andrewB

i had some bad experiences with nutmeg in my life and don't do so well with it unless its small quantity in pastries... The first experience was when i was 8 and found a whole piece of nutmeg. I liked the smell so much that i stuck it up my nose!! Well, couldn't get it out and was too embarrased to tell anyone so it stayed there for over a day until i almost popped my ear drums trying to blow it out... The next incident was in 9th grade on a class trip to chicago. We were doing shots of ground nutmeg followed by mountain dew to see if we would trip. Yeah, it works...

on the fish sauce tip, here's a recipe for one of the original fish sauces used by the Romans, garum.. I've had liquimen in Italy and its so strong it comes out of your pours the next day... compliments of foodreference.com

the is a lengthy, painfelt question to answer... As a cook spending 14hours a day working your ass off, you can feel life whisking by. I remember working in SF and on my day off every other week, i would walk down market street in a blur, disconnected from the rest of the world. There became this irony that the only thing seen out of the one window on the pastry side of he kitchen was Alcatraz. To cook on a professional level at the top, takes everything you have and more. You pour yourself into what you do and its still not enough. Every plate has a piece of your soul on it, a cry to express your humanity to the world passing you by. Time passed is not marked by etchings of charcoal on a cave wall, but by the burns, nicks, and cuts on your hands and forearms. Sleep when it comes is a restless one. Tired by the day, but caffeine and adrenaline still course through you. Staring at the ceiling, your mind races with the days events, calculating what happened, what you could do better, how chef freaked out on you, why table 32 got the wrong app, how hot the new food runner is... You wake in a panic that you didn't turn the oven off or the stock rolling in the kitchen as you sleep is reducing too much. On a good night, you wake from a dream with a new recipe and write it on the notepad you keep under your bed. We are all creatures of our surroundings and as a cook, these surroundings mold us into a different creature from the rest. you become oblivous to pain, sometimes not noticing you've cut or burned yourself. ADD is augmented in the kitchen: give a cook one thing to do and he'll take all day and stare at his oil stained shoes, give him a full prep list and watch him chiffonade herbs, mound a sauce, and close the oven with his foot. You subsist on what i used to call see-food (see the food but don't eat the food)... Anthony Bourdain became such an icon to cooks around the world because he put into words and on paper OUR lives. It was what we felt and could never express, let alone have people listen to it. The first thing he said when he came back into the kitchen during service was "COOKS RULE!!.. its nice to be able to go to any city in the world, walk into a kitchen and find people like you..." Those words for me say it all... Thanks for reading this...

i will swear by a diamond steel sharpener. In the right hands its a gem.. ha ha.. There is a swiss company who makes a mini carbon steel sharpener which is great for quick sharpens, scissors, and seraded blades...

The reason the recipe calls for a calves foot and skirt steak is because classically stock should be 2/3 bone and 1/3 meat... if i were you i would forgo it and just use veal breast instead. relatively inexpensive cut nobody uses and makes an awesome stock...

this is the new one for the day: I will never put a bain-marie of creme brulee on the top shelf of a stacked oven. My lil pastry cookie is a bit shorter than me, and in trying to take it out, he spilled it all over his head!!! Happy to report that he walked away with only a red face and a bruised ego...

The only time i cut myself these days, knock on wood, is either with a new knife, one back from the sharpener, or putting it back in my case...

Tuile Dentelle Chocolate: Butter 100g 100% Chocolate 100 g (unsweetend) Glucose 80 g Sugar 300 g Pectin 5 g Cocoa Powder 20 g Water 160 g In a small pan, melt butter, chocolate, and glucose. Add the sugar, pectin, and cocoa powder off the heat. When combined, add water and bring to rolling boil. It should be the consistancy of bechemel. Chill. At this point, we just keep it in the walk-in until we need a sheet or two. So you spread it evenly and thinly on a silpat. Bake at 400 for about 15 minutes (at the thickness we do it). You can tell when it's done because it bubbles up a lot while baking, and when the bubbles slow down, you take it out. If it's not baked enough, it doesn't snap as well... it kinda bends a bit. It also over-bakes very soon after it's done... may i ask out of curiosity why you are using metric measurements for your recipes in SF?

i have the same problem as well. I think maybe they will be found in that universal void where all those missing socks go!! I did find out though, that the reason we were loosing so many of them was because the dishwashers were oblivious to anything left in the bottom of a pan and were just chucking them away along with anything else at the bottom... Now i also know why we had soo many problems with the garbage disposal...

both sauces freeze just fine. i keep pint upon pint of veal stock and essences in my freezer for use. Can you imagine making all that everyday?!?! I find though that it freezes better without the tomato paste involved. Tomato in stock i believe is a throwback to old sauce techniques... could be wrong though...

wow, now THAT's an idea!! wonder if they make that in an apron version!!!

Sauce and tasting spoons vary as much as the chefs holding them: some have thick handles, some thin, some have big wide heads, others have little tear drop heads, some are heavy, some are light, some have rounded tips, and some even look like they have been bitten off!! While working in San Franciso and living in the Mission, i developed a fascination with the spoon. There were these run down thrift stores and dollar shops littered all over Mission street housing the most interesting of wares, from irregular sized underware to toy guns which no longer made any sound. It was here where i found all shapes and sizes of spoons in bins holding massive amounts of loose flatware. Next to a knife, tasting spoons might be a cook's best friend and many kitchen fight has broken out over whos spoon is whos. We as cooks have bonded with these spoons, tasting many a soup or sauce with them. They have touched are lips more than our girlfriends in high school. I even used to have a reaccuring dream about saucing a plate, reaching around into my back pocket, and not having my spoon... Like partners, spoons have been loved and lost over the years. Here is a chance for some to tell of their favorite spoons and share pictures and stories. Also a chance to describe what spoon shape works the best for what item in the kitchen...

I have a question in regards to possible 'flour' alternatives. Would it be possible to create a sour dough out of a flour alternative, soy flour, chic pea flour, or even rice flour?

2. What about soups? When you have a nice bright color to work with -- like a zucchini soup or a coral-colored shellfish soup -- it's easy to present it well. But I find that a lot of my soups look really bad -- like lentil, split pea and all those other soups that look like greenish-brown goo. What can you do to make those look more enticing, without resorting to tired old tricks like sprinkling tons of parsley around the bowl? Here, by the way, I'm talking about individually plated portions. .. For green soups there are a few tricks to the trade on it. for a zucchini soup for example, before you blend the braised zucchini, quickly wilt spinach and puree and strain with the zucchini. My reccomendation is to strain into an ice bathed container as it will help to bring down the heat and retain more of the bright green color. Careful while heating though: it should be heated slow, continuously stirred, and never boiled. Another trick for split pea soup is to make something we simply call 'chlorophyl.' You can do this with with anything green really, but the more innert, the better. I find spinach and the outside bruised leaves of lettuce work the best. Blanch the leaves in boiling water for 20seconds and then shock in ice water. Puree this in a blender with stock or water, the more liquid the finer the puree will be. When finished, strain out the liquid and you are left with 2 versions which can be used. One is a chlorophyl liquid for a la minute coloring, and the other is a fiber pulp which can be added to thicker soups for color (also to correct color on a zucchini soup gone bad for example).

The piece de la resistance on my collection is a '73 Salvidor Dali cookbook! Goes along next to my Lassere cookbook signed by Mr. Lassere before he died!! It wasn't until i worked at Lassere that i realized most of Dali's book was shot there and they were both great friends. Anyone who brings white stallions and doves into the dining room of his restaurant must have been friends with the original moustache ride!!

I will never again grind whole dried ginger in a coffee grind while aimlessly talking to one of the servers. Seems that the ginger is a bit too hard for the plastic top and splindly little blades on the sucker. Well, the plastic shattered, one blade broke, the other blade was still running and gave me 8 stitches across my thumb. Thank god for the stopping power of a thumb nail!!!