Day 32

Oh my god, rachel ray is on tv right now and is drilling holes in my ear with her diarrhea of the mouth. But today in school I made delicious swordfish.


We made a minestrone cut soup first this morning but I didn't photo it. It was just veg soup, people. It was a clean out of the veg drawer but with nicely layered flavors and some garbanzos. I didn't use pasta in mine although most of the class did. I don't like when you open the fridge the day after and the pasta has eaten all of the broth and become mammoth. It turns alien in size and falls to mush upon reheating. I don't enjoy this. But I did enjoy my swordfish.


This is marinating in garlic, parsley, oregano, lemon zest and juice, olive oil and capers. It sat in the marinade for about 20 minutes and then got a dose of salt and pepper before heading onto a hot grill. I did my best to make lovely diamond patterns on it.

It had a little rest after grilling while I finished my risotto. It was a fennel risotto, started with onion and large dice fennel. I used veggie stock and when I finished it I added fennel powder to the Parmesan. Its good. It served as a base for the grilled swordfish.

Isn't it nice looking? I thought so. Chef asked us to plate it in this manner. I would have liked to stir some fresh herb into the risotto at the end. Parsley or tarragon maybe? I might try it at home. We then made grilled steak Florentine. Big grilled meat with a topping of parsley, Parmesan, lemon, and olive oil.

Big steak. I think the grill could have been a little hotter. Its fine though. I didn't really eat much of it anyway. Especially with the thought of tomorrows dish: osso buco. Love it...but for lunch? Its a lot. Whatever. Maybe we'll have wine with it and that makes all manner of protein suitable at any time of day. That's official, you know.

Day 31

Welcome to Italy! We are with a guest instructor today learning some hand made pasta recipes. We start with dough. We made egg pasta and semolina pasta. Later we made gnocchi dough.


We let our dough rest while we made sauces and prepped what would eventually be lunch. We picked basil from our plants outside and cleaned it up. Okay that is a benefit of our
hot weather, we have basil almost year round.


We had such a pretty assortment of colors. We made a pesto from this with pistachios instead of pine nuts. We made filling for ravioli too. It was just ricotta, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and Parmesan cheese to taste. It made a lovely filling.


Yes, they were big. Not huge but like small sombreros almost as big as my palm. I ate two leftover cold this morning. Gross? Hell, no. They were great. And the texture of the pasta was fantastic. We used the egg pasta for the ravioli. We cut paperadelle and some fettuccine from the egg pasta also. The cut pasta was to be tossed with a simple meat and tomato sauce that we simmered while cutting shapes.

Nope, still can't figure out how to rotate pictures. If you can, let me know.
We made little ear shaped pasta with the semolina pasta. I can't spell it, but it might be orcheiette. or not. We treated it the same way we did our potato gnocchi. We tossed it in browned butter with some fresh sage leaves. That was grub.

Pasta day was all hands on. I can see, however, that this is something that you could do for the next 30 years and still be figuring it out. I might make it more often. Maybe. For sure if someone else wants to clean up my kitchen afterwards.
Tomorrow: Italian style grilling, a risotto, and minestrone.

Day 30

Sushi day! I have made sushi before with my cousin on one adventurous day. It wasn't hard. Just takes obvious practice. I'm talking about rolls though here. Not perfectly sliced fish with a knife that could take off your scalp like in the kill bill movie. I made rolls. We did start with baking some salmon skin until cooked and slightly crispy.


We made a huge batch of sushi rice, seasoning it with the usual vinegar/sugar mixture and keeping it covered so that it won't dry out. We started prepping all the ingredients for rolling.


Isn't this amazing. I love the color. That is not me cutting it. I avoided the uber sharp knife cutting expensive fish. The instructor was cutting this down. Some went to nigiri sushi, some to sashimi, some to a poke dish, and some to spicy tuna. A poke is a Hawaiian dish of diced fish, with sea salt, ogo seaweed, ponzu, chili paste, sesame oil, scallions and masago. Its great and in some asian markets they sell seasoning packets for it. You just dice tuna and stir in seasoning. Poke is fun.

This is the scraping of the tuna meat off of the silver skin that runs all through it. You use the scraped off meat for spicy tuna mixture. That is also not me with the little finger condom on. I did not have injuries this week. Yea me.

So some of our rolls were spicy tuna, poke, salmon skin, crunchy (shrimp tempura), eel, salmon, california and vegetarian. We also made a lightly marinated cucumber salad with thinly sliced octopus and some edamame. The colors on the platters were lovely.

Lunch could have been better with some big kirin lights and some sake. Well, next week is Italy. I will be puffy and full from all the carbs I am sure. If it wasn't still hitting 90 degrees I could hide in sweaters like the rest of the country. Fucking California sunshine.

Day 29

Today was our last day in Asia with Chef. Tomorrow we have a guest chef for sushi. So today I think was like Chef's version of movie day. Normally he is very specific about what exactly he wants to see in our recipes and on our plate. Today I made veg (clean out the walk in fridge) stir fry.
I love making veg stir fries so this was not in any way bad. It was just out of character for him. I used fennel, onion, carrot ribbons, garlic, ginger, baby corn, cabbage, and wood ear mushrooms. I sauced it with some salt, sugar and vegetarian stir fry sauce. The sauce sort of sucked right out of the bottle but mixed in the veggies it was okay. I just don't like bottled sauces, really. We also made a version of fried rice. I make this at home too, to get rid of leftovers. I don't think I have ever made uncle ben's rice at home so making fried rice out of it was a little weird. I would not do it again.
People liked it though. It wasn't bad. I just don't like that creepy uncle ben with his shitty processed rice. Who is he anyway?


Miso soup is a no brainer, right? We made ours without dashi (bonito/kombu) stock. Its still great although a little less complex. You boil or simmer water. Whisk in miso, add scallion, wakame seaweed, and tofu at the end. Breakfast is served. Next we made steamed seabass over Chinese egg noodles, zucchini and a beurre blanc of our choice. We were suprisingly free to set this up as we pleased. I set to work on my lemongrass beurre blanc. I made the usual wine reduction with smashed lemongrass added to my shallot, pepper and wine. After whisking in my cubed butter, I strained the whole sauce and adjusted the seasoning. Before plating I added finely chopped cilantro for color, freshness and texture. I liked it but I liked my classmate's sauce better. She did ginger garlic in her reduction and chives at finish. The ginger garlic had a sweetness that I liked. I steamed my seabass with salt, pepper, and sweet curry powder. It took on a lovely light yellow color (I guess from the tumeric). I burnt my fingertips many many times feeling up the fish to check for doneness. I realized later that a toothpick would have worked fine. Duh. So Chef boiled and then shocked the noodles that we were to serve between our sauce and fish. We were to plate and serve them as we saw fit along with some cooked julienned zucchini. I thought about how I like to eat egg noodles...crispy. Why couldn't I fry them until crispy like they serve them at all manner of Chinese restaurants? Naive? Of course. I cut my zucchini into long strips and tossed them with my noodles and heated some oil in a small teflon pan. I dropped my mix into the pan and pressed it together hoping that it would form into some sort of cake like disc that I could crisp up and serve fish on top of. No sooner had I dropped the mixture into the pan then I hear behind me "so Jennifer, what are you planning to do with that?" Like I really knew. So now all of class is looking at my pan and skeptically evaluating their own little plans for serving noodles. He thought it would probably not work without some sort of binding, like eggs. I just left it there until the edges were crispy and with prayers sent out flipped the noodle cake over. It stuck together but browned unevenly. I was pleased. I finished crisping the second side and dropped the sauce onto the plate, followed by a drained cake, and the steamed sea bass.

It looks a little yellow/beige for my taste but it was good. I was picking at the crispy noodle edges immediately after Chef looked it over and tasted it. He was really pleased. He said to remember the dish for my final or for when we stage our restaurant later in our schooling. Hmph. Everyone else had boring piles of bland noodles with limp zucchini under plain white fish. Yes, I felt superior. Don't worry. It did not last long. You can see in the pic that the edges browned uneven. Chef didn't like the crispy part. He said with a scowl "it's hard". I blame that difference of opinion on his being French. Tomorrow: Sushi...

Look at that rainbow parade! Where's a pride party when you need one?

Day 28

Malaysian Coconut Beef. Its some of the same flavors as earlier curries this week but thickened with an unsweetened coconut galangal lemongrass garlic chile paste that we made. The sauce is great. Beef, meh. I just don't really do well cooked beef. It takes too much chewing. The sauce was kafir lime, coconut milk, and tamarind juice.

Serve, again, over rice. Next we made we made chicken soup. Tom Yan Goong. Thai style chicken soup. So good and comforting. We simmered lime leaves, galangal and lemongrass in chicken broth for 15 minutes to infuse the flavors, strained, and then returned to a simmer. In to the stock went pieces of shrimp, enoki mushrooms, a Thai green chile, cilantro leaf, lime juice and fish sauce. Lots of fish sauce.


It was strong and delicious. I don't ever order this at Thai restaurants. I will have to try it at my favorite place. It should definitely be made at home too. Its simple as long as you can find the ingredients. It helps to have solid homemade chicken stock on hand as well.
Next dish was another Indian chicken dish. This one was shorter on ingredients but had an interesting technique of using a cooked, pureed onion to season and and add body to the sauce. It gets added after the spices but before the chicken and yogurt. It also gets a pinch of saffron for color. Its not my favorite, but it was good over basmati rice for lunch. I hope to pawn it off to the family tonight. See the black specks in it? Those are cardamom seeds. At home I have only used pods, which I like to remove. The seeds are really strong in flavor and overwhelm my mouth often. I would substitute pods if I made it again. But I doubt I will. Meh.

But lets talk about deep frying now, shall we? I don't deep fry at home for all manner of reasons having to do mostly with cleanliness. But I will make a mess in other people's kitchens no problem. So today we made Filipino lumpiang. They are an egg roll sort of situation. This version used equal parts shrimp and pork, water chestnuts, green onions, egg, and soy sauce. You roll em up into small cigars and fry. Mine were large cigars as you can see. I don't have that small nimble rolling thing down quite yet.

You fry for them for about 5 minutes and then burn the fuck out of your mouth while trying to eat them before they cool down enough to handle. We made a funky dipping sauce of ketchup and sugar, water and Tabasco. It was really sweet so we upped the spice to try to balance it. It was tasty with the lumpiang. Are homemade deep fried crispy egg rolls ever not tasty?

If you said no go fuck yourself. They are of course good. And afterwards your stomach expands and you feel sleepy for a good few hours. I have leftover filling that I am going to use with wonton wrappers tonight. I will not be making ketchup sauce.

Tomorrow? Chef says we will eat the best fried rice of our life. I am of course skeptical. I'll let you know. We also are making my favorite Thai soup: chicken with coconut milk. MMMmmm.

Day 27

So we started our morning with a yogurt chicken curry situation. It was a fabulous situation actually. It has a list of ingredients like 2 pages long so here is a summary: chicken, aromatics, spice mixture including, cinnamon, clove, bay leaf, cardamom, and nutmeg, garam masala, cilantro and nut paste to thicken and stabilize. You simmer chicken until cooked really. We ate it with rice and it was fine.

Its something I might make again, if I was craving Indian foods and not interested in the old standards like tikka masala. I tend to always make daal (yellow split peas) and eggplant (benghan bharta) so this was a nice change up. The spices were really tasty.

We then made the lamb balls. We made little 1/2 ounce meatballs of lamb and seasoned them with jalapeno, ginger, cilantro, garlic, cloves, and mace. They get fried and please reserve your balls for later. The sauce was tomato and yogurt based and also utilized the nut paste made earlier. Once sauce is simmering, return balls, and simmer long enough to cook through. No Pink Balls, please!

The little balls get a minty finish and served over rice. Try not to love my balls!

Wonton soup was our last dish of the day. It was an easy simmered soup that had snow peas, black ear mushrooms, shitakes, and chicken stock. The wonton filling was long on ingredients but quick to make. It had shrimp, chicken, water chestnuts, oyster sauce, sugar, Chinese wine, egg, cornstarch, and soy sauce. Wrap them up and drop them in simmering soup to cook in about 3 minutes. They are great pan fried too. I have leftover filling and will probably make some more tonight for dinner.

I can't seem to get enough dumplings in my life. We are doing another one tomorrow: Lumpiang. Its the Filipino egg roll.

Day 26

Asia is quite a bit of land to cover, you know? So we hit up some main flavor combos and cooking techniques. First we deep fried beef. If you don't like fried beef for breakfast, get over yourself. It was great. Real fortifying like. We marinated our meat in rice wine and then just deep fried it in oil. After that it just gets tossed with garlic, coarse ground black pepper, oyster sauce, soy, szechwan peppercorns, and sesame oil. Serve over iceberg lettuce. I balanced out my meal by eating extra lettuce. I know it helped. I am sure.

It was super good. I just can't be bothered to deep fry at home due to the whole spattering and disposal of oil situation. Next we made wontons. A basic pork, ginger wonton that we boiled and served with a fragrant dipping sauce that had chile oil and cinnamon in it. I tried folding them all sorts of ways but I do not yet have the nimble fingers of an old Chinese lady.


The wontons were good. Not as good as some we will make later this week. We also pan fried and deep fried some just to taste the difference.
Our next dish was mango pork curry. I guess its Burmese. It was my favorite dish of the day. The sweet and velvety mango and spicy savory meat are a killer combo. You sweat your aromatics (onion, garlic, ginger, chile flakes) and then drop in the raw cubed pork, mango slices, and a small amount of water to coax the mango into puree. This simmers for about 15 minutes and then you can serve it over rice. The color is much nicer in person. I would have really enjoyed eating this as leftovers but someone beat me to it.

Next time I will hide it in an old yogurt container or in the cheese drawer.

Our last dish was an eggplant salad dish. I usually like any eggplant preparation, especially when it starts with roasting an eggplant until super tender. These were scored and seasoned and drizzled with a little peanut oil before roasting.

We took them out of the skin carefully and mixed the loosely chopped flesh with peanuts, onion, garlic oil, cilantro, red chile, and fish sauce. I was too full to eat it then but it made an amazing breakfast the next morning on toasted pita bread.

Isn't it nice all tucked back into its shell? I like it. And it tastes fresh and delicious. Please note that this is one of the ONLY non meat dishes we have ever made in school. I asked chef if we would be doing any more veg this week and he said "Why? Are you on a diet? Huh!" Please say it with a French accent and make the Huh almost a snort.

Tomorrow: Sauteed balls of lamb. Lets see how many balls jokes can be made in one day. Yes, I am maybe 12.