Busboy

My family and I just got back from Paris and founf Patricia Wells' "Food Lover's Guide to Paris" in valuable. We didn't plan our days around the book, we just carried it around with us and when we got hungry we whipped it out and hunted up something near by. It's organized by food category (cafe's, markets, bakeries etc.) and by arrondissement so if you're in the 14th and looking for, say, a good baguette and some cheese, you can flip through and find something nearby. We also relied on the Guide Michelin, discredited though it may be in some circles, looking for what we called "happy face" restaurants. They now have a category called "Le Bib Gourmand" which are fine restaurants at a lower cost than the starred places (there's a picture of the Michelin Man's face next to the restaurant listing -- the "happy face") and the two meals we had at those establishments were extraordinary. I think the menus were about 35 Euros and I most of the wines in the 20-40 euro category. Have fun!

I was travelling last month and apparently missed something I wait all year for -- fresh young english peas, which are available for only a couple of weeks each year. We make the soup out of the French Laundry Cookbook, it's an extraordinary thing, worth the intense labor and $20 worth of peas it takes to get a couple of cups of soup. We asked one of the vendors at the market if we'd missed the peas and she said they didn't have any this year, they'd sold all the pea plants for that horrid dental floss pea vine salad greens and saved none for actual spring peas! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE AND MUST BE STOPPED! I was crushed, but finally found some at a different market the next day and got my soup. In the plus side, the cool spring here has extended the strawberry season and we've been eating fresh strawberries and strawberry sorbet all weekend, and I have a couple of quarts of vodka flavoring up for a fresh berry apertif to be consumed cold winter evening when a taste of spring is absolutely necessary.

Katie -- I like your definition of roughing it. One great think I found camping in Oregon: even the stores that specialize in fishing licenses and canned goods usually have a decent selection of cheap, tasty Oregon wines.

Don't know how much access to fire and equipment you have, we usually work with a backpackers little campstove and the campsite fireplace -- 2-3 pots or pans at once. I'm assuming you're not backpacking. After a day of serious hiking or other outdoor grunge, we like to put some black beans over a low fire with whatever flavoring you feel like hauling along ...onion, cumin, garlic, wine, sugar. Then, on the other fire, make up some rustic quesadillas -- grated cheese between two tortillas, fried like a pancake in the oil until the cheese melts out and gets crunchy. Jarred or homemade salsa isn't bad either, and you can put the beans in a bowl, the quartered quesadilla on the beans and the salsa on top and eat the whole thing with a spoon and your fingers. It's about half-way between authentic and Chi-Chi's, or maybe half-way between steak and peanut burgers, but something about beans and tortillas and woodsmoke just works. Best dinner ever was when my son caught crawfish in the creek next to the campsite, and we made crawfish pasta for dinner. Also, you can make great garlic bread by chopping garlic into hot butter over the fire, and toasting bread in it like French toast (Italian toast?) until brown.

I like paring it with white beans, too. But I also like frying up some potatoes persiellade (sp?) -- ie hash browns with garlic and parsley and a green salad using a dressing mase with duck fat, tamari and jerez vinegar (Jacques Pepins') suggestion. Takes about 10 minutes of effort and tastes like a million bucks -- great for late dinners at home after the show. I warm the confit until the skin gets crackly while I work on the other stuff.

But I do call it a martini -- and after two, I'll be ready to trade blows with anyone who dares deny me the right to do so. After three, I'll be asleep. Another, more civilized, martini variation is a good shot poured on the rocks, just enough scotch to get a little taste, and a twist. My friends father called it a "silver bullet" and was routinely detailed to fill the thermos with them for boating parties.

Another question for the teachers, dilettants, housewives and chefs here, (asked as one who has often fantasized about chucking it all for a year and running off to the CIA): What percentage of the non-career-track cooking course students are actually crashing the professional classes? Is there a self-selection process that weeds out most of the people who wouldn't wilt in an intensive course long before they set foot in class? I may be crazy enough to put up with brutal chefs and competitive students (though, looking at my mangled thumb, I won't be doing so until my knife skills improve), but my wife, a very good cook, would never consider dealing with that kind of stress. In other words, what's the actual magnitude of this phenomena?

So, forgive my unfamiliarity with cooking schools, but in any of the cases metioned here, won't the student unwilling to put in the time and effort get thrown out? If I don't practice my violin, won't Juilliard bounce me? If I am unwilling to turn my potatoes, won't the CIA demand that I turn in my houndstoothe pants? And if I can't stand the heat, won't I take myself out of the kitchen? And If I'm holding back a class -- be it Yale or wherever, won't someone take me aside and let me know, nicely or not? As someone pointed out earlier, chefs are not well know for holding back. In any education longer than a 6-week adult ed course, it strikes me that there are any number of means and methods by which both the unmotivated diletants and the unsuited would-be pros will be weeded out. Or does cooking school not work like this?

After I stopprd trying to gain weight for the rowing team by sharing a quart of milk and a quart of Haagen Dazs for dessert every night with my roommate (funny how it never worked then and the weight comes wothout effort now), I went years without eating much ice cream. Then one day my girlfriend brought home a quart of B&J's Heath Bar Crunch...Man, I loved that stuff. We used to track the big pieces in the container, and if one of them disappeared without "sufficient" ice cream also disappearing, there would be a scene -- it was the moral equivalent of eating the middle out of an orea and putting the cookies back. But we survived. We had the local Ben and Jerry's make the cake for our wedding. Mostly I make my own ice cream now, but I still keep my eye out for Heath Bar Crunch, and am always a little bummed out (as Jerry might say) when it's not on the shelves.

"Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit..." A. Bourdain "Butter...get the butter." Marlon Brando in "Last Tango in Paris"

I got some extraordinary divers scallops and fresh Belons shipped for Thanksgiving one year from www.shop-maine.com. The site looks a little cheesy (you can also get paintings of lighthouses and cribbage boards), but the fresh seafood people take their work very seriously and ship some great stuff.

Where's Chateaurenard? Once you visit the place, you find out how big Provence really is. I feel like we barely scraped the surface -- could have been all that surprisingly tasty pink wine we were drinking...

melkor -- We stayed in a house in Vaqueyras -- located half-way between its better-known neighbors Gigindas and Beame-de-Venice. We did a lot of market-hopping and I developed a definite preference for the smaller ones. We ended up going to Ile Sur-la Sorge, Vaison La Romain and Orange, which got a little old, eventually. They were too heavily touristed for me, though I guess the locals know where to park and how to find the cherries and fresh fish without stumbling through the "authentic provencal" cotton-poly tableclothes and the discount clothing. I stumbled accross Bonnieux and really liked that one -- 90% food, it seemed, and much lower-key. Next time I'll know to keep off the beaten track and I'll buy everyone a bottle of olive oil so I wont have to schlep from market to market for presents for the friends back home. Doesn't it always seem like you have to leave just when you get a place figured out? Of course, all that hot shopping (record temps, according to La Provence) does make that first morning beer taste mighty good. My wife even got my mom to have a pastisse at some locals joint in Orange ("Bar Victor Hugo", I believe). And it made swimming in the Ardeche all the more refresshing. Where do you stay when you go?

Fresh strawberries, only $4/kilo. Cherries from St. Remy. Cavaillon mellons, $2.50 a pop. Cured sangliere. Goat cheeses whose names I will never know. My son searched the market for perfect nectarines and claimed to have found them. Tomatoes, country baguettes, and haricot verts. And a very cold 1664 beer at the Brasserie l'Industry, where we stayed for the wood-burning oven pizzas to come out before we picked up the watermellons and napkins. OK, just bragging. Came back from vacation Sunday.

Olive oil with chili and garlic, for when I buy a ficelle and a salami down the street for lunch. A knife to slice the salami (or some cheese). Goldfish in bulk (stored scattered on the floor, I actually import them from the office kitchen downstairs); on a busy day it can look like a bizarre salmon run on my blue office carpet. Salt and pepper. Protein bars during odd cycles when I actually get to the gym regularly.

I like to blanch them then toss with lemon, olive oil and feta cheese, and spoon them onto crusty bread. In one cookbook or another, Alice Waters talks about the whole restaurant staff (even waiters!) gathering in the dining room to shell favas for the night's meal.

We eat at the table whenever we can -- four or five nights a week. Recently moved to having the girl clear the dishes and the boy wash them - it's like going to a restaurant now, only the food is better (sometimes). Eating in front of the TV is a guilty treat that we do every now and again, prefereable with carryout food and a lightweight video that appeals to across the 30-year age gap. Once, we decided to strip the wallpaper in the kitchen and moved all the kitchen stuff into the dining room. We spent a month (we got 2/3 of the way through the project and lost momentum) eating every meal on a table on our front porch, which was delight.

Of course Michelangelo, like most great and near-great artists, had to kiss a little ass, too, in his time. Popes, partrons, Nings, gallery owners, critics -- artists have been known to accomodate the whims and demands of the less talented because they don't find the starving artist image as romantic as non-starving, non-artists. Nothing like a flattering portrait of an industrialist's wife to pay the rent on the studio, and free you up to do what you really want. And that bourgeois commission can be art, too.

That's too late -- I need it cut by next Saturday, to make up for the slide in the dollar against the Euro.

Pan -- the difference betwen what you do and what a chef does, whether or not it is "art," is that it is impossible for you to custimize your work. You cannot stop, go back and replay a portion of a sonata differently for a single audience member and the go on. You cannot play something "wrong" for the picky customer in the back, and simultaneously play it "right" for everyone else. A chef can. And, since you present only one "meal" a night, you can't really make changes on the fly -- swiching from Sibelius to Beethoven, say, in mid-piece -- because the crowd is slipping away. A chef can change on the fly, though, if the veal is coming back uneaten. Your music is has a certain rigidity in the way it is presented, because it has to. On the other hand, there are many types of music in which the interaction between the audience and the musicians is critical -- they draw energy from one another and a jazz musician or good jam band will play songs differently every night, alter the set list, feature different musicians and instruments all based on immediate feedback from the crowd. Maybe they'll play the same refrain over and over again, in a dozen variations that touch different people and build to a frenzy. Maybe they'll get intellectual and play with rhythm and transform the melody. Maybe they'll just rock out. They're artists, too, but they understand that great art can accomodate both the genius of the artists and the visceral response of the audience. (Not to imply that "classical" musicians should adopt this approach, mind you).

Curious if people are pickier now than in my days on the floor. It was rare to get more than a single request for a significant change -- more than "sauce on the side -- in a single shift back in my day. I doubt kitchens got more than one or two a night most nights. Are line cooks today dealing with five or six special requests at a time, at rush?

I was in Little Rock once and asked around the hotel for a decent rib place -- playing to the local strengths, I hoped, as suggested earlier in the thread. Got a lot of lame recommendations, the HI Ribsters Fridays by the Tourist River Walk Underground Centre and the like. Finally, someone recommended a place in the "bad" (ie "black") part of town and a bunch of us hunted it down. Great ribs. Great juke box. Nasty beer, but served in BIG cans. And the hostess/owner/chef was as friendly as she could be. Not like those brutes in New York (if anyone's following that thread). So, don't ask the locals, interrogate the punks until they give you what you need. Don't take Olive Garden for answer, they're only telling you what they think you want to hear.

I guess if every chef had this attitude, we wouldn't have a thread. But -- not with you, perhaps -- there's still the sense that a single adjustment is a personal affront. It's as though a politician weren't satisfied with 60% of the vote -- he had to have every vote. I think the self-righteousness some chefs express irritates people much more than not being able to always get exactly what they want. That, and the inability to take even the smallest bit of what they percieve as criticism. In the rest of the world, people get negative feedback every day, and they either learn from it or disregard it. In all the writing about this, there's a lot of "get over yourself" in the pro-change group, and they have a point.

OK, given. Why the fit, though, when one customer out of a hundred dares to tinker, and say, "leave the huckleberry sauce off, I'll have the foie gras without it." Genius and megalomania, though often found together, are different. Is this a self-esteem thing?

1/4 salt; 1/4 black pepper; 1/4 cayenne; 1/4 garlic powder. Grill or blacken, serve with "avocado salsa" ie lumpy guacamole, made with avocado, line, lots of cilantro, and a little sugar.