So I'm in this squalid little cell known as the "Internet Room" just catching up on news and checking up on some of my fav message boards and I realized that it's almost my civic duty to update this webpage that most likely only one crazed stalker reads... but hey, still gotta do it.
Right now I'm cooking out in Lake Louise at the Chateau Lake Louise with some people I've not worked with in a long time. Took a lot of pictures so far (of boring nature, of course) but I can't upload them because I'm too cheap to pay for wireless internet. Oh well, in any case I'll try and update this site a little more again, maybe add some kickass recipes.
There's been something I've been wanting to vent for a little while but never got to around it (clearly I'm too busy working on my thesis). There are two shows I occasionally find time to watch when I visit my parents, Chef School and Fink. Both are in some ways very similar, they both talk about people in food and students. In many ways both groups are given tremendous opportunities that mere mortals don't normally get. With my temperament as it is these days I get really pissed off when people decide to throw away opportunities or squander them.
Having started at a relatively "mature" age I can only imagine what could happen if I went through something similar. On the other hand I am what I am going to be and they are what they're going to be. Having had a relatively false start with regards to my career choice all I can say is that it's tough to find what you want to do... most people in fact don't or simply can't. Perhaps I should count myself lucky that I will be able to do it, and I do. Oh well, enough with the speculation, let's get cooking.
Got back from Sydney and I picked up some great tips and met some excellent people. Since I plan on graduating soon I've still yet to determine where I'll be and when. I'd post some of the recipes I tried out if only somebody sent them to me. Oh well, they'll come sooner or later.
I'm heading out to Sydney tomorrow but usually with these things I can't get decent sleep and my mind is churning with random thoughts. So I'm not going to fight and I'll just type what I've been thinking. Of course, this being a food and restaurant related site it's exactly what I'm going to write about.
Went to a buffet today and I had a bit of an epiphany (with a little help from the driver in the car) that buffets are simply not worth it, with few exceptions. Too often we have mountains of food messily prepared and with not enough care coupled with ingredients that seem none too fresh. Stale lobster, tipping point sushi fish, cheap nasty substitutes are the order of the day and it's starting to be sickening. Are we such gluttons that we favour endless piles of crap over a satisfying amount of food that is lovingly prepared? I surely hope not... we're not suffering from a famine and we're not bears in need of a smorgasbord to survive the winter hibernation.
Let's think about the way we eat, eat smart, eat well, eat with relish. Thanks for listening.
As you may have noticed I decided to add some different content in the section "Life on the Line", mainly the addition of some photos of my cooking. I figure there's only so many ways I can describe myself working and getting drunk so here's something new. Unfortunately most of these weren't created with a solid recipe in mind, so if you want to know how I made them you'll need to contact me personally.
James Barber, a.k.a. The Urban Peasant has passed away. I remember being a huge fan of his show back on CBC and it was a lot of fun just watching him just tear the kitchen apart. Although now that I recall that some of his recipes were sketchy I always found him a great entertainer and caught his show pretty religiously. Tonight I light a Kwanzaa Kake in his honour.
Working in a restaurant or even dining out often with company has the effect of lowering my faith in the collective tolerance and worthiness of humanity (and diners in particular). The mentality of the average diner is often one that resembles an scorned in-law with an agenda: Find things wrong with the experience and continue picking at it until either you feel like you're positive you were participating in the great restaurant Holocaust or the entire staff of the restaurant kicked your baby into the deep end of a freezing lake.
I've worked with stupid, careless, clumsy, insane, and vapid waitstaff but never one who was malicious. Look at their hang-dog look and tell me that they're out to personally get you, ruin your career and drown your kittens. The people you should really be looking out for are the cooks... but you can't really avoid them, can you?
Although it doesn't look like I've been updating content much (okay, I admit that I haven't done it as much as I used to) but I promise that there have been new recipes, restaurant "reviews" and other stuff. Also looking for a front or back of house job, so if you got anything give me a beep.
If I were to use the local newspaper's weekly restaurant reviews to gauge the style and number of new restaurants in the area, then maybe I should just stick to eating home every night of the week. There isn't much in the way of mid-priced restaurants (I'm going by main courses in the low twenties on average) that doesn't seem to just do the tried and true American-Italiana, pseudo-generic uninspired cuisine of meat, veg, and starch.
Perhaps people just don't like eating "those new fangled stuff" here, or think it's all frou-frou and shit... but I have a dream, and it is that one day we will eat something new and interesting in this town, apart from all the usual cheap-and cheerful sushi, awful dim sum (with the exception of Cameron), steak houses, wings, pre-frozen bar food, and chicken on pasta that seems to permeate this place. Or maybe people in "Intelligent Communities" just don't like to eat well.
It's been fun, painful, exciting, dull, and whatever silly little adjectives I wish to jam into this entry. Twelve days from now I will no longer be an employee at the Huether Hotel and I will be back to being a pleb, plying my trade and doing lazy grad student stuff. To my sous chef I wish to offer my regrets that I will not be staying as long as I had initially claimed: It has been an honour to work for and work with you.
To everybody else I hope to see you even though I won't be hanging around in the kitchen and I'll always be proud and pleased to cook for and with you.
Even the willow snaps when pushed by the most unforgiving winds... and I certainly lack the patience to be a willow.
Let's face it, if you're an employee, you probably think the owners and their "bright ideas" are completely asinine and are lacking in intelligence while if you're the employer you probably think the same of your staff. Speaking as the forementioned, perhaps something that's bothered me a lot recently is the directive that apparently we aren't allowed to drink beverages (including water) on line, because apparently it may "disturb" the customers.
Oh, I'm sorry if I'm going to dehydrate and faint in the middle of service because it's really hot and we're all sweating like pigs. Pity the customer who must be disturbed at the sight of that. I've seen more expensive and "better" places who've allowed people to drink water. Perhaps in the future we shouldn't breathe or talk because it upsets the customers.
I'm only Human, and with that comes all the foibles of Humanity. I feel like I'm being worn down into a nub and I don't know why... I'm riding solely on inertia these days to get things done, even to write this post. Well, let's hope I can ride out the summer... and it's already getting pretty warm outside.
I got a tip direct from a customer yesterday, which I have to admit was oddly gratifying. It came from a cafe order at around 12:30 am and we were all tired from working and cleaning. I guess I either made a really good sandwich or they really felt bad for ordering food at that time of night because I got a buck fifty from the cafe girl who told me that the customer wanted the tip to go to the cook.
I'll admit I didn't do the whole thing myself (someone did toast the bread), so I'll share it with the other cook.
With the demand to have what you want for less money, many bakeries resort to using butter substitutes in their baked goods. From puff pastry to croissant dough to danishes, artificial butter can be used in lieu of real butter to give a puffy and layered look to your baked goods. However, there are several ways of telling that your baked good is made with fake butter:
Ways of telling you've been given the switch and bait with fake butter:
a) Baked goods made with butter generally have a crisper texture. Bite into a croissant made with butter versus one made with imitation butter... feel the difference.
b) Baked goods made with butter TASTE like butter (and not the artificial movie popcorn kind)... yummy.
c) Baked goods made with butter smell more fragrant and more like butter (again, if you smell the movie theatre, you're not smelling butter).
d) Baked goods made with butter are more expensive, butter costs more than the imitation, so obviously costs are higher. If they're trying to pull the wool over your eyes, refer to points a, b and c to confirm. So don't be cheap! Pay a little more for deliciousness.
With these four simple guidelines you too can enjoy the pleasures of REAL butter. Throw away that soggy vegetable fat-laden piece of crap and BUTTER it up.
There's normally this strange schism between the customer, waitstaff, and cooks that seem to really rear its ugly head when people post lists of annoying customer or annoying server habits. Well, I'm going to vent as well. I'll admit that I've perpetrated various behaviours that would constitute a "bad" customer, server, and cook, so this doesn't put me off the hook.
Things I don't like doing or just plain dislike:
a) dividing a dish into two+ individual dishes: First of all, most people can't properly portion a dish into two equal and smaller plates and usually gives more or less than the original amount. Secondly, the presentation is ruined. Thirdly, what's so bad about just giving you two smaller plates so you can portion what you want off the main plate and then you two can pick off however much food you want? Fourthly, it slows down the line.
b) don't come walking in like you're the Queen/King/Hermaphroditic Royalty of Asia and make stupid requests, such as randomly deciding to have your pan seared fish steamed, or to have your tomato soup with no tomato. Unless you're ordering at Swiss Chalet or McDonald's, sometimes dishes are portioned and set up so that there is a limited supply. Secondly, you can't remove elements from certain dishes, like potatoes from a shepherd's pie. Thirdly, unless you're allergic or have post traumatic stress syndrome from certain ingredients, try it out, you might like it. Finally, there are other dishes on the menu... (unless you're going to a tasting-menu only place) if you don't like all the elements on one choice, choose something else. In essence, don't be such a control freak!
c) don't declare that you have an allergy to a food if you have an aversion. I won't spitefully put the item on it to trick you (I haven't gone to become quite so petty), I won't come out of the kitchen screaming at you. If you really had an allergy, I'd use up valuable time and resources to make very certain tools and items are clean to cook and serve for you, time I could be using doing other things so other people don't get upset.
To be continued...
The dinner went relatively well, I got all of my prep done, the food was (mostly) well received (damn you, Shawn Henderson and your incessant pickiness... just kidding, of course *wink*) and no one died of food poisoning, although due to space and cooking equipment issues (that being four burners and a toaster oven), some people had to wait a long time for their food. For that I apologize and I'll try even harder to get everything nice, hot, and on time next dinner.
With regards to personal musings, although I'm not a restaurant veteran by any stretch of the imagination, I think a good idea to keep my toes in the culinary world and not have my skills deteriorate would be to operate a small-scale catering business. Of course, with any business there are a tremendous amount of factors to keep in mind (liability, fees, ingredient sourcing, taxes, insurace, employees, customers, marketing, etc.), I think it's worth trying. However, right now I'm still in the daydreaming phase so I'll be content to simply thing of a catchy name, a logo, and a prototype web site. Hope to feed you soon.
So I decided to hold a "dinner party" for some friends and I have a decently ambitious menu set up and managed to recruit my friends to help. I'll post all the gory details afterwards and share some of my food ideas and recipes, though I guess I should really start working on some of the early prep... so far I got the tarragon-infused oil down, and I still have to do the salad vinaigrette, stock, pot de creme, soup, gnocchi, and chocolate coffee ganache prior to the day of the food... oh, and order the main proteins as well.
Valentine's day passed and it's interesting to analyze how more complex dishes change the nature of a service night. Since the dishes had more components than the usual ones we serve, it was interesting to note how service time, plating procedures, etc. were affected in such cramped quarters. Nonetheless, we put out a good service and it was a decent night (although most likely less busy than last Valentine's day).
Addendum: Greenlandic-Chinese food? Sign me up for some!
It's a Friday night, I'm not working and wow, do I feel bored. I'm working on my splines assignment, but it's not particularly thrilling and I have no big plans but to maybe drink with the restaurant folk after hours... odd how my life revolves around the restaurant, the scant people I known in town and school.
Business at the restaurant has been relatively slow lately, which leaves me with some serious doubts in my head: Am I contributing to this slow turn of business because of my bad cooking, or is this just a result of various random factors outside of my control? Whatever it is, even though I'm neither the chef nor the owner I feel somewhat guilty that the situation is what it is. It feels like I'm presiding over the death throes of a restaurant as it steadily declines towards mediocrity and below. Perhaps it's best not to think too hard about it and to keep doing what I've been trying to do, make good food and make it without compromise of speed.
Let's hope that I have more times to write about some of the places I've been eating at and some of the things I've been cooking, it's been a busy few months and I wasn't in the mood to write anything new and creative. Perhaps the juices will refresh and I'll have some brilliant things to write.
The function and New Year's has come and gone. Ate a lot of great and not so great things. Oh, and Paula Deen's accent sounds so fake and her sons also seem to play up that accent on that show of theirs where they go in a convertible... I like Alton Brown's road food show so much more.
I've got a few new recipes I want to make note of, but due to time constraints, I'll do it later. Meanwhile, restaurant work is proceeding apace, I've got to do some research and practice on pulled sugar decorations and find a marble surface I can work that stuff on.
Worked my first night on the saute section to days ago, and I have to say that although it was really hot there, it was also a thrill and a great learning experience. It's actually made me reconsider the way I do stuff at home and when cooking for guests. I just need to master the whole meat doneness routine and I'll be really fired up.
One thing I've always found particularly stupid (I admit to doing it, but almost always for a reason other than "everyone else does it") is the dogmatic adherance to various food habits. So you mix wasabi in with the soy sauce and you like putting soy sauce on rice, or you eat eggs with ketchup, or you smoke your brisket with cherry wood...
I'm not going to lecture you on how to eat your peking duck as long as you've got an open mind and an open stomach. That's my piece for the day
OK, so maybe I'm whoring my chef out here, but there's a new menu out for Cafe 1842 at the Huether hotel, give it a try and send back comments.
And a lesson I never seem to learn:
1:20 am, put creme caramel into the oven and set oven timer.
1:25 am, trudge upstairs and lay on the bed to "wait" until the timer goes.
2:55 am, wake up and wonder how long I was sleeping.
3:00 am, realize that I left my creme caramel in the oven... (perhaps the question I should be asked is why I'm making creme caramel at 1 in the morning?)
Perhaps the smoke alarm makes a more effective timer than the oven buzzer. Fortunately, since I was cooking it at a low heat and in a bain marie, the caramel was only overcooked and still edible (albeit pretty lumpy).
Just spent the majority of the week at the Peltzer residence where I made some good old standbys, tried some new things (both successfully and unsuccessfully) and went to Ottawa and Renfrew county for some good old R&R. I know a lot of chefs and cooks really grind out the hours working for the man, but there's no accounting for a short break to get the juices flowing again.
The CIA Baking and Pastries textbook is nice and all, but I don't recommend you use the scone recipe, it really is all sorts of wrong.
Also, call me a food heretic, but I don't think I've ever eaten an heirloom tomato that I've found even remotely impressive. Homegrown, great storebought tomatos I've had, but not a good heirloom tomato... I can only describe each of my encounters with them as watery and flavourless.
If you really want to prove me wrong, either send me a basket of good heirlooms or email me telling me where I can find some tasty ones in the K/W or Toronto area.
Welcome to A Cook's Notepad, a place where I just write about whatever cooking terms, techniques, and so forth that I've accumulated in my short career.