New Again

The last time I posted on my blog was over a year ago. In the thick of culinary school I left the blog and went on to pursue other ambitions of a college student: being with friends and wasting most of my time playing video games. Afterall, why not? There is only so much time to have fun and be free of all obligations. Throughout the time I fell in and out of love, learned and cooked, moved to Charleston for 3 months and then moved back home. Now I am here waiting to hear back from job prosepects. I have been happier and sadder than I ever have been over the course of 2007 and now it is drawing to a close and I am ready for a change. Ready to move forward bright with hope and possibilities. I am more myself now than I ever have been and it took a year of trying to escape myself to be able to discover it again. So the blog is back. I will write of food and memories and time spent looking deep into a pot or peering through the glass oven door to find out what will come of the labor I had put forth. There is truly nothing as satifying as discovery, of new recipes and of who I am. I will let food define me as I search for secrets and all my powers stirred together with a spoon.

Back to the Chef's whites.

So, there are just 2 weeks left in this term. It is hard to believe that I am here doing this and that it is a quarter of the way through already. I have had fun, I have really had fun and I love this school, so there is nothing that I will try and change yet. I was the most nervous about that, coming here and regreting that I had ever decided to pack up my things and go. But I am glad I left my job and left my home to come here and go after my "dream". I guess I will just have to wait and see if the dream continues after school. I am sure it will, I love working in restaurants. The most recent class I took was Essentials of the Dining Room. We got to wait tables for a couple of weeks and learn all about dining room service. I found it really rather fun. I like restaurants and it is just a happy feeling to me to walk into a restaurant, have a cup of coffee and get to work. I like this work. The only thing is that I also like my family and in this business your job is your life. All I know is that there is "no truthful river" and I will just have to see what lies ahead. But, for now the dining room class is over and it is back to the chef's whites, it will feel good to get my hands dirty again.

Fine as Brine

The need to preserve our food was the spark that inspired cooks to try new approaches to flavoring. Pickles, chutneys, cured meats, cheese, wine, marinades, and brines all came from the need to stretch out the life of a food item for a few more meals. The temperature controled days we live in are a far cry from those days. Now we demand the freshest ingredients, when we want it. But luckily the flavor revolutionists of the past's good ideas are still with us. One case in point: Brining

A brine is salt disolved in water. Other ingredients can be added like vinegar, wine, sugar, and spices. Today in class we got a bag full of chicken legs and placed them in a brine for about an hour or so. The brine denaturalizes the meat, meaning the salt in the water allows the brine to penetrate the cell walls and fill them with the flavored water. So when you cook the chicken it is moist and perfectly seasoned all the way through. It is really a great way to cook meats that tend to dry out, like chicken and pork chops.

After brining the chicken we coated the drumsticks with flour and then let it sit for about thirty minutes, or until it got gummy. Then we coated it again. I repeated this process three times. Then we deep fried it, throwing all the chicken in at once and just letting it go. And it was the most perfect fried chicken, the chicken you wished mom used to make.

Life and Death in the Kitchen

Lately, I have been contemplating why I love the kitchen. What is it that feeds my stomach and my soul? And why doesn't everyone like to cook?
Last night I had a conversation with a friend who hates to cook, gets frustrated and relies on fast food or premade food or just not eating at all. Anything to stay out of the kitchen. For him cooking feels overwhelming and just not worth the effort. After all, there are plenty of restaurants with good food. But I guess at the end of the day I like the space, the activity, the pulse of a kitchen.

There is also a deeper, ancestral feel for me, partly found in the life and death of food. While I have been at school I have cut and cleaned whole fish, accidentally pushing my finger into one of the eyes, and squeezing out its guts when I tried to cut the head off with a dull knife. I could not help but think, it was alive at one point and now I was treating it like a prop in class. Butchering it with no skill and riping its skin from the flesh. Then eating it breaded and fried, maybe even more undignified.

But among all the death is life. Not just in the sustenance that we got from eating the food. In my baking class we would use yeast, a living organism in baking bread. We'd coax the fragile yeast out of its dormancy with warmth, food, and moisture and the living organism would flavor and lift the bread into something it was not before, and could not be without it.

There is so much of what we are in food. The whole history of mankind can be seen on a plate. When I saw Anthony Bourdain speak at Charlotte Shout he said this, "Food, at its best, is the purest representation of a place."

I thought this was so true how a plate of food is a combination of all the cultures that influenced the place and the cook. Then the eater will further make it their own by adding condiments or taking the recipe and changing it to fit their idea of good.

There is so much mental chaos in life: Worry, fatigue, to do lists, and just the frustrations of dealing with people, that for me, going into the kitchen is a relief. A sort of controlled chaos. Moments where you are so concentrated on the present that the past and the future do not seem to matter, at least not for a little while.

First week

A picture speaks a thousand words. So here are the pictures from the first week...Let me just say that having a baguette, a croissant, and a danish fresh from the oven is an experience everyone needs to have once in their life. For all those who read this blog that actually know me I will try to make this come true. Brunch anyone??

The Elusive Food Memory

Today over breakfast we got in a discussion of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. The southern alternative to Duncan Doughnuts' cake doughnut, Krispy Kremes are a made with a yeast dough and are covered in a thin glaze. When they are fresh and hot they, melt in your mouth and to me are all that a doughnut should be. Every year at the beach when the "Hot Now" sign is on at the Krispy Kreme store we will get a box of regular glazed doughnuts and an assortment box of cream and jelly filled. The cream-filled, chocolate glazed are so rich and so sweet that they are really too much, but every year we get a box. While we were talking this morning I found out the reason we always get the box of cream-filled is that my mom has a childhood memory of eating one and to the palate of a child it was perfect. Then the cream was more likely a made-from-scratch pastry cream rather that the sort of "whipped topping" that fills them now. Regardless of the change every year we get a box of the cream-filled as my mother tries to rediscover that early first taste.

Childhood food memories are usually exaggerated, by memory itself or by the newness of childhood experiences. Often they are impressed with the time and place, more than likely a special event or a special person rather than the actual food itself. The food has been tied in with that event and is often the only remaining element you can try to recreate.
My mother has told me of many food memories, the taste of a bottled coke and a grill cheese sandwich from the city drug store, the first taste of a vinaigrette at Sardis in New York City, the first time she ate tacos with a Texan roommate, all of these things impressionable and sweet for a young woman who did not grow up with an endless stream of food choices and a bombardment of food and recipes from the TV and magazines. Food was still new. You could go to New York and not know what a vinaigrette was or stumble across Feta cheese on a menu and not know what to expect. (Both of which now can be found on a McDonald's salad)

This conversation led me to realize that I have very few childhood food memories. It seems that most of the food I enjoyed as a child I can still eat now and the things I first tried as an adult I knew what it was and it was not exotic or new to me but something I had read about in a magazine or seen on TV and was eager to try.
I love food and am a foodie to the core. To write, think, and eat food is the way I live my life, but sometimes I wish I had not been so exposed. That I could wander into some little French bistro someday and not know what to expect when I tried that first oyster.
But that will not be the case. All I can hope for is that the feeling of the night will be perfect and the company better, as I take in a moment with the taste of the sea.

Summer Flash Back

Well, I guess the end of July is not the end of Summer, there is still a good 6-7 weeks left but the days are starting to get a little shorter and the plants that looked tropical two weeks ago now look middle-aged and worn out. Falling blooms litter the patio and the basil has gone to seed. I still have time to make pesto though, before the leaves turn yellow and the plant transitions into a dormant state and readies itself for Fall. I have not blogged this Summer, sadly I said I would but I got so busy with work and preparing for school, and just having a carefree Summer. Here are the highlights of Summer in flash back:

Father's Day:
For Father's day I made a key lime pie and we grilled ribs served with slaw, potatoes, fresh corn on the cob and bread: definitively Summer! At the end of the meal we sat and talked on the porch until it was dark outside and we all knew it was time to wind down and get ready for another work week. I came in that night and wrote in my journal:
"A 1000 wonderful dinners...I am lucky."
This was the feeling in which I lived my entire Summer. With each evening grilling out, each churn of homemade ice cream, each perfectly ripe tomato there seemed to be a feeling of impermanence and appreciation, of knowing that these times won't last forever. Not just the good food of Summer but the happy moments that accompany it. Life will change and this era will end, just as Summer comes and goes; the full and lush, long days that seem to last forever are quickly gone and turned to Fall and Winter.

The 4th
We had fireworks and burgers and two churns homemade ice cream. It was nice to know that just about everybody was doing the same thing we were; enjoying a mid-week day off of work with good food and a few fireworks. Fireworks are legal in SC so there are quite a bit to choose from for the after dinner backyard show and my father did not disappoint. We had quite a few old favorites like the parachute fireworks for the kids, and a few screaming meanies followed by a grand finale.

The Beach:
We stayed in a house on the beach with an empty lot behind us with a view of the inlet. It was really beautiful and peaceful to go over the dock and look out on the inlet water. It was so different compared to the ocean which, though beautiful is rather violent, always churning and rumbling with waves beating the shore line smooth. I ate at one restaurant while I was there, Lee's Inlet Kitchen in Murrels Inlet. It has THE BEST clam chowder. It is not a milk based creamy chowder but a tomato based "red inlet style" the menu says. It also has wonderful fresh seafood. The Lee family has owned and operated the restaurant for over 50 years. The Lee family also offers Lee's fishing tours, so much of the fish is caught off the Carolina Coast.

So that leads me back to now, the last few days of July 2006. I am a month from JWU and leaving home again, maybe that is why I feel nostalgic for a Summer that is not even over. Or maybe I know that I am moving into an uncertain future. Afterall, I am about to start something new that I hope will lead me somewhere I want to be and I can't help but wonder...where will I be next Summer?