Malawry

I don't think there are homeless people foraging at our school, because it's situated in a somewhat well-to-do suburb. There may be similar groups around DC that can help. I'll report back if anything changes. Thanks for the ideas.

Thursday, August 22 Tomorrow is test day, so tensions are somewhat high at the school. I’m trying not to worry too much about making my train to NY tomorrow, and to focus on the information I need for the tests. I spent a lot of time last night going over beef and veal cuts. I suspect we will be asked about what cuts come from the tenderloin of beef (chateaubriand, filet mignon, tournedor, medallions, and of course tips from the tip). The meat information is very hard for me to absorb (perhaps because I tuned it out for so many years) and so I have to make more of an effort to “get” it. We’re still feeding the Albert Uster people, and today’s menu includes the spring rolls we learned yesterday, kung pao chicken, a vegetable stir-fry with shrimp, and jasmine rice. Chef Somchet demoed the chicken, the stir-fry and the rice this morning, and then shooed us into the kitchen to get started. I joined my pal Drew and Jonathan at a table and got cracking on the chicken dish. Jonathan has the distinction of being the only member of my class with facial hair; he keeps a well-trimmed, handsome beard and mustache. Jonathan is a big fan of all things Anthony Bourdain, and he’s got some of the same bourgeois-bored-bad-boy attitude. We’ve been chatting about movies for the past few days. He disliked a lot of the movies of the past few years that I adored, such as Memento and Fight Club. “Oh, Fight Club was great for the first hour or so, and then it just went all weird…” I stared at him in horror when he said this. We started in by cutting some boneless skinless chicken breasts on the bias for stir-frying. As we were chatting about music and movies, I started thinking about the chicken I’d cut as goujons…a word I think is normally applied to fish, describing something a little smaller than a fish stick cut of flesh. I mentioned this aloud, and Jonathan immediately said, “You think a lot, don’t you?” “Uh, I guess so.” “Yeah, that’s why you liked Memento and Fight Club and all those movies. I bet you liked Being John Malkovich, too.” I started laughing. I tried to explain that stories that I like are complex and cover emotional territory that I find unfamiliar, but he sorta tuned out my explanation. Figures. Once the chicken was cut, we whipped up the marinade and poured it on. We heated four saute pans and stood at the stove together to saute the chicken off. It took us a good 25 to 30 minutes to get the chicken done, and we all enjoyed the sensation of standing at the stove actually doing something. Some days we stand around feeling somewhat useless, cutting up parsley or whatever, while somebody else stands over the stove or grill finishing things a la minute. Drew said later that working on the chicken was one of the most fun things he’s done at school so far. The finished dish was one of the tastiest things we’ve made to date. I’m still a bit squeamish about chicken most days, but I snarfed an incredible amount of the kung pao today. It was damn good! After lunch I was so wiped out that I took a brief catnap at a table in the demo kitchen. So did a few other students. It was great to run around doing stuff all this week but between the work and the pre-test anxiety I’m getting worn out. I am concerned that I have not yet cut up a chicken. I was hoping to be assigned to work on the coq au vin we will serve Albert Uster tomorrow, but I was on the kung pao team instead. I bought two chickens on my way home and asked Edemuth if I could cut them up in her apartment (my kitchen is vegetarian) in return for allowing her to keep the cut parts. She kindly agreed, so I went down to her place and cut them up late in the evening. I planned to push myself to finish within 45 minutes, but it turned out I was done with both birds in about 20. It’s relatively easy. At least if it’s on the test, I know I can get it done right and get it done quickly. Friday, August 23 I arrived at school around 9:20am this morning, after a good workout and a quick breakfast. I went into the main kitchen almost immediately and grabbed a styrofoam cup for my daily coffee. The menu for the test had already been erased from the whiteboard in the kitchen, but I saw profiteroles cooling, people working on julienning carrots for glazing, tourneed potatoes, and chicken breasts laying about. No whole chickens. Also no egg dishes at all. I heard that we were producing onion soup from those who had shown up earlier. Once I had my coffee, I went and wrote out a list of mise for the test menu, both equipment and foods. (I didn’t write out tasks like I did last time, especially since most of the things we were making I’d made at least twice before.) After that I hung out with my classmates until the written test was administered. I don’t think I did as well this time as I did last time. There were a number of questions on which I could only make educated guesses, which I don’t like admitting. I didn’t study veal as much as I should have; I focused mostly on beef in my studies. Also, things that I was convinced would be on the test, such as the difference between a blanquette and a fricassee (blanquettes have their meat blanched, while in a fricassee you seal the meat without color in butter before using) or the enemies of chocolate (heat and water) did not appear on this exam. I did the best I could and checked over my responses before handing the test in, and then I went to help Chef Peter get things together for today’s Albert Uster lunch. Once the first group finished their tests and the Uster people were fed, Chef Peter wrote up our menu and let us get to work. Here is what appeared on the test: Onion soup Emince of chicken with cream-mushroom sauce Glazed julienned carrots Cocotte (tourneed) potatoes Profiteroles I got started on the profiteroles right away. I felt fairly confident about my ability to turn out a proper profiterole, since I have done both them and eclairs before. For some reason, though, my pate a chou stayed floppy. It was so loose that I couldn’t even pipe it, it just flowed out of the pastry bag as soon as I filled it. I couldn’t shape it properly, and the resulting puffs did not split and rise properly. This is the first time I have had problems with pate a chou. Chef Somchet said during the evaluation that I added my eggs too quickly, which was why the dough was too soft. Once my profiteroles were ready I got the soup going and started on mise for everything else. Nothing took me too long, and I worked at a solid clip since I wanted to finish in time to make my train. Unfortunately, my attention to detail wavered somewhat. My potatoes were a little overcolored, and my carrots were overcooked. The chicken was all right. The soup was perfect except for a piece of garlic I accidentally left floating in the bowl. I don’t think I’m still on top of my class at this point. The midterms are our next tests, and supposedly they will separate us into those who are getting it and those who are dilettantes. I’ll try to focus more and be more ready for my test next time, and I won’t go out of town for the weekend the minute the test is over if I can possibly help it. I know I can do better in general than I did today.

Worst case scenario, I'll catch a later, unreserved train. Ick. The problem with the shuttle is that I'd have to pay for a path into the city from the airport...and I have 9pm dinner reservations, so I don't have much time to arrange everything. Much easier to step off the train at Penn Station and walk to my hotel. Fat Guy, you might be able to find those articles in the archive via washingtonpost.com. I think archived articles are $2 each. I may ask Chef Francois if he has a copy of them. Thanks, Jinmyo. I'm getting as much out of this as I'm putting into it. (That's a lot!)

Don't you mean "appetizing," Fat Guy? I've never considered pairing mustards with foods. What other mustard-food pairings do you prefer? And what mustards do you actually keep in the house? We keep some ballpark type mustard (I think the current bottle is Westbrae), Maille, and usually Grey Poupon around the house. I hit the Maille more than anything else. We had this New Zealand pineapple mustard...Barker's...for a while, which we were all into constantly.

Why, yes, Bushey, that would indeed be what I was talking about. Too bad there's no high-five smiley.

Monday, August 19 Since our class dropped down to 16 students, we’ve been placed in teams of four almost every day. When one person has been absent, we’ve been in teams of three. Today, two people were out, and Chef Peter decided to break us into teams of three plus one team of two. The luck of the cards put me on the team of two…the first time I’ve been on a team of two since we started doing multi-course menus. (There have been teams of two a couple of times before, but I never got stuck on one.) I was placed with Zoe, who I worked with a few times last week. I think Zoe doesn’t care much for pastry, and she knows I like doing it, so I think she was hoping I’d volunteer to make today’s lemon meringue pie. However, I did a lot of pastry work last week while I was sick, and I wanted to feel fully competent in the kitchen today as I’m feeling healthy. So I convinced her to make our pie, and I got to work on the rest of le menu: Watercress soup Composed salad of mesclun wrapped in cucumber with blood oranges and avocados Poached eggs and duxelles on artichoke bottoms with sauce choron Zoe ended up making the salads once her pie was going, plus we inherited duxelles and vinaigrette from the chef’s demo; these things both helped me greatly. I started by gathering as much mise as possible and getting the soup started off. I also trimmed up some artichokes and made a blanc quickly for boiling them in (a blanc is flour, lemon juice, salt and water and is used to retain color in veggies which oxidize easily). Chef Peter came by later and tut-tutted over the hack job I’d done on the artichokes…he hadn’t re-demoed how to trim them this morning, and my notes from the one other time he cut them are most generously described as “cryptic.” He showed me how to cut them properly, and I trimmed up a few more and got them going. The sauce was probably the most worrisome project. Sauce choron is a derivative of sauce bearnaise, which is itself a derivative of sauce hollandaise. A bearnaise is a hollandaise with a reduction of white wine vinegar, white wine, tarragon, shallots, and peppercorns; the reduction is strained out and the sauce is finished with chopped tarragon and chervil. A choron gets the addition of tomato paste. L’academie stocks canned tomato paste, but today I guess Chef Peter wanted us to get some tomatoes out of the walk-in or something because we had to make the tomato paste ourselves. So I had the reduction to make and the paste to make before I could make the sauce. In my hurry, I managed to grab rosemary instead of tarragon for the reduction. Chef Peter caught my mistake before I took my pan to the stove, which was good since I didn’t waste as much time as I would have if he hadn’t noticed, but bad because I was embarrassed. It’s not like I don’t know the difference between tarragon and rosemary, after all. Lunch came together somehow after much hurrying around. There was a bit of drama when I left the stove briefly while poaching eggs; I had a sizzle plate with me lined with paper towels for drying the eggs off, and right after I walked away one of the paper towels ignited from the stove flame. Chris F. and Chris G. put the fire out before it really got started, but this was even more embarrassing than the rosemary-tarragon mixup. After lunch, Chef Francois broke down a whole lamb for us. I’ve never seen a whole carcass of mammal like that. Like the rabbit, the lamb looked very animal-like, particularly with its hooves still attached. I wish it had been a whole beef carcass or at least a veal carcass, since the lamb is so small you can’t really see a lot of the cuts in the same way we could with the leg of veal last week. The hanging tender on a lamb is too small to serve even a single person for lunch, and the cut that looks like a T-bone is Lilliputian. It’s fascinating to see how a whole animal is broken down into its primal cuts, and I suspect we will cut down the primal cuts ourselves tomorrow into chops and steaks. Tuesday, August 20 I’ve been surprised for weeks that the school does not yet know about my diary, and I continually expect somebody connected with L’academie to tell me that they have read it. Everybody at school knows that I intend to become a food writer, but I hem and haw when I am asked what I write. At this point, I’ve already established myself as a student, and I am not especially worried about being treated differently as a result of the diary. Besides, I think my classmates have a right to know about it. So I intend to start talking about it, probably tomorrow, starting with school director Chef Francois Dionot. Our next test is Friday, and Chef Peter told us today that he is dividing our class in half…half of us will start with the written test and take the practical in the afternoon, and the other half will start in the kitchen. He said he’d probably divide us “by the roster” and that the early alphabet people will do the practical first. This is a source of stress, as I am visiting New York next weekend and will need to catch a train on Friday afternoon. I am pretty sure I will make it even if I need the full time for the practical exam, but I’d prefer not to have to stress about the train schedule. I asked Chef Peter to please put me in the first kitchen group, but he said he isn’t taking any special requests. The rumor mill has spit out another menu for Friday’s practical: a poached egg dish with a hollandaise sauce or derivative, glazed carrots (again), a chicken saute or the chicken emince we did early on with mushroom-cream sauce, and Chef Somchet all but told us we’d make profiteroles for dessert. I still have not taken apart a chicken, which is a moderate source of stress. I shied away initially, and then I intended to do it the last time it appeared on the menu (when Edemuth came to visit), but I was feeling sick and I really wanted to make the eclairs so I didn’t. I intended to buy a chicken and fabricate it somewhere over the weekend, but I never got around to that either. I spent today’s lunch service working with Zoe again; we were joined by Chin and Ivelisse. The lunch menu included a tuna tartare, which requires about a dozen little bits of mise. I took charge of the tuna, and I especially enjoyed cutting lotus root slices on the mandoline and frying them into chips for garnish. We also had lamb on the menu, so I helped Chin trim and tie some lamb pieces for him to roast off. I’m getting better at handling big pieces of meat, and am not as overwhelmed by figuring out where to send my knife as I was a week or two ago. Lunch also included boulanger potatoes, which are very thinly sliced and layered with butter, salt, pepper and onion. The potatoes are brushed with plenty of butter and revisited periodically as they bake with more butter. They are quite delicious and went over well with everybody on my team. After the afternoon break, we started working on tomorrow’s menu. There’s some group we’re apparently catering for over the next three days; we will eat the same thing they will, and we’re producing 60 plates on top of the usual 25 or so faculty/staff/student covers we normally create. Tomorrow we’re all eating veal marengo, Thursday features egg rolls and some kind of stir-fry dish, and Friday we’ll serve coq au vin. (We’ll make the coq on Thursday after break, since we take our tests Friday.) I took apart a veal neck, cleaned it, and cut it into pieces for tomorrow’s stew. It was good practice, since I didn’t have to worry about the look of the finished fabricated parts…they were all getting cut down into stew meat anyway. Wednesday, August 21 I talked to Chef Francois today about my diary. He seemed interested in the project and said he would take a look at it when he had a chance. He told me about some similar projects other graduates have completed, including a three-article series in the Washington Post Food section following a member of the class of 1998. I expect various people from L’academie to come read here soon. If you’re one of them, welcome to eGullet. We did a very brief demo this morning on egg rolls, and then we got to work on the lunches we’re catering. Turns out the people we’re cooking for are from the pastry and chocolate company that supplies L’academie; they are conveniently located at the other end of the strip of offices where L’academie is situated. They are doing some kind of training session on-site, and some of their people came over to use our pastry kitchen as part of their training. The company is Albert Uster Imports. I was one of the people who took lunch over, and I pushed a rolling cart filled with food through their warehouse to where they were setting up lunch. I spied all kinds of interesting products…flavorings, fruit pastes, a million varieties of chocolates, pastry liqueurs, prefabbed tartlet shells, and so on. I’d love a chance to go back over there and see what all that stuff is, but I don’t think we go on a formal tour at any point despite the close relationship between the school and the pastry supplier. Before we went into the main kitchen to work on lunch, Chef Peter went over the details for our Friday test. I am part of the team due to report at 10am to take the written test, and I will be taking the practical after everybody from the morning team wraps up. I asked if we could switch with anybody and was refused. I am very concerned about making my train to New York, but there’s not much I can do about it at this point except hurry through my practical. The afternoon was spent in sanitation class again. We watched a video on safe sushi preparation, and talked about safe preparation, holding and reheating techniques. Much of sanitation education feels repetitive: Practice good personal hygiene. Avoid cross-contamination. Keep foods above or below the temperature danger zone. Develop a HACCP plan and stick to it. And so on. Chris finds an amazing number of ways to drive these messages home for us, to his credit, but we’re all getting a little tired of sanitation. We still have several classes to go before the sanitation test is administered.

A big piece of baguette, toasted and slathered with butter and jam. I had that for dinner tonight, with a farm market red-skinned pear variety I hadn't seen before. I also like cream cheese and olive sammiches, preferably on onion rye bread. I love PB&J on toasted whole wheat with chips and a pickle but I eat that for weekend lunches more than for 10pm fridge-raidings. I don't make pasta under the circumstances Jaybee gave. Takes too long. The absolute ultimate of 10pm snackies is ice cream, though. Straight from the carton. Coffee chip, preferably.

Black Pepper-Almond Biscotti 4 eggs 1.5 cups sugar About ½ tbsp coarsely ground black pepper 1 ½ tbsp amaretto Splash of vanilla extract 3.5 cups flour 1 tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt 1.5 cups almond slivers, toasted without fat in a pan until light golden Beat eggs and sugar with paddle attachment in mixer on high speed until smooth. Shake pepper over bowl while running mixer on high. Scrape the sides and mix more to disperse evenly. Add the amaretto and the vanilla while running mixer. Set speed to low. Sift flour, baking soda and salt together and run in slowly with mixer on low. Set speed back to medium and run in the almonds. You may want to taste for black pepper at this point, and decide whether or not the dough needs more. (I was using very fresh pepper, but if you don't grind it yourself it may need more.) Turn off mixer when well-mixed. Flour hands and pull out half of the dough onto a floured board. Form into a log about 12” long by 3” wide. (This makes for long biscotti; make a longer, narrower log for short biscotti.) Set on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper. Form second half of dough into an identical log and set well apart from the first log onto the sheet pan. They will grow significantly, so don't set them on a half-sheet pan, use a full-sheet or bake them on two pans. Bake at 300 degrees until dough springs back and feels firm when touched, 30-35 minutes. Cool at least until cool enough that you are able to handle them, or let cool entirely. Cut logs into 1” thick cookies. Place cookies on parchment-lined baking sheets with their cut edges on the sides (don’t lay them on the cut edge, in other words) with plenty of space in between. Crisp at 300 degrees until firm, about 30 more minutes. They’ll get harder as they cool. Serve with strawberries, and perhaps a mug of chai tea. This recipe is adapted from one appearing in Caprial's Desserts, by Caprial Pence and Melissa Carey. I do know better than to use volume based measurements, but I ran out of time to find a trustworthy recipe that relies on more accurate measures such as ounces. Dana, to me the worst part is how that gray foam sticks to the vegetables at the top of the stock. Ewwwww!

Kpurvis, no need to apologize. I'm interested in the idea of a lard biscuit (and I'm not really vegetarian any longer, although my household still is meat-free). I've never baked the same item side-by-side with the same recipe but different fats. Has anybody done this? Not just biscuits, with any type of baked good.

My household is vegetarian, which many people here on eGullet know and which may be partly why nobody urged me to use lard. I'd be willing to eat a lard biscuit, but I won't be making one at home any time soon. Kpurvis, why do you think Crisco trumps butter? I am familiar with Hardee's. Their biscuits are okay, but as chain restaurants go I think Biscuitville biscuits are closer to what I want. The best biscuit I've had is at Danny's in Greensboro, NC. If you get them right when they come out of the oven they are every morsel the biscuit I described in my initial post here. Last night, I used up the leftover biscuits from breakfast in some shortcakes. Mixed some farm market blackberries with sugar, lemon juice, and a splash of Frangelico. Whipped lightly sweetened cream. Smothered the biscuits with berries and cream, and put 10x sugar on top. Yesh.

Chicken backs come to us frozen from our meat purveyor and cost the school about $40 a case (if my memory is accurate). One case makes one quite large vat of stock. To prepare the backs, I cut off all the skin and fat I can. I cut off the triangular part above the breastbone first. Then I slice off the large globs of fat on each side...they fold underneath usually, just unfold and cut off. Leave as much meat as possible attached to the bone. Then I cut off the large sheet of fat and skin that's over the top of the breastbone. Then I turn the back over and scrape all the dark and red bits clinging to the underside of the bone with the tip of my knife. If I can, I remove the stringy bits as well, but I don't worry about them too much since they come off more easily when rinsed. I use the knife to trim off the larger globules of fat from the meat remaining on the underside, and then I pitch the back into a bowl which later gets dumped into a colander for rinsing and manual cleaning. At this point, the backs are ready to go into a stock. Skin and fat are removed because cooking a stock with them just makes for more fat in the stock which you'll just have to remove later. The dark bits we scrape out because they're full of impurities and blood, which can darken down a stock and which need to be filtered off the top as the stock simmers. It's much easier to remove impurities with a knife than it is to skim them off the top; every time you skim you remove a little bit of the good stuff, after all. Chicken backs are a fact of life. They're okay, but I definitely disliked doing them twice in a row. Ick.

Thursday, August 15 I made my first chicken stock today. When we broke into teams for lunch, Chef Peter said that one person from each team should start cleaning chicken backs immediately, and that he wanted stock on the stove well before 12:30 lunch service. I decided to go ahead and clean backs for my team. I started washing the last few bowls of backs out and realized that I’d never actually made chicken stock…and everybody else who had helped with the backs was already with their team, working on lunch. So I decided to make it myself. There was vegetable mirepoix already cut in the walk-in. I made two big bouquets garni, one for each pot. And then I filled the pots with water and had Chris G. help me heft them to the stove. I didn’t cook anything at the stove for lunch service, but I visited periodically to check on my stock and skim any scum off the top. Almost every time I came by after the stock came to a boil, each of the two pots was working its ass off, boiling madly. I’d cut back the heat, skim, and walk away. Ten minutes later, I’d check and it’d be boiling again. I have no idea who kept returning the heat to high, but I’m fairly angry about it. Stock should be brought to a boil and then cut back to a simmer so that the slow motion of the heat brings impurities to the top. A stock at a hard boil forces impurities back into the body of the liquid through its rapid action, creating a cloudy stock. Argh! At the end of the school day, a few students (including me) strained the stock and set it aside to chill. It looks cloudy, but I hope that it clears up some after it chills and I can defat the surface. After lunch service and break, we had our next round of spice and herb presentations. I happened to be the first on today’s docket. I’d come in early this morning and cut and crisped my biscotti in the oven, so I was mostly set. I gave each student an almond-black pepper biscotti and a strawberry, and I passed around a tray with the various types and grinds of peppercorns labeled in little cups. My chat was short and sweet; I talked a little about the differences between the types of peppercorns on the market, what the plant is like and where it grows, and I described a little of the spice’s history. Most people seemed to be paying attention, which was all I really wanted from my classmates. Later, several people came up to me to tell me how surprised they were at how good the biscotti were. (Not everybody had heard of black pepper ice cream, or strawberries with black pepper and balsamic vinegar.) After class let out and I dealt with the chicken stock, I offered Christian, Chef Mark, his assistant Chef Theresa, and various staff members and pastry students the remaining biscotti. They went over quite well with those I spoke with, though I haven’t heard from Mark and Theresa what they thought yet. (I’m a little nervous about their opinion, even though I’m not a pastry student.) Friday, August 16 I am a media darling. Last night, I appeared on Nightline, as did Amy, Kristin and Marta. Nightline was recording footage for a story on Julia Child at the dinner we worked at recently. Marta’s hands are apparently featured (she was making caviar quenelles) and everybody else’s face can be seen. (Marta understandably seemed a little rueful about only having her hands on the air.) I have not seen the footage yet; Marta captured it with her TiVo, and I hope she brings in a tape next week so we can see it together in the school library. Lunch service today was especially obnoxious because I somehow ended up being one of the lucky folks who worked on chicken stock again. I trimmed chicken backs with a few other people and then yet again I ended up washing them all out in the sink. By the time I finished with the stock, I only had about 45 minutes before lunch service, so I ended up running myself ragged trying to assemble a Thai cucumber salad, a remoulade sauce, and so on. I tried to help out with everybody else’s work as much as I could, including the sensual job of gently wiping marinade off of cod with my fingers and then dredging it in flour. Lunch was a big hit: chicken satay with cucumber salad and peanut sauce, cod fried orly style with pont neuf potatoes and remoulade, and brownies with ice cream. I joked that it was an east to west meal theme. The afternoon was taken up with the last of the reports from my fellow classmates on spices and herbs. The reports and the foods got even more complicated and outrageous, including a Persian rice dish with saffron and that yummy rice crust and some freshly made mojitos. I’m impressed with how well my classmates teach, and look forward to the next set of reports. On my way out of school, I bumped into Chef Mark from the pastry program. I nervously asked him how the biscotti were. “I got a hit of pepper that wasn’t properly blended in. Other than that, well, they’re biscotti.” He shrugged and went on with whatever he was doing. Can’t please everybody. Saturday, August 17 I went to school today to check out the pastry buffet. I arrived around 1:15pm; the celebration started at noon, but I wasn’t able to make it there any earlier. The buffet was set out in the main kitchen, and there were scads of people everywhere, so some of the goodies were starting to melt a little in the warm heat. I walked around checking the treats out, and I asked the pastry students I saw to show me what they made and tell me about how they made it. Some of the cooler things included: A croquemboche, which still had crisp caramel despite the humidity A spring-themed buche type cake with chocolate buttercream frosting and filling Sweet brioche “peaches” with almond patisserie cream “pits” and marzipan leaves. They had been glazed with apricot and rolled in sugar so they looked very peachlike. A wedding cake, a birthday cake, and a graduation cake Christian showed off his individual savarins, and gave me a slice of his rich chocolate tart. The brown pastillage platter he worked on earlier in the week while I was baking my biscotti didn’t work out, so he ended up going with a plain white pastillage plate, which he decorated with royal icing and coffee beans. His comment: “Unfortunately, the coffee beans led people to believe my tart had a mocha filling rather than plain chocolate.” The buffet had many beautiful and interesting things on it, and I learned a lot by coming by and checking it out. I look forward to learning some of the skills I saw used that we’ll cover in future months, such as working with chocolate and pulling sugar. At the same time, the pastry program at L’academie is quite French in focus, and I’m not too interested in classic things like savarins and Paris-Brest rings. I don’t think of these as particularly tasty or interesting desserts. I’m more interested in powerful, creative flavor combinations in pastry. Still, some of those recipes and techniques are the foundations of the desserts I would be interested in learning about, and it’s good experience to work with them.

Experiment number one: I tried to follow Varmint's method as best I could. I used Washington self-rising flour (the only kind they sell at my local Giant), salt, baking soda, Plugra butter, and a mixture of 1/3 buttermilk, 1/3 cream and 1/3 milk. I think I placed my biscuits too far apart because they did not grow together, and the edges were crisp all the way around. Also, I think I needed a little more liquid than I used. The resulting biscuit was not as fluffy as I hoped for, but they did rise, and the edges and top were crisped. They are light years better than canned biscuits (the only kind I remember eating at home) but they are not yet the right biscuits...but this is surely more a matter of my technique than a fault with Varmint's recipe. I did like the rich mouthfeel of the biscuit quite a lot. I can't believe somebody's mother is yelling at me via email. I'm terribly amused!

I'd like to hear what you think the silver lining is, actually.

Brandy snap basket? Yummmmmmmmmm.

Your menus look lovely, Nick. Fat Guy, fwiw, club menu prices are almost always noticeably lower than prices at resaurants. Dining is a "loss leader" at most clubs; membership dues usually subsidize dining, and members expect a good deal on the food (especially when they are required to meet a minimum, as I think Nick's club enforces). Nick, I see certain items repeated on your menus, like the shrimp cocktail. Is this a "classic" dish at your club, that you're not allowed to take off the menu? Are you ever able to do something fun with the dish, like serving it with a variety of sauces? I noted the crab cocktail which sounds a little more fun. Also, I've not seen carpaccio as an entree very often. Sounds like a lovely summery dish.

Hi Steve, welcome to eGullet. I am amazed that you found eGullet through my personal website, and that you found my website through Google. You may want to consider posting a bio in the Member Bios board, and of course you should also check out our fledgling DC local board (look under "North America"). I personally do not work in the industry, but many of my classmates do. After school lets out I normally go to the gym and then go home. (I skipped the gym all week because of my sickness, which is why I am on eGullet right now.) As soon as I get home I grab something fast to eat (usually something light, since I eat a lot while at schoo) and then I work on my diary. The diary takes me about 30-45 minutes of work most days. After that, I work on writing up recipes. This takes about 20-30 minutes most days. The rest of my evenings are taken up with reading, surfing the Internet (I miss the information flow I got when I worked at a desk all day), talking to my partner and housemate, seeing friends, playing with my cats, and doing laundry. Nobody told me how much laundry there'd be after I entered school. Weekends, I see more of my friends, catch up on whatever I've put off all week in terms of home maintenance/family obligations/errands, and I cook. We rarely have reading these days, but I try to review my notes and also look over relevant information in the On Cooking textbook a few times a week. Also, I consider it important to keep current with what's happening in the food world. I read the Washington Post and NY Times food sections each Wednesday, and I check around other major newspapers periodically to see what they regard as worth covering. I at least glance over Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Food Arts, Cook's Illustrated, and other periodicals at school on breaks. I spend time as I can on eGullet, which is helpful on many levels. Members point me to information that I may find useful or interesting, and sometimes I get ideas for writing projects from this site. Plus, it's fun. I eat out periodically, and I try to choose restaurants that I've read interesting things about rather than returning to the same places. I have limited time for cooking but I cook at least two meals each weekend (usually three or four), and when I cook a meal I usually make at least one dish that we've covered in school as practice. In my household, I'm the primary purchaser of food, as well as the primary chef and kitchen-cleaner. I visit the Takoma farm market every weekend and am slowly getting to know some of the vendors there. The farm market is an educational, social community experience, and I try hard not to miss it. I regard the full process of acquiring, preparing, and cleaning up from food to be a part of my education, and I approach all those jobs with the same energy I bring to more formal studies. I'm not just in culinary school as a student, I'm there because I have a passion for food, and I try to learn as much about food as possible. I did a lot of these things before I started school just as a matter of habit. It's great that all this "work" is stuff I regard as enjoyable and even relaxing. Not many people can say that about their jobs!

"I could really get into a biscuit" is a running joke between me and my dad. It's usually meant in jest, and we say it after a huge meal or during Passover when any sort of bread sounds delectable. Of course, he and I both enjoy biscuits, as does my partner and just about everybody else I know. Despite being a native of North Carolina and despite their utility as a conveyance vehicle for butter and jam, I have never made biscuits. (When I lived in NC, there was no reason to make them...everybody sold them. DC is of course a different matter.) I'd love to hear recipes, techniques, and testimonials about biscuit-making. Just so you know, the biscuit I am talking about is tender and buttery-flaky. Its top is crisp, as is the bottom rim, and it easily splits into two pieces (top and bottom). It's the sort that's really good when hot, that's acceptable later in the day reheated, and that's stale the next morning. It probably contains buttermilk. It's about 2.5" in diameter and round, but it is also squared up a little from being baked right next to its fellow biscuits.

Sometimes when I think about the differences between pastry chefs and chefs de cuisine, I think they're totally different animals. Other times, I get almost angry about the common perception of difference. Discussing what different species pastry and cuisine supposedly are obscures the more important issues. Namely, excellent chefs of any type require a nuanced palate, a sense of timing, a meticulous approach to mise, and an artistic and intentional presentation in order to produce the best possible end result. I don't get too excited about food styling or food photography like I get excited about cooking, teaching and writing about food, because I think the taste of food is the most important aspect to consider in working with food. Some people finish a pastry program without much consideration of their palates, but I don't think it's possible to finish the program I'm in without getting it banged into your head that the taste of food is very important. I think lack of emphasis on taste is more a problem with pastry training programs than something inherent in pastry work, but I also admit to not being able to back that up. I suspect that people describe pastry and cuisine chefs as different species partly because they're seeking an excuse for the shortcomings of one or the other (oh, a pastry chef can't create something a la minute to save their life, oh, a chef de cuisine can't create a beautiful plate without relying on round molds and squeezie bottles). Shouldn't a truly good chef of any type be skilled at all of those things I listed above? Pastry is an essential part of the culinary career training program at L'academie, and I'm grateful for that. I do indeed enjoy pastry work quite a bit, and I'm something of a pastry program groupie. I always want to know what they're doing in there and how they're making it. If I had all the time and money in the world, I'd probably look at doing a pastry program after completing my current course of study. The one time I made a pie on my own, the crust was a delicious half butter, half Crisco combination. We will be learning more American pie crusts, including one similar to what I just described, as we continue our studies. I think an all-Crisco crust can have a fine texture but it just tastes...blah. But then, my butter fondness is well-documented around here.

Monday, August 12 Still sick, sick enough to not want to go to school at all. I dragged myself there anyway, partly to prove I really am sick and partly because I’d rather not miss a demo if I can help it. I found Chef Peter before class started and told him I planned to depart after his demo was over, and he agreed that this would be a good idea. I called my doctor about getting some prescriptions and settled into my seat. The demo wasn’t much of anything worth reporting on. I missed black bean soup, a composed salad of tomatoes and roquefort, sauteed beef tenderloin medallions, ratatouille, and a chocolate tart. Lengthy menu. I took the lunch order from school staff before leaving, since it didn’t involve handling food. I went home around 11am. Tuesday, August 13 I woke up feeling much better after extensive napping and several prescription medications calmed down my system, so I reported for a full day today. I was coughing so much that George called me “barky,” but I actually didn’t feel too terrible. I missed some interesting shenanigans yesterday. First, the power went out around 11:45am, so everybody ended up with soup, salad and chocolate tart for lunch. The lights blinked back on after lunch service, but nobody got to cook the beef medallions (which were what most of my classmates really cared about). Everybody left their mise in the walk-in, and so today the team assignments were identical to yesterday’s so everybody could prepare the food they’d started on yesterday. Then, Chef Peter spent yesterday afternoon demo-ing calves brains. Brains used to be on a regular lunch menu, but nobody really ate them, so the school decided to serve a taste of them after a demo rather than waste several pounds worth by forcing them on everybody at lunchtime. I quizzed a bunch of my classmates about what they disliked about them; apparently the texture was the most disagreeable aspect. Zoe really liked them, and likened them to foie gras in texture. (Yes, I have tasted foie gras; I sampled a foie gras mini-medallion wrapped in duck confit and topped with a grape salad at the Julia Child dinner.) I’m sorry I missed them, since I doubt I’ll be curious enough to order a full order of them at a restaurant, and yesterday was my chance to try them without commitment. Not much I can do about it now. Since we had the entrée mise set up and since the entrée had been demo-ed yesterday, and since today’s menu was only three courses total, the demo wrapped up very early today, and there was tons of time to prepare for lunch service. I was arbitrarily placed with Team 1 and I again took the lunch order. I then tried not to do anything at the stove because I didn’t want to stand in different degrees of heat and because I needed to be able to turn away and cough or sneeze at will. I helped out with setting up Chef Peter’s demo on risotto for tomorrow, I worked on chopping mirepoix for chicken and veal stocks, I made the filling for today’s shrimp ravioli starter. Around 11:30am I started feeling bushed so I sat on a stool for a few minutes. Chef Peter came by and asked if I was going to stick it out and I told him if I’d made it that far, I may as well finish off the day. After lunch service and break, we had our first round of student presentations. Our first papers (on a spice or herb of our choice) were due last Friday, and 5% of the grade is based on an oral presentation of our subject. My presentation is not until Thursday afternoon and my spice is peppercorns. Today I learned about cinnamon, garlic, oregano and ginger from my classmates. Three of the four presenters offered food; cinnamon french toast, roasted pepper and oregano bruschetta, an interesting Puerto Rican style oregano flan, and ginger ice cream with a real kick. I’m impressed that my classmates appear able to teach class effectively, and now I have a sense of what does and doesn’t work as I prepare for my Thursday presentation. Wednesday, August 14 I came into school early this morning to start on the food for my presentation tomorrow. I’m making almond-black pepper biscotti, which I will serve with strawberries. I got the dough together but did not have enough time to start baking it before class. Chef Peter brought in a whole leg of veal and showed us how to break it down as part of today’s demo. It was amazing to watch him expertly move his boning knife around the seams of the veal and the curves of its bones. It looks like an overwhelming amount of stuff initially, but it breaks down into recognizable parts. There’s lots of fat and sinew to be removed, not to mention huge caveman style bones with round ball and socket joints. Chef Peter said we’d be expected to clean the fat and skin off of the cuts he generated as we had time while preparing for lunch service. Class demos and today’s lunch menu were abbreviated as they normally are on Wednesdays; lunch service was at noon so we could be ready for sanitation class at 1:30pm. We seem to be finishing up with braised and stewed dishes, thankfully; I have never been fond of lamb and veal stews, and even vegetable stews like ratatouille elicit minimal enthusiasm. Today’s lunch menu included a Thai coconut milk-chicken soup, which was refreshingly non-French and which was just what I needed for my sick self, and an entrée of risotto and veal marsala. I worked mostly on the apple pie we had for dessert. We learned an American style pie crust which relied entirely on Crisco for its fat content. The result was a flaky but not especially flavorful pie crust; mine was technically correct but did not taste like much of anything. I didn’t put quite enough sugar into the Granny Smith filling, so the whole project did not exactly satisfy. It was only the second pie I’ve made in my life, so I’m not upset about it, but it was disappointing. After finishing up with the pie, my teammates seemed to be completely on top of our meal, so I trimmed down the butt end of the veal tenderloin. (I didn’t have time to tackle a larger piece of meat, and I hadn’t worked with the beef tenderloin on Monday since I’d left after the demo). I’m pleased to report that I did a pretty good job with it, and barely removed any meat when I swiped off the fat and membrane. Chef Peter added much of the sinew to his batch of veal stock. After lunch service, we met for sanitation class and learned about purchasing, receiving and storing food optimally for food safety. Chris showed us a segment from a Dateline type program which aired only yesterday, about unrefrigerated meat delivery vehicles. His enthusiasm continues to amaze me. This Saturday, the current pastry students will be finishing up their formal classwork with a big buffet and celebration event. The things they are producing are graded as final exams, and they’re spending plenty of time on their projects. Most of the pastry students reported early today to get a jump on their work, and access to the pastry kitchen and ovens was severely limited for nonpastry students. (We made and baked our apple pies in the main kitchen for this reason.) Unfortunately, this meant I did not get a chance to bake my biscotti batter until after classes ended today. A bunch of the pastry students had set up camp in the main kitchen, but there was still a table available for me. I got my biscotti batter in the oven quickly, but I had a half hour to kill while it baked. I decided to talk to some of the pastry people while I waited. I started by chatting with head pastry instructor Mark Ramsdell. He was working with some hot pink marzipan to make roses, which he said was for a birthday cake he was making for an upcoming Julia Child celebration. I helped him roll nubbins of marzipan into balls between my palms, and then I watched while he pressed the balls out into petals and attached them to the marzipan bud he’d molded by hand. Mark is somewhat aloof when he talks to me. He has obvious knowledge, but he does not interact with students in the same easy, friendly manner that Chef Peter has. Still, I enjoyed chatting with him and got him to tell me a little about his history with L’academie (he has been teaching there since the mid-late 1980s). After a while, he started being pulled away from his roses by student queries, so I wandered over to one of the students and started asking him questions about the pastillage he was working with. He was coloring it a light brown and planned to use it as a background for a chocolate tart. His name is Christian, and we talked about the Silver Spring area (where he grew up, near where I live) and why each of us is at culinary school. Christian is more interested in the artistry than the taste of pastry work; he likes to eat but he doesn’t think he has much of a palate. He worked in IT for quite a while before enrolling; I’ve found many IT refugees among student populations at L’academie. I had lots of pastry students wander by and check out what I was working on, and several asked me questions about the biscotti as I worked on them. I really like talking to the pastry students and am a little sorry that this group goes on to externships in a week or so and therefore will not be at the school regularly. There will be a new class soon, of course, but I’ve barely started talking to students in the current class. I’ll miss them and wish I had more a chance to hang out with them before they depart. I hope to visit and check out their buffet this Saturday.

Jaybee:

Indeed, those rights were one of the reasons I chose to use eGullet for this project.

Wow, this is all very flattering. Welcome, Jogafur. And thank you, SA, your thoughts mean a lot to me. Fat Guy, I can't decide whether to hug you or smack you for saying that. It's one of the sweetest things anybody's ever said to me. But at the same time, I miss having a social life and an income some days, and the diary unfortunately doesn't help with those things as it currently exists.

Damn, I've been outed again! More on TJs: It's not a warehouse, it's a relatively small supermarket. They sell their own label on most of their merchandise. Many items have an organic and vegetarian bent, but I understand their meats and such are pretty good quality as well. There have been other threads on TJs, do a search and you will surely find them. It's not much like Restaurant Depot sounds, nor is it much like Costco. Almost everything is sold in normal quantities. I want to take a course in butter. Guess I'll just have to give one to myself.

I've seen Ghee at my natural foods co-op. It's in a glass jar with a blue label, but I don't know the brand. Cheapest way to get good clarified butter that I know of is to buy Plugra for $3 a pound at Trader Joe's and clarify it at home. I do think of Plugra as a major, national, mass produced product, but it's still pretty good and an excellent value.