Personal Chef 101

Time is moving so fast I'm losing track of where I am and what I need to post.

My Nutrition class is basically Personal Chef 101.

Here is my first class effort:

Roasted Pepper and Olive Salad

Pan Seared Chicken Breast on Couscous with Green Beans and Cinnamon Gelato

I was pleased with the dish and I received a rave review from my client. It has somewhat of a Greek theme with the the olives, couscous and chicken. I'm not so sure that the couscous is actually couscous. Chef said it was but then Chef ordered a new case it it doesn't look like this stuff, but again, my client liked it, whatever it was. The chicken was seasoned with cracked pepper, cumin and turmeric. The "couscous" was tossed with onion, peppers and tomato. The green beans were seasoned with nutmeg. The gelato is not a true gelato since no custard is used. Cornstarch is used as a thickener instead. I also had to use soy milk because my client has a milk allergy. The taste was good but the texture was off. I would say it was closer to pudding than ice cream. It reminded me a lot of tapioca pudding. All in all I was pleased with my first effort. In looking at the picture, I could have done a little better on my plating.

We did this meal after cooking in the morning for our banquet class. That meant I was cooking or washing dishes from 8:30 to 4:30 with a break from 12:00 to 1:00 to serve food and eat. My ass was dragging. My feet and legs hurt so bad. I could feel myself move slower and s-l-o-w-e-r and slooooooowwwwweeeeerrrrr. I once saw a Red Wings hockey game that went to six overtimes. By the sixth period it looked like they were skating on slush instead of ice they were moving so slow due to fatigue. That is exactly how I felt.

Looking around the class, my buddy Tennessee was attempting to wing it with no prior plan. Fried prosciutto in a pesto cream sauce on homemade pasta. Kudos for home made pasta rather than processed and refined stuff, but not really a healthy meal overall. And damn that prosciutto was salty! Took me hours to get the taste out of my mouth.

Good ol' RK took three hours to make empanadas. They were the size of of a Hostess cherry pie, if not bigger. Granted they had a savory filling with rice and olives and raisins, but they were deep fried and HUGE! That was his entire plate too. He made eight, we're serving one. Some people just don't get it.

Extra Credit

Last Sunday I had the opportunity to cook for the USO at the Atlanta airport for soldiers passing through the airport on the way home or way out.

Well, not exactly.

A year ago in my first class with the teenyboppers, Chef explained his expectations for the class. Besides the mundane like being there on time and every day and wearing your uniform, one of the expectations he mentioned was being involved in extracurricular activities. Chef said from time to time he will organize trips to ACF meetings or host ACF meetings. Also he will volunteer us to cook for various projects. We don't have to be involved in all of these activities but he does expect us to be involved to some extent and our participation is taken into consideration for our grade. A year ago he said that he had signed us up to cook for soldiers at the Atlanta airport, Labor Day 2009. But that was all the detail he knew at the time.

The original plan was to go down to Atlanta, cook in a real kitchen, and then serve the soldiers as they went through the line. That didn't happen. Instead we were going to prep the food in our kitchen and then Chef was going to deliver the food on Monday, Labor Day. Chef said it was strictly voluntary, I saw it as extra credit, so I showed up at 3:00pm on Sunday. No one else from my class showed. Another girl showed up about twenty minutes after me. Coincidentally she was in my first class. Another guy showed up about an hour later. He's finished the program and works for Chef at his restaurant. That was it.

Our menu was roast chicken, barbecue pork loin that Chef had smoked at his restaurant, macaroni and cheese, baked beans, roast potatoes, corn, and more of that key lime pie. I started in on the chicken. I think there were two cases worth, about 200 pieces. I filled five sheet pans. It took some time only because I had to wash the chicken, separate out the wings and pop out the bone in the thighs. I brushed the chicken with olive oil and seasoned the pieces with garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, salt, pepper, and tarragon. Chef reported back no complaints.

Pizza Girl worked on chopping up vegetables to jazz up the canned beans. All of the food that we were cooking was donated by Chef's vendors. He was pretty disappointed with his vendors' contributions. Apparently they don't donate any more. A sign of the economic times I suppose but but pretty sad given the cause. Just goes to show you where loyalties really lie.

Sous Chef sliced the pork loin on the big meat slicer. I think there were seven loins. I have a really hard time remember meat cuts. It would help to learn the why they have the names they do. One would assume that pork loin comes from the leg or thigh area of the pig but it comes from the back. The barbecue sauce was a combination of two sauces. One was Bulls Eye but I don't know what the other one was.

Imoved onto the potatoes. This was basically the same as what we had done on Tuesday, except I think I had sixty pounds of potatoes! I filled a huge roasting pan with about forty pounds and then Pizza Girl started a second roasting pan. I seasoned both pans just like we had on Tuesday. Again, no disgruntled eaters reported by Chef.

Meanwhile, Chef made the macaroni and cheese. It was canned cheese sauce. Chef put some other stuff in it but I'm not sure what.

The last dish was the corn. Pizza Girl set out three large aluminum foil pans and filled them with the cooked frozen corn. The corn was pretty tasteless. We hit it hard with salt and a pound of butter in each pan!

We were done around 6:30. It was hard work but it was fun. And there was a nice warm fuzzy feeling for doing something good for these soldiers. Chef's plan was to come back in at 3:00AM! and cook everything, load the van up and head to the airport at 7:00AM. Chef said it was a tiny kitchen when he got there. He was worried that he had too much food, only enough for 200 but was told that was great, they were expecting 300-350 soldiers passing through. I'm sure each one of them loaded their plates up too. They had USO volunteers serving but Chef, his wife and Sous Chef also served. Chef said they announced each of our names over the PA system thanking us. And each of us received a flag patch from Operation Chefs Unite that we are supposed to iron onto our jackets. How cool is that!

And More Chicken!

This will be a relatively short post as the writing of the recipe is already done. Last night we had White Chicken Cacciatore. My fellow Guzzisti, Danilo, posted this recipe and story on his website. The dish is on the oily side but olive oil is healthy, right? I don't see me making this too often but this is a great presentation dish. I'll be tweaking it a little. My big skillet wasn't big enough! Anyway, checkout As the Dude Abides and his recipe from the Old World.

Strata Revisited or My Little Helper

I brought Rose home from school early today. I figured might as well since she had her Valentine's Day party and it was Friday after all.

So now the difficulty was how to prepare dinner with an active 2 1/2 year old? Chicken Strata is easy, but just how easy. Everything came together very well for Sous Chef Rose I have to say.

Grit-ty Chicken and Herb-y Broccoli

Last nights dinner menu consisted of:

Polenta-crusted Chicken in a Balsamic Caper Sauce
Broccoli Tossed in an Italian Herb Sauce
Mashed Yellow Potatoes

I gave up trying to find escarole and broccolini but decided to make this dinner anyway.

This was a fabulous meal, the kind you might serve for guests. I used chicken tenderloins instead of chicken breasts but the results were still fine. Actually a bonus because Rose loved the chicken tenders without the sauce, dipped in "red dip" (ketchup). I ended up with probably three servings and I think two pounds of chicken would have yielded four servings. Or just get four chicken breasts.

Luckily I know that polenta and grits are the same thing. That still didn't help me in the grocery. I had to ask Dinah to show me where the grits were located. Being a true Georgia girl she was able to steer this Yankee to the breakfast aisle and point out that they are right next to the cream of wheat and oatmeal. There was one bag marked polenta but I was looking for "quick-cooking." So if you don't see grits up North, look for polenta.

The sauce is deep and complex. Very good on potatoes also. The balsamic vinegar adds a nice sweet tangy-ness. Dinah described it as having hints of blackberry. I like capers but if they are not your thing, don't leave them out just strain them out when you serve. Since I couldn't find any escarole which is used as an edible garnish on top of the chicken, I just left it out. I think some wilted spinach tossed in the balsamic caper sauce would be good next time around.

The broccoli was outstanding. The herb oil is somewhere between a Caesar dressing and an Italian dressing, easy to make and fresh and light. Don't be turned off by the addition of anchovy paste. You won't taste it. The anchovies add a savory saltiness to the oil. It's the main ingredient in Caesar salad dressing and Worcestershire sauce so you've proabably had it before and didn't mind. I'm sure broccolini would have been good too but I wasn't interested in making a two hour drive to Publix just to find some.

Eat Mor Chikin

We had chicken tonight, again. It was an accident, not by design. I don't normally like serving similar meats back to back like that. And I'm not that fond of chicken to start with.

The plan was a dish called Chicken Anaheim. Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned and I ended up with something that wasn't Chicken Anaheim.

I admit I have a temper. I like to believe that even though I can still fly into a rage, my rages are less often now and less intense. I've mellowed. Really. But it still happens. Things not going as planned sets me off and having a dinner not go right really sends me into orbit. Fortunately by the time Dinah and Rose got home, I had mostly calmed down, mostly. But the food was cold by then and I was still a little pissed.

This dish has three parts, a bed of noodles, grilled chicken and a cream sauce. I use fideo noodles to add some Mexican authenticity but broken spaghetti noodles work just fine. I remember saying out loud, "no need to buy any spaghetti since we have at least three boxes." Well we have none. I don't even like spaghetti so I don't know where it all went. I guess I used it up without realizing it. So I ended up using elbow macaroni. It worked but wasn't what I wanted. Maybe I should have busted open some packages of ramen. (The idiot kids in my class call it Roman noodles).

But what really sent me into orbit was my peppers. I froze all the peppers from my garden. They freeze well and allow me to have some nicer peppers than what I can buy in the grocery at any given time. I needed to char the skins of my Anaheim peppers and rub them off. I've learned tonight that I need to find a good way of doing this. In the past I used the side burner on my propane gas grill and it always worked perfectly. Problem now is one, that burner doesn't work any more and two, it's 19 degrees outside (yes, in Georgia)! I have tried using a bottle torch. It didn't work. Later I saw it done lickity split on TV with the same torch I have. I don't know how they did it. This time I tried the broiler in the toaster oven since I only had two peppers. I got the skins to char, mostly. I sweated them like usual. When I tried to peel the skins off, my peppers shredded. I had nothing. Dammit. I've got to find a better way.

But in the end, the meal tasted good even if it wasn't what I set out to make. These things happen, I know. And it's Monday.

PS I got paid today!!!! I might just buy my wife a Christmas present after all.

Curry Chicken Broccoli Casserole

I made this dish for dinner tonight. This was one of my favorite dishes growing up, one of the few ways my Mom could get me to eat broccoli as a kid. Hey its got meat, rice, vegetable. Its almost a complete well rounded meal!

If you try it, let me know.

What To Do With That Left Over Turkey?

Here's what my family does. My mom has made Chicken Strata with the left over turkey for as long as I can remember. I'm sure she found it in a magazine or some other source lost to time, desperate for a way to use up the left over turkey instead of throwing it away. You can only have so many turkey sandwiches. It became our traditional day-after-Christmas breakfast. And while we always ate it for breakfast, I have been making it as a dinner for years by just frying up chicken breast instead of using left over turkey, hence why I have named my recipe chicken strata not turkey strata. Guess what we are having for dinner tonight?

This dish has become so associated with my family that I made chicken strata kits last year and gave them as Christmas gifts.

I think you will easily become as addicted to this dish as I have become. After all, as my wife says, how can you go wrong with a dish that calls for gravy?

Let me know if you try it what you think.

Readin', 'Ritin', and Recipes

I don't like the way most recipes are written. Too many lack clarity or detail. I think my displeasure comes from too many years of writing work instructions and procedures for QS9000. Another pet peeve I have is too many recipes call for ingredients in unusual amounts, like 10 ounces of beer or one cup of sour cream. Beer comes in 12 ounces bottles and sour cream comes in 8 ounce containers, by weight, and no 8 wt. oz. does not equal 8 fl. oz. except for water.

As I've gotten more into baking I've worked to weigh my baking ingredients instead of using volumes like cups, especially with flour. This is especially important if you want your recipes to be consistent batch to batch. It also makes upsizing or downsizing a recipe much easier. It is a whole lot easier to reduce 500g of flour by half than to find half of 3/4 of a cup.

So now I think I have a recipe format that has evolved that I really like. I include notes for extra clarification or for changes for next time at the bottom of each. Kind of like the side bars Rick Bayless includes in his cookbooks which I like so much

Anyway, tonight I made an easy Italian dish called Polo con Salsa di Funghi. Its a chicken dish with a tomato sauce and mushrooms. I used some leftover cooked chicken that I had frozen from a few recipes ago but it's pretty straight forward to cook up a two pound package or so of boneless chicken breasts (or thighs) for the recipe.

If you would like to try it, you can find it here.