Feral Feastin'

We stopped at The Big Cheese again yesterday to stock up for a cheese and "O Brother, Where Art Thou" party. But the big find was a splendid new book (only $4!) - Gourmet Cooking for Free, by Bradford Angier (1970).

Within its pages are recipes for things I can only dream about eating - animals and plants that most people haven't even seen, let alone munched on. Beaverburgers anyone?

I'll have to acquire some serious hunting skills to tackle many of these dishes:
Woodcock with cream
Roast coon
Porcupine liver
Pheasant hash
Beavertail soup
Fricasseed lynx
Crow with rice
Grouse alone can be broiled, creamed, roasted, and spitted. Oh yum! (and I mean it)

Here is one recipe to give you a taste:

Older Squirrels
... Or, particularly if you have a brace of squirrels that are among the elders of their clan, cut them into pieces. Brown these in 3 tablespoons of butter in an uncovered, large, heavy frypan.
Meanwhile, dice 1/2 dozen slices of bacon and bronze these in another pan, tipping the accumulating fat to one side so the bits can tan more deeply. Then add a diced onion, 1/4 diced green pepper, and a cup of chopped fresh mushrooms. Saute to a rich brown. Season to taste with salt, paprika, and freshly ground black pepper.
Cascade all this over the sizzling portions of squirrel. Add 3 tablespoons of flour mixed smoothly with a cup of dry sherry. Cover and simmer about an hour or until a sharp fork inserts and withdraws from a test piece of meat without binding, by which time it will whet the most jaded appetite. Serve with bountiful mashed potatoes.

I know what I'm eating for lunch tomorrow. I just have to remember to pick up a couple elderly squirrels on my way back from the Stop & Shop.



It's a real shame what's happened to cookbooks these days - they're just so tame.

A Picture

A sweet photo of Gorg, to warm your day.



It's 10 degrees where I am...

Day 3

What a bad person I am - reneging my blogger duties. I'll try to remedy that this weekend!

Thursday was finally what I would call a "good" day for our team. Not all perfect, but I walked away from class feeling optimistic for once (versus the feeling of wanting to run far, far away from Hyde Park).

We got our demo plate up precisely at 10:25, sold most of our plates in the 30 minutes of service, and were complimented by Chef ("I overheard a lady in the dining room telling her friend how delicious her mujadra was"). Yay!

I apologize for not really commenting on the food until this point - my general state of fear and nervousness, sleep deprivation and lack of appetite the first two days hardly made me want to rhapsodize about the food.

But obviously, my education and love are for food. And we're making some pretty tasty food.

I thought our dish, mujadra, was boring at first. Lentils and rice, on a pita? Carbs, carbs, and more carbs. But how delicious it is! The rice and lentils are cooked in flavorful vegetable stock, infused with lots of ginger and garlic, some chilies and allspice, onions and olive oil. The pita is soft and warm, and mounded with this mixture. Then a layer of caramelized onions, super sweet. The whole thing is topped off with a dollop of thick garlicky yogurt and spicy harissa. Mediterranean soul food at its best.

The lamb stew is another of my favorites. The vegetables vary each day - turnips, carrots, zucchini, winter squash, and others - but it's always thickened by the chickpeas that cook in the liquid. The stew is served on a bed of couscous - real couscous - ones that are first soaked, then steamed, not once or twice but three times, over top the simmering lamb. Between each round of steaming, the couscous are rubbed together by hand to separate and aerate the grains. This method (versus dumping boiling water over them and letting them drown and suffocate) produces couscous that are exceptionally fragrant, tender and light. Raisins soaked in rose water add a sweet touch to the dish.

Of the mezze, the manti are magically delicious. The ground lamb inside is mixed with lots of cooked minced onion, parsley, and mint. After cooking, the dumplings are given a quick saute with lots of butter infused with fresh mint and sage and cayenne, then served with more garlic yogurt. So good!

I wish the Bisteeya team's phyllo dough had cooperated better, because they weren't able to serve their dish every day. A real shame, I think. Bisteeya is a sweet-savory pie, made in Morocco for special occasions. When cooking for a wedding, traditionally the most valuable ingredients are put to use - pigeon, eggs, nuts, saffron, and sweet spices such as cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Our class used chicken, but it was otherwise unchanged - crisp phyllo crust with a sweet custardy middle, braised shredded chicken, toasted almonds and walnuts, warm spices and butter. The top is dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon.

After class on Thursday I spent five hours studying and prepping for the next day and completing a take-home quiz. That left me with precisely one hour of down time. I haven't looked forward to a weekend this much in a long time!

Day 2; Need Some Comfort Food

Nothing comforts like the bliss of a Townhouse cracker topped with chips of good cold butter. The cracker - crisp, buttery, and addictive; the even butterier butter - cold, slowly melting and salty. Comfort food at its most basic - at least to me. And I sure do need me some comfort food tonight!!

Class certainly wasn't worse than yesterday, but we still have a long way to go. Actually, Chef told us that among her past classes, ours showed the highest rate of improvement between Day 1 and 2. I'll take that as a compliment (they're sparse these days!), but I wonder how much worse our Day 1 was than all the others....

Once again I felt helpless, doing pitas all morning and not being able to assist Paul. But we almost were ready on time, which means we got to do a demo with Chef and have a fighting chance for a grade higher than an F. Plus, the kitchen stayed open the full half hour for service and all the food was really tasty.

I would say it can only keep getting better, but that's not true. Tonight I need to study for a quiz, research the dishes, revise my time lines and game plan, and miraculously get three times faster at everything I do - we have a monumental amount of prep tomorrow.

Pass the butter ... please!

Day One of Meds

Oh, stupid me. I spoke way too soon about Meds being simpler than I thought.

We were behind before we even walked in the kitchen, and it only got worse.

But first, an explanation.

Days 1 through 4 focus on the Middle East. There are six main dishes on this menu, with two students per dish. Another student is sous-chef (they keep everyone on task, informed, etc, and expedite during service), and another is tournant (doing extra jobs, prep, etc). The remaining five students worked on the mezze - hummus, baba ghanoush (eggplant dip), cacik (cucumber-yogurt salad), tabouleh (bulgar wheat salad), falafel, dolmas, msoura (carrot salad), and manti (delicious lamb dumplings).

The main dishes were: shrimp chelow (sauteed shrimp in a spiced sauce with Persian rice pilaf), chicken tagine, Bisteeya (chicken pie), mujadra (rustic brown rice and lentils with caramelized onions), kilic sis (grilled marinated hamachi skewers), and a lamb and pumpkin stew. All the dishes were served with rice pilaf or couscous, swiss chard, and accompanying sauces such as harissa.

Paul and I were on the vegetarian dish - mujadra. It's a peasant dish made throughout the Middle East. Rice and lentils, cooked perfectly, then seasoned and topped with caramelized onions. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, first we had to make a vegetable stock to cook the rice and lentils in, before anything else. Chard had to be washed, dried, stemmed and torn, and later sauteed to order. Lebneh (thick yogurt with olive oil and garlic) was mixed. Pita dough was made, and after rising was divided, weighed, preshaped, then rolled. The bread was baked in a 550 degree deck oven. Lima beans had to be soaked, then peeled one-by-one for frying later. Nothing difficult in the least, but getting it all done in 90 minutes with only two square feet of work space per person? A little trickier. In fact, no one was ready for demo at 10:30 - NO ONE!!! - and family meal (our lunch) simply didn't happen. The doors opened and students started ordering, and Chef hadn't even tasted our food or showed us a plating demo! Not good. In fact, the most popular dishes/teams got swamped within five minutes, and Chef closed the doors right after. As a class, we had only sold 33 plates, a pathetic third of what should have been. Two teams couldn't serve because they weren't ready in time, or their food wasn't right.

And no one kept up on their dirty dishes or cleaned the kitchen fast enough. But tomorrow should hopefully be a little better, since we all know the layout of the kitchen (walking into a new kitchen blind on the first day is bad enough), we know our dishes and have a better grasp of the timing and how things are done, and we'll be more mentally prepared. Then again, Chef has been known to mix it up a little by randomly switching everyone to a new dish....
Not tomorrow, please!

Today there were 19 in our class. We'll see about tomorrow.
Oh, and 16 out of 19 failed for the day.

Tomorrow

Well, tomorrow is the start of Cuisines of Europe and the Mediterranean. Like everyone at school, I will hereafter refer to it simply as "Meds" - which makes no sense to me but is a whole lot less of a mouthful.

I've had to do a daunting amount of studying and planning prior to Day 1, and I'm a little worried. I keep reminding myself that this isn't Meadowood, and take a deep breath and calm down. But the multitudes of prep lists, ingredient and equipment lists, timelines and study questions and station diagrams is enough to make me want to go back to Baking. Of course I always worry too much, and everything will be just fine. Although, maybe I shouldn't say that just yet...

In other news, Keith and James and I drove down to Rockland (almost New Jersey) to witness an amazing commercial bakery, one that simply hands you plastic gloves and a paper bag and sets you loose on the production floor to bag bagels right off the conveyor belts. I abstained - it's much too soon after Baking - but it was pretty tempting. I've never seen so many types of breads, so many carts and baskets of bagels and loaves and pastries, so cheap by the pound!

And then we went to an awesome kosher deli, where we all devoured hot corned beef and pastrami on rye with coleslaw and Russian dressing, and many dill pickles on the side. You can't beat that.

Introducing...Iris!

Iris is my first and favorite cow, and the sweetheart of our cow family. Actually, right now she is the only bovine on our property. But I plan to remedy that this summer....

We bought her in June 2003 when I had just turned 14, from the Wechslers of Samish Bay Cheese.

She gave birth to Mo that January, but had such an atrocious time calving that we never bred her back. This would be enough for most dairy farmers to send a cow straight to slaughter, but I kept milking her for another four years. And after that, she raised a calf.

A cow needs to be milked every twelve hours, every single day. That first year I woke up at five-something each morning to milk her before school. And come 6 PM, no matter where I was, I would have to rush home to milk again. Every single day! Such is the life of a milk maid - slave to the cow.


(winter coat)

After the first year I met Charlene, who was willing to milk Iris in exchange for milk. This made our lives so much easier! All through high school Charlene milked every school morning, while I did the evening milkings. Eventually I switched to once-a-day milking, which made things even simpler, although it also meant less milk. So of course, I turned around and bought another cow (Lil), and we were right back to that 12-hour schedule!

Other cows and steers have come and gone, but Iris still roams the pastures of Fort Bantam. She is now milk-free and retired, but currently living the good life and enjoying a midlife career change - horse baby sitter.

I have to say - Lil's milk was mighty fine, and raw milk from other farms is quite tasty - but nothing will ever come close to Iris's milk - creamy and sweet and luscious - simply incomparable.

And isn't she cute?