DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Check out the Chronicle’s Year in Pictures — 12 galleries of their best shots from last year.

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Small world syndrome: the owners of the restaurant where I spent three nights last week just bought an old Mercedes diesel for $1500 and outfitted it to run on vegetable oil (for $800 more). They’ll get free fryer fat from neighboring restaurants. The point is, being “part of the solution” in this case does not represent a huge investment, as might, for example, buying a new hybrid. (While I think hybrids are an improvement over traditional internal-combustion-only vehicles, they still burn refined fossil fuels, and thus are inferior to, not to mention more expensive than, biodiesels.)

British correspondent Ade Rixon wrote in to describe a roadblock to the greasecar movement in the UK: the government taxes fuel, and considers it a serious crime for citizens to burn any fuel that has not been taxed: Sniffing out unusually fragrant exhaust fumes, highway patrols have already collared several dozen offenders, who save more than 40p a litre by diverting oil from the kitchen cupboard to under the bonnet. So you can burn cooking oil, but you risk spending seven years in prison if you do.

I know of no such laws here in the US, although I would not be surprised to learn that it’s buried in the so-called Patriot Act, which among other surveillance measures gives federal agents access to customer data from bookstores and libraries, as if domestic terrorists could be identified by their reading lists.

Anyway, bitter sarcasm aside, I had a depressing email exchange with someone last week on the topic of alternative energy sources. It started with that message that’s been bouncing around about boycotting oil companies that buy from Iraq. I responded that I’d rather they drill in the middle east than offshore California (e.g. 15 minutes from my house) or in an Alaskan wildlife preserve — and that the best solution, in my opinion, is to reduce consumption because then we need not worry so much where the oil comes from. She wrote back to accuse me of being a nimbyist (“not in my back yard”) which is true enough, but still an easy condemnation for her considering she doesn’t live anywhere near a proposed drilling site.

She continued, “But the fact of the matter is that gas/oil is a necessity. I wish that it were not, but it is. I hope there will come a day when we don’t rely on it for our transportation or to heat our homes. However, that day will probably not come in my lifetime.”

That’s just so wrong. Certainly the easy solution for her is to drive a gas-powered car and use oil-based heating, but by no means is that a “necessity.” I suggested a number of alternatives, e.g. electric heat, solar power, wind power, motorcycles, diesels, hybrids, electric cars, Segways… and she wrote back, “You must be living in a different world than I do.”

Well, I guess maybe I do. At least I’m looking for answers rather than trying to convince others, in the face of the evidence, that no answers exist.

What scares me about this is her blindness to facts, her closed-mindedness to the death spiral we’re in due to dependence on (foreign) oil, the damage to the environment we do every day with these “easy” answers, and of course the fact that she votes.

[This is part II of a 3-part series. Read part I, intro to chefdom, or part II, soup from concentrate]

One of the most interesting food-service tricks we’ve learned is something I’d first realized when reading Kitchen Confidential — that most restaurant food is prepared in advance. In our case we served a six-course meal, and the only item that was actually cooked to order was what the chefs called the “veg,” the token plain vegetable served on the side of the fancy vegan entree. Everything else was either kept warm after having been cooked earlier in the day, or reheated out of the cooler.

It’s a good lesson for entertaining at home. For small groups, it wouldn’t matter so much, but even then, this approach makes way too much sense.

This afternoon, my task was to make one of the two entrees, jambalaya. This particular dish appealed to me because it was cooked in the oven with minimal fuss. I combined all the ingredients (including uncooked rice) in big “hotel pans,” and then stuck ‘em in the oven. It couldn’t get much easier than that.

The prep took time, though. The “Cajun spice blend” called for in the jambalaya recipe put me back at the spice rack with my calculator and pad, measuring micrograms of cayenne and fennel and file. We were doing 5x the written jambalaya recipe, so I made 5x the spice blend. Toward the end of the process I realized that I’d just combined about $80 worth of dried spices, enough to feed Cajun food to 100 people every day for the rest of the month. Turns out the spice-blend recipe was already multiplied out, and I’d just made 5x more than we needed. I had a big salad bowl of spices and a sheepish grin on my face. The chefs didn’t mind, though; they make batches of this stuff periodically anyway. (Maybe not again this year, though.)

My soup changed dramatically overnight. It was hugely better; the flavors had combined and balanced. As we were getting ready to serve it, I panicked, realizing that the head chef, out front acting as hostess, hadn’t tasted the soup to adjust seasonings. Back in the kitchen, I asked the sous-chef to do so, and she said, “I can’t taste anything; I have a cold. It’s on you!” So I had final say on the seasonings, and we were just about to serve the soup to 30 people.

I’ve never trusted my palette. Great chefs become great because they constantly taste and adjust. Identifying what’s lacking, or what’s overpowering, is a big part of the skill of a talented chef, and that’s the one skill I’ve never developed, or even attempted. I regularly serve food that I have not tasted at all, whether I’ve followed a recipe or not, because the few times I have tasted something I’ve never known what to add.

So, under this enormous (but largely imagined) pressure, I dunked a spoon and slurped some soup. It was fantastic. It needed nothing, and for once I knew it. There was no question in my mind. So we served the soup as-is, and it went on to get raves from everyone — I heard people talking about it in the restaurant. That was pretty cool.

I put in a 2-hour shift in the kitchen, plating all six courses. It was fun for that amount of time, knowing that things would never get too crazy. Afterwards I got to sit in the dining room and eat while other students took over plating. This was a nice end to the process, to return to the front room and act like a customer again, to have shaken every hand that had touched the food, to know the stories and the faces and the personalities and the near-accidents, and to have the recipe book open as I ate dinner.

The best part, though, is that someone else did the dishes.

[This is part II of a 3-part series. Read part I, intro to chefdom, or part III, the big night]

My stock was excellent. Excuse me while I finish filling out my application to the CIA.

Tonight we continued preparing for tomorrow’s big dinner event. My project tonight was to make soup for 70. I think I’ve only made soup once in my life. (And it gave me gas for three days, which explains why I haven’t made it since.)

Of course, we’re working from recipes. But there are still plenty of opportunities to ruin something. Tonight I smoked my saute oil, and had to rinse out the pot and start over. Then I under-carmelized two pots of vegetables because I kept stirring them, afraid they’d burn otherwise. But then I got distracted, and nearly did burn one pot. Working with unfamiliar tools, e.g. a commercial gas stove from about 30 years ago, and pots the size of bathtubs, just about overloaded my attention.

Another student was melting a big pot of chocolate and it seized up into a softball-sized lump with a big metal whisk sticking out one side. That took an hour’s work with the food processor to recover.

I guess most kitchen accidents can be fixed. But I definitely grew more paranoid as the amount of time I’d invested in a dish increased. For example, you can’t really make a mistake while chopping vegetables, so long as you don’t draw blood. But if, two hours later, you accidentally dump 2x the right amount of salt into the soup pot, you’re screwed. When it came to seasonings I was ultimately overcautious, measuring and calculating 4-5 times for every addition.

The chefs were laughing, because they never measure anything any more. I’m a baker, though, and as they’d concede, accuracy in measurment is one of the keys to successful baking. Add to that the fear that I was about to spoil 14 quarts of soup, and you’ll get an image of me with pad and pencil and calculator: 3 tsp to the Tbsp; 16 Tbsp to the cup… I even asked for a scale. I was gently scoffed at.

Dinner was again outstanding: baked winter vegetables and tofu with “Brazilian sauce.” I’ve been promised the recipe and have taken an organic rutabega hostage in case they don’t comply.

[Read part III, the big night]

For all the cooking I do, and all the thinking about cooking, I’ve never once worked in the food-service industry. I have a ton of restaurant experience, but none on the other side of the menu. So today, I started a three-day intensive cooking class at a nearby vegan restaurant.

This class provides a second opportunity: we’ll be cooking for the public. And really it is a bigger deal than even that, for this restaurant is closed during the winter except for a handful of special-event meals; my class of six student “guest chefs” will be preparing the restaurant’s Mardi Gras dinner, the one meal the restaurant will serve this month. The owner expects 70 guests, including four VIPs. No pressure!

After just one class, I now have “knife technique.” Sure, it may not be very good, but at least I have one. I also have two hand’s worth of abused knuckles and a raw spot on the side of my index finger from chopping approximately 500 vegetables. (OK, well, probably it was more like 30 vegetables. A lot, anyway.)

Tonight’s session used a learn-as-you-go format; the class offers little formal instruction but lots of hands-on experience. The chefs identified the half-dozen items that could be prepared two days before service — dressings, sauces, stock — and assigned students to each. I made 4 gallons of stock. I was working without a net, but I guess it’s hard to ruin a pot of simmering vegetables. If they ask me to make another 4 gallons tomorrow, I guess I’ll know the verdict on the first batch.

At the end of the class, we ate dinner. This was a highlight; we had a Thai carrot bisque that was among the best soups I’ve ever eaten. The story of the soup is a testament to the knowledge of an experienced chef, and the power of a good recipe: someone requested that we have soup for dinner, so the chef scribbled a recipe from memory, scaling it as she wrote, and the result — as executed by two students who had never made it before — was spectacular.

[Read part II, soup from concentrate]