on election day – the last 36 hours were all on me.  It was up to me to lead the army into election day, and there was no way for me to do it all myself – I had to be a leader.   I obsessed, I worried, and I had to trust in my own skills and organization. And I did it.

I do get a little irritated with the Cordon Bleu curriculum at times – too many wretched dishes with vile and heavy sauces and what feels like pointless garnishes.  But with workshops like these, I sometimes get a glimpse of the deeper lessons they want us to learn, and I’m grateful again for a few more years of life experience so I can see that it’s not always about how my salad turned out.

Yes Chef!  Lesson learned.

Sarah's Day Off

One thing that is really nice about school is that I sometimes have a little so-called “free time”.  However, it’s not like the “free time” I remember when I was in university nearly 15 years ago (oh God…)

Back in the old days, I was a smug and arrogant liberal arts student convinced, like we all were, that I was uncovering great and profound truths in the 15 or so hours a week spent in lectures like “Justice and Gender”, “Survey of Comparative Politics” or “Philosophy of Law”.  Like everyone else, I was probably an insufferable asshole pontificating about concepts like “postmodernism” and “cultural relativism”, while ignoring a hundred pages of readings over a pitcher of Labatt 50 in the campus watering hole. 

You can’t pull that crap in culinary school.

You can’t write 4000 words of bullshit the night before a deadline, squishing the margins on the word processor, typing in a 13 point typeface to eke out an extra page, and stuffing the footnotes with vaguely relevant economic indicator stats pulled from the back page of The Economist.  At the LCB, you have to produce something nearly every day, and you can’t fake it.  Either you plate on time with a decent dish, or you don’t.  And that means you need to practice.

So when I get a day off, or even part of a day off, I practice.

I practice my knife skills.  So far this term I’ve probably run through nearly 12 pounds of carrots working on my julienne, brunoise, and the always (for me at least) horrible turning (or tournage).  My knife work isn’t bad, but for some reason I feel like I’m all thumbs at turning.  Turning, I am told, is the bane of culinary students everywhere, and I’m no exception.

This is an example of what a properly turned turnip looks like:

This is what I did to a carrot:

I also practice butchery and sauce-making, which is a bit of an expensive endeavour.  Canada has cartels that control prices for products like chicken, butter, eggs, milk, etc.  Unless there is a sale on, a whole chicken is going to cost about $10… a good quality, organic chicken usually twice that.  Butter, milk products and eggs are scandalous rip-offs compared to prices in Ogdensburg, New York, just 45 minutes away.  Consumers in Canada, quite frankly, get hosed.  But when groceries are school supplies, you get on with it. 

So while the other section of the Intermediate Cuisine class had their Saucier workshop yesterday, I had the day off.   I got up early (like an adult!), and got to work on a batch of chicken stock, one of the most productive things you can do with the old chicken carcasses from the depths of the freezer and sad-looking vegetable scraps that might otherwise be headed for the rubbish bin. 

Bashing up the carcasses and bones with a cleaver is really one of the best forms of stress relief.  Bad weather?  Whack!  Friend who hasn’t returned my call?  Whack!  Barista who screwed up my coffee? Jammed printer?  Email spam?  Whack! Whack! Whack! 

Sweat the vegetables:

Cover the whole mess with water, simmer, skim and repeat:

Having few frozen bricks of stock in the freezer is a great luxury, making soups and sauces a whole lot tastier and less time-consuming, and leaves me feeling slightly better about paying an extortionate price for chicken in the first place (ok… not really).

I also like to practice a few other techniques and recipes that I consider essential – I won’t give away all of those because I know at least one of the Chefs reads this blog and I want to keep a few tricks up my sleeve.  But one I will admit to is my quest for the perfect frite. 

Who doesn’t love French Fries, Freedom Fries, chips, frites, or whatever you like to call them?  They go with (almost) everything, and few people really know how to do them well.  I am convinced, however, that Heston Blumenthal’s Triple Cooked Chips are the closest recipe to absolute perfection.   And of course, because I am mentally incapable of leaving well-enough alone, I’ve spent the last year screwing with nearly every aspect of the recipe and think I’ve figured out all the corners I can cut and still get a good result.  Never know…. It might come in handy sometime soon.

A well-spent day off, but a lot more work ahead this week.