Superior Pictures

Here are some pictures of the dishes I have made in Superior (or at least the ones that I remember to take pictures of before the tasting)

Veal Tenderloin with Polenta and Stuffed Artichokes

Herb Crusted Salmon with Mushroom flan and parsley root with a Madeira jus

Studded Monkfish with eggplant biyaldi

Beef tenderloin with mashed potato cakes, poached pears, and a pepper sauce

Friends with Blogs Part 2

In my second installment of Friends with Blogs, I would like to direct your attention to two new (but super awesome) friends with blogs.  These are different blogs because they both include pastry!

The first blog is by one of my friends who is at LCB for cuisine AND pastry. Talk about a busy schedule!

Anyways, she is American and much better about posting, so I would definitely check out her blog at https://uhohparis.wordpress.com/ if you want to hear about our course on a more consistent and well done basis.

The second blog is by a friend who is just doing pastry. She has also traveled quite a bit (or at least more than me!) and has some pretty pictures from those trips. PLUS, she's pastry, so her pictures look amazing and very sweet.

She's also American and better at posting than yours truly. Here is hers! http://cateinparis.tumblr.com/.

Enjoy!

Great article about Squirrels

So, I came across this article a little while back as the author recently won a James Beard Award for it. While I was just perusing it, by about page 3 (it is six pages and a little bit of a commitment to read through) I was engrossed.

As someone who grew up with squirrels in the attic, planning their demise as they ran around my walls as I tried to sleep, I sympathize with this man. As someone who gets excited about terrines and making food out of whatever is available, I find it an interesting take.

Anyways, read the article and let me know what you think!

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/why-eating-squirrels-makes-sense/Content?oid=7215952&storyPage=1

Le Deuxieme Atelier

So, I left you at "Finesse"

Let's pick up with this Atelier's guidelines:

The Must-Use Ingredients:

1 Sea Bass
1 Veal Tenderloin
250g Spinach
1/4 bunch Green Asparagus
4 Mini Turnips
4 Poivrade Artichokes


So, as you can see, much less than the amount of Musts for the first Atelier.

Other ingredients included: 4 slices of pancetta, 30g ginger, 2 lemons, 4 cherry tomatoes, 1 leek, 1 carrot, 1 onion, 2 shallots, 1/2 head of garlic, tarragon, basil, parsley, veal stock, chicken stock, white and red wines, Vermouth, Port, spices, rice, soy sauce, phyllo, gelatin, pistachios.

The guidelines:

1. A warm entree
2. There must be a julienne on the entree
3. The veal tenderloin must be stuffed
4. The main must have a sauce or jus
5. The garnishes: 1 dough based garnish for a vegetable, 1 good puree, 1 vegetable glazed brown

The same no-nos still applied that I listed for the first Atelier.

My menu:
Entree: Sea bass in two ways- poached and seared with a spinach puree and julienne pancetta.

First, I fileted the fish, using the bones to make a stock. I also confit garlic which I added to the finished and strained stock. I reduced that down together to make my poaching liquid, which I poached part of the fish in and then reduced down adding whipped cream at the last minute. I julienned the pancetta and dried it in the oven (looking back, it would have probably been nicer to just sweat it at the last minute on the stove top). I sauteed shallots, carrot, and pistachios- deglazed with vermouth and puree-d that with quickly sauteed spinach. At the last minute, I pan seared part of the fish.

(This is a terrible picture, but you get the idea)

The Chef's comments:

Well, this is kinda different. So, I planned my menu out with the idea in mind that we would have one of the three chef's in charge of the course at the atelier. Something must of happened because we got the young, Japanese chef, who only works at the school occasionally. While a nice guy, amazing chef, and great teacher, he is also young and super modern. Not what I was expecting.

I was hoping to show the chef that I could improve and really plate with "finesse." To do this, I kept it simple and focused on doing it well. Instead, I got told that everything was boring and too simple.

My fish was also like a minute over-cooked and he thought there was too much spinach puree on the plate. However, he did tell me a better way to pan-fry the fish, which ensures perfect cooking.

Now the Main:

Veal tenderloin stuffed with lemon/basil rice and green asparagus, turnip puree with candied lemon peel, artichokes glazed brown, and basil crepes stuffed with confit shallots and asparagus tips.

Chef's comments:

Well, first, the meat is over-cooked on one side and under-cooked on the other. Great. But, it's because I didn't rotate the meat every 5-6 minutes- something I will never forget to do again! The artichokes needed to be glazed more brown, and my puree came out too liquidy, so I had to dry it out which made it too salty and therefore really bizarre with sweet lemon peel. No problems at all with my crepes.

However, it was all BORING and too SIMPLE. 

Oh well.

In the end, I learned quite a bit and can only keep getting better from here. Hopefully for the next Atelier, aka THE FINAL, I will be able to intertwine finesse with NOT boring/simple and perfectly cooked meat.

Here's to hoping!

Le Premier Atelier

Atelier in French means "workshop" and here in Superior Cuisine, we are given (told we must?) the opportunity to create and cook our own menus for a grade.

However, there are some rules.

1. A la Chopped or Top Chef or whatever, we are given a list of ingredients and we can ONLY use ingredients from this list for our Atelier. 
2. Some of these items are marked with an * and MUST be used in one of the two dishes
3. There are some components that must be completed for each dish.

I'll give examples starting with the first Atelier. For the first one, we were given a list of ingredients with the following ingredients marked by an *:

1 Lamb Rack
1 Lamb Neck
1 Sea Bream
4 Jumbo Shrimp
150g Cultivated Mushrooms
250g Fingerling Potatoes
350g Peas
1/2 bunch of White Asparagus
1/4 bunch of Cilantro
1 Zucchini

Other ingredients not marked by asterics were 2 tomatoes, 1 carrot, 1 celery stalk, 1/2 head of garlic, 2 shallots, 1 onion, 1 leek, parsley, chervil, 1 red bell pepper, milk, eggs, breadcrumbs, veal stock, fish stock, Gruyere, Parmesan, butter, red wine, white wine, Madeira, Cognac, Port, assortment of spices, flour, tomato paste, pine nuts, honey, yeast.

Our guidelines (#3) were:

1. The entree must have a brunoise
2. The main dish must include a forcemeat/stuffing
3. The main dish must include a sauce or jus
4. The main dish must include the following garnishes: 1 flan, 1 composed garnish with 3 ingredients and "gratinee", and 1 turned vegetable
5. You must plate 2 servings of the entree and 2 servings of the main

There are some other "no-no's" that we are not allowed to do. Namely, no reductions of balsamic vinegar, no use of vacuum sealed bags or the vacuum sealer machine, no outside dishes or pieces for serving. We have 5 hours to complete both dishes.

So, the menu I devised from these rules was as follows. (Sorry- I totally spaced and forgot to take pictures)

Entree: Sea bream croquettes with a red pepper brunoise, pan seared shrimp, and a roasted red pepper mayonnaise.

Main: Lamb rack stuffed with braised lamb neck, peas, pine nuts, Tandoori spices, honey, cilantro; tomato flan with suspended peas; zucchini, mushroom, lamb neck composed garnish au gratin.

The result?

Well, I ended up making the croquettes too big so they weren't fully cooked in the middle. Oh well! Next time I know to not make them quite so big. The roasted red pepper mayonnaise? Now that is a funny story.

So, anyone who knows me, knows that I love mayonnaise. When I eat most sandwhiches, I order a side of mayo or as my brother calls it, "Elyssa's Dipping Mayo." Because yes, I dip my sandwiches in the mayo- just for that extra flavor.

I can therefore obviously make mayonnaise. Or so I thought. You may have noticed on that list of ingredients that I gave you that there was no mustard listed. Now, I knew that it was possible to make mayo without mustard- I had just never done it. What I didn't find out until later is that while it is possible, the mustard is the stabalizer for the emulsion- without it, you need a drop of water or something to start the emusifying process.

Well, I get in there and I've got my egg yolks, dash of vinegar, salt and pepper, and I'm slowly adding oil and whisking and NOTHING. It is a liquidy-runny mess. Not mayonnaise.

I panic. Start over. Then I start again. And a third time. By now, I'm whispering at my friends around me asking for their advice or help. They can't really help me. And keep asking things like, "2 egg yolks?" "Did you add too much vinegar?" And while nice, not super helpful.

Finally, the chef walks over and because he knows me from working at Omnivore, can tell I'm having a minor panic attack. He asks me if I'm okay, what I'm trying to do, and if I know how to make mayonnaise. He then decides to help me by slowly pouring the oil while I whisk.

Well, that ended up working well enough and tasting fine (especially when I whisked in the roasted bits of red pepper), but I was not expecting the most stressful part of my day to be the mayonnaise.

Now, the main.

Well, my lamb neck stuffing was amazing if I do say so myself (and I do). My tomato flan, loved it. It had peas suspended in it and tasted very good. My gratin dish, delicious.

As the chef said, everything tasted great- it was just the way it looked.

Here's what happened. Apparently I did not take enough fat off of the wrap around the lamb making it pull apart in the cooking and why it wasn't a perfect circle at serving.

And then, there was the problem of not having enough time. See, we have to plate at a specific time and I was running literally one minute late, throwing every part of the dish on the plate, including the sauce and it just looked a bit messy. Plus, the lamb was a little under-done.

So, my main advice from the chef: More finesse. Everything was good, but lacked "finesse."

So for the next atelier, I focused a whole lot on Finesse. I'll let you know how that went tomorrow.

Interview Video

In case you were wondering what school looks like/where I cook day in and day out, you can watch this video!

Plus, about 1 min in, you will can see the interviews with the two chefs in charge of my final course here at LCB and get to know them a little bit.

If you understand French, you can learn something about molecular cuisine!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEeS8ekH46k