Malawry

I've made a roasted corn and black bean salsa for my girls using frozen corn. I browned it lightly in a pan with a little fat. Turned out pretty good, not nearly as nice as fresh corn but fresh corn is several months away where I live.

I don't pre-bake them. I usually stuff them and bake them in a moderate oven. But I put them in a shallow pan for baking and add a small amount of some kind of liquid to the pan to keep the mushrooms from drying out. Chicken stock is probably the most common liquid I use. But these are not "fine dining" mushrooms, these are casual home cooking. I made some stuffed portabellos as the vegetarian alternative for work tonight, actually. Filled with a mixture of some leftover frozen spinach and the ends of white, wheat, and rye breads toasted in butter. (Gotta love watching that food cost...) I sprinkled with parmesan before baking. The girls who don't eat fish (which was tonight's meat entree) ate it. A lot of the fish eaters ate it in addition to fish.

I've heard tell of a place an hour or so from here where they deep-fry the hot dogs. Sounds kinda gross to me, but as long as you're tossing stuff in the fryer you may as well try it. We had planned to deep-fry moon pies at the pig picking Varmint hosted, but after the surfeit of pig fat, the airy blobs of hush puppies, and the formidable caramel cake, nobody could get motivated.

Dump a cup or so of pepper on a big bowl of chicken breasts because I opened the "spoon" end instead of the "shaker" end. It took me a while to clean that one up. BTW, side lesson learned: The membrane on chicken breasts captures those little bits of pepper, bigtime. Simply rinsing doesn't work if the breasts still have some membrane on them.

I have seen people use a terry cloth kitchen towel to vigorously rub the silk off of ears of corn with some success. My mom gave me a corn desilking brush once. Piece-a-crap.

Poor Dr. Mrs. Varmint. Nero, I recommend having a little renovation discussion with her...everybody wants to change some things about their house. Then you can segue into the bathroom, and finally you can offhandedly mention that Trading Spaces episode where they installed a pig in a bathtub, and suggest she should consider it for her own bathroom. Or something.

Brian McBride was just about the only chef who demo-ed for my class at L'academie that totally blew my mind. I haven't dined at Melrose for quite some time but he does things I've never seen anybody else do in that kitchen.

I'm definitely interested, Monica.

Straits of Malaysia! I loved that place and was really bummed when they closed. Thanks for the update. I wonder why 88 failed. I "didn't mind" it either...thought it was rather pleasant actually, a welcome alternative to the Lauriol Plaza behemoth.

What did you end up making?

In college, I lived in two different dorm rooms with kitchenettes. They both had tiny windows but no formal ventilation system. Once I had a friend over who accidentally set my coffee pot on fire. (I kept it on the stove since the kitchen was so tiny, and didn't think about it since I lived alone and had no problem avoiding use of that part of the stove. Then my friend comes over and wants to cook eggs...) I immediately grabbed my fan and pushed all that smoky air towards the tiny window. No burning plastic smell a few hours later, and I didn't set off the fire alarm either. I am wondering if you can use a regular fan to help push air towards the doorway and (presumably) open windows elsewhere in your apartment when you want to sear a steak or something. Might be better than nothing.

I think broiling may be too intense for low-fat delicate meat like chix breasts. At my culinary school, we were taught to never broil meats of any sort. Juices in meats tend to move away from the heat source, and the theory was if you broiled it you'd drive the juices down into the pan...and then when you flipped the meat you'd drive the rest of the juices out too. Broilers (salamanders), we were taught, were for browning toppings, melting cheese and making toast, not much more. If you want a prettier color, and you can't achieve it in the pan, you could try pulling the breasts from the oven and zapping them under the broiler briefly. But I wouldn't do this unless I topped them with something I wanted to brown, which would help prevent them from drying out in the intense heat.

Hey wait, are we talking about a suckling pig or a full-grown beast? I've never seen a suckling pig roasted in a pit and am curious if anybody has tried it. I bet it takes a lot less time, but then I also bet it generates a lot less meat...

And here I thought the coolest thing about the place was the flocked wallpaper.

She has a cookbook called "Plenty," but I haven't picked it up. Maybe I'll borrow it from the library and nose through it...I think she is a vegetarian, though, so she probably wouldn't approve of my short ribs. Le sigh. My cooking is better than ice cream.

15 minute short rib cuisine using a microwave (to combine some recent threads): Take Sunnyside Farms wagyu short ribs braised in red wine from fridge. Scoop off all easily-accessed solidified fat Pop container in microwave just long enough to liquefy liquids Place meat in bowl and pour liquids into 8" omelet pan Warm meat in microwave for 2 minutes Reduce liquids to a syrup over medium-high heat Spoon over warmed meat Snarf I was listening to Sarah McLachlan while doing this, to tie in yet another thread.

Wow. That sounds sooooo Southern to me. I've seen pickled watermelon rind as far north as the DC area, where I live. I dated somebody whose father was addicted to the stuff.

Some types of professional cooks, including me and Abra, do ALL the dishes and ALL the cleanup every day. Fortunately my girls eat their lunch off of paper plates, so it's only dinner dishes that I have to handle for them. But I do all my prep dishes too...and believe me, I do whatever I can to minimize them and work neat so my end-of-day work is not so overwhelming. I do the same thing at home. I say "behind" and "hot coming through" at home all the time...but since I work alone I never need to say it at work. Which is nice...this also means that when I put down my good knife nobody picks it up.

I'm glad you started this thread, Past, because I just made my first short ribs last night. Very very simple: I browned them in oil, then removed meat to plate. Added some sliced onions to oil and cooked until softened. Then I returned the meat and the juices from the plate to the pot and poured on about 1.5 cups of wine. I added some fresh thyme and braised them for about 2 hours. I plan to eat them tomorrow night but couldn't resist a nibble before putting them away. Perfect.

Asparagus is around $3-3.50 a pound at the farm market. I paid $25 for 10lbs...more than I'd pay through my foodservice supplier, to be sure, but these are local and organic and not shipped from distant lands. (To their detriment, they farm market ones are not sized, while the trucked-in asparagus is usually sized reasonably well.) Basically asparagus is expensive, partly because it's annoying to ship and store...those little heads get mushy or break off easily.

From Dupont Circle, downtown DC: Red leaf lettuce Bibb lettuce Frisee Beef short ribs Chili Breakfast sausage From Takoma Park, MD: Rainbow eggs 10lbs of asparagus for work.

At work, I often cook with huge heavy sautee pans. I can do the flippy-thing just fine with them, but it gets tiring. I've found that jerking the pan back and forth on the stove rapidly and sharply works almost as well...and now it's second nature. It does tend to scrape up the bottom of your pans, so I don't do it at home where I have more expensive cookware, but frankly these work pans didn't look any better before I started working there than they look now.

If I cook anything at all on a work night, it's usually something that's done in 15 minutes or less. Yet I always feel a little weird about admitting to these quick meals. Normally, the goal of cooking is not to slam in and out of the kitchen rapidly...but some nights I just want something small and quick so I can come hang out on eGullet already. A quick meal for me is a Hebrew National hot dog with Maille mustard, or a salad with some sort of meat thrown on top, or perhaps eggs. What do you eat that's ready in 15 minutes?

Certainly my current job is different in many ways from my stint as a line cook at a fine dining restaurant. Meal service is not driven by the influx of tickets, which ebb and flow...and I make everything, not just the salads and fried apps or whatever. But even when I worked on a line I was always thinking of food, talking about food. The pastry chef and I both usually cooked nice meals on Sunday when the restaurant was closed and then came in Monday morning eager to discuss what we did and how it came out. Some of the line cooks enjoyed making staff meals of whatever they loved to eat...I did the same for my coworkers a few times. Some professional cooks eat like shit, but others don't. It's true that there were plenty of McDonald's runs and pizza deliveries, but people also ate lots of salads, many pieces of fish off the fish station, the jerk chicken pasta where I worked. (I was more amazed that they'd spend money on food when they could eat for free than I was at the content of the food they'd spend money on.) When most people think of professional cookery they're talking about working on the line of a restaurant. But there are many professionals like myself that do not work in restaurants...that work in labs in New Jersey developing foods, that work in cafeterias, that work as personal chefs, that work as executive chefs. Where do the people who do these jobs fall along the home-professional chef continuum?

I have one foot in professional cookery and one in home cookery. Yes, I cook for other people as my career, and I'm accustomed to cranking out meals for 35 to 60 girls on my own, but I feel like I approach my professional cookery in much the same way as I do my home cookery. I sit around dreaming up what I'd like to eat and I poll the people I feed (the girls I work for, my spouse, the friends I'm inviting over) to see what they want. I read a couple of recipes if I'm rusty or making something new, and then I go make it. The only real difference feels like the amount of mise-en-place (mental and physical) I invest in the process. This seems surprising to me because I'd heard so many contrary experiences from professional cooks before I shifted to cooking as primary career. I heard that professional cooks never wanted to cook in their spare time, that they didn't enjoy it and were too tired from their work to be interested, that they didn't enjoy eating so much after working with food all day. Some of this can be true for me (I do rarely cook dinner after a full workday, and I'm just not that hungry after a day of tasting and working). But I'm always thinking about what else I'd like to cook, and when I might have time to do it. Upon reflection, maybe there are differences besides mise-en-place in my personal approaches to home and professional cookery. I work harder and faster at work, where I have set mealtimes as deadlines to meet...I am less likely to take time for a perfect brunoise, I don't listen to music while I work, and I act like I'm behind the eight-ball even if I have all the time in the world for something. (I figure I can clean or make a special dessert if I have extra time.) At home, I try to make everything as perfect as possible...I pay attention to plating and I enjoy setting a beautiful table for my guests. I love a leisurely day in my home kitchen, love having the chance to linger over details that would only annoy me at work, even enjoy washing the dishes without having to set up a three-part sink. We've touched on the differences between professional and home cookery in many threads around here, but I don't think we've talked specifically about how they compare in this forum. How do you perceive professional and home cookery? Are they different? How?