Last Day

Last day of work tomorrow before I move to China to start teaching English, eating awesome Chinese food every meal, every day, and hopefully staging at a few local restaurants (learning to make la mien tops the to-do list). As always, it feels weird to be parting, probably forever, with a place that I have become part of and has become part of me. So many great friends made, good and bad times had, many things learned, and of course a few new scars (including one big keeper). Whenever I'm in this situation, I always promise myself I won't lose touch with the people I'm leaving behind, but it always seems to happen anyway.

A huge part of my life and my identity, gone after tomorrow.

But sometimes to have a new beginning, you have to start with an ending.

Brussels Sprouts + Mint

At work, we've been roasting brussels sprouts with mint and garlic and using it as the garnish for a sunchoke soup. Brussels sprouts and mint is the kind of surprising combination that tastes obvious.

Twisted Fish

I was fileting rockfish today at work, and came across one specimen whose body bulged out unnaturally behind the gills and then narrowed into a comically skinny tail, giving the fish cartoonish proportions. I figured immediately that the poor guy had had some kind of spinal problem, but its exterior appearance didn't fully depict how twisted the backbone would turn out to be, twisting and contorting in all directions. My first reaction was to anthropomorphize the thing, telling Tameka that other fish had probably made fun of this guy in the high school locker room because of his scoliosis. Then I got to thinking about how the nature of the spinal problem. Whether the defect was genetic or due to some trauma (I can't escape the image of a young little fish slamming into a wall at full speed and collapsing into a snake-like S shape forever), the problem must have arisen early in the fish's life, because its tissue growth was so bizarrely warped. Maybe the little guy's growth was slowed because of his spinal problem, which would mean that he had to survive in his farm much longer than anyone else in his weight class (which is how fish are sold in the business). Or maybe that was ridiculous. Who knows. In any case, thinking about that fish's life reminded me about how little I think about the many animals I butcher every day. It seems that it takes an exceptional animal, which is to say one with some sort of defect, to make me think a little about the lives these creatures lived.

Yay Bread!

Using this recipe and this mixing technique (the French Fold), I made some beautiful rolls and a braided loaf that was not quite as perfect. I was hoping the folding technique would make kneading feel less onerous, but I still got bored and frustrated at times. Perhaps with practice...

Also, the pastry chef at work and I have started a little series of cooking competitions with each other. Of course, as the first contest I proposed an item straight from the sweet side of cooking: cinnamon rolls. Needless to say, hers came out much better than mine, though I was pretty happy with my results and I learned a lot from watching her work (which was the whole point for me). Lessons learned: proof the rolls right up against each other and the walls of a pan to limit the outer surface area, which will get dryer and brown; put some brown sugar-cinnamon mix under the rolls so they get extra-gooey; baste with lots of butter that white glaze is important to the overall cinnamon roll experience. I actually preferred my bread to hers because it had a little chew, whereas hers was almost like cake. I used this brioche recipe, which I must try again, but only with a stand mixer: the dough took forever to mix, and was very stiff.

Duck Bacon Results

At work on Saturday, I pulled the duck legs out of their cure and smoked them. Total curing time was 12 days, first in the Ruhlman/Polcyn basic cure for 5 days vacuum-sealed and then 7 more days in a mix of equal parts by volume white sugar and salt with added brown sugar, garlic, and whole coriander, allspice, and black peppercorns, this time in a normal ziploc-type plastic bag. After the first cure period, I thought they weren't fully cured, so I decided to do another week in a cure with the brown sugar and spices that I didn't have time to add on the first try. I didn't have pink salt on hand, so I didn't vacuum-seal the legs for fear of botulism, but from the interior color of the final product I suspect nitrite penetration was quite thorough after the first week.

After 12 days curing, the meat was quite firm, slightly translucent, and wrinkling at the edges. The legs got rinsed, patted dry, and left for an hour to air-dry in the walk-in while the smoker got going. I hot-smoked them over hickory for about an hour and a half, but I think the smoker was only producing good smoke for about 45 minutes to an hour of that time. First I turned the burners under the smoker (just a deep hotel pan rig we use at the restaurant) too low and then fat rendering from the legs dripped down onto the woodchips, effectively forcing me to abandon the smoker and finish the legs in a low (250F) oven for another hour or so. I gave the legs a sniff before I put them in the oven, and the level of smokiness seemed appropriate, so I wasn't unduly worried.

After the duck came out of the oven, I crisped up a few small pieces and it was FANTASTIC. The smokey flavor was perfect and well balanced with the intense meatiness and saltiness, with the brown sugar taking the delicious up another level. I was slightly worried about texture, since duck legs sometimes get a dense sponginess if not cooked long enough, but the texture of even the un-crisped meat is pleasant - dense and a bit chewy in a good way. With some crisped skin and fat thrown in - the ratio of meat to fat is also excellent - these legs are really a great eating experience.

I'm still trying to think of good ways to feature this stuff in our family meals - pasta carbonara and pizza are the only things that have come to mind thus far.

Fresh Whole Wheat Pasta

Inspired by all the fresh pasta making going on around me at work every day. In this case, meditative was the flip-side of tedious.

Recipe.

Duck Bacon

12 duck legs are in Ruhlman/Polcyn's Simple Cure (recipe here), hopefully I'll get to smoke them on Saturday, when there's more space in the kitchen. The last few Saturday's we've done more elaborate projects for family meal, and I hope to keep that new tradition alive.

On the home front, I've got a few pounds of pork belly I bought at a Chinese market in Rockville curing in the fridge for pancetta. I'll hang it somewhere on Saturday.

Turning Point

DC Restaurant Week for me was a crucible of 6 13-hour days in a row. I had no idea what to expect, what my mise was going to be, or even which days I was working (pretty much all of them, as it turned out). The only thing anyone would tell me was that we were doing 200+ covers a night. This fact was relayed to me constantly by chefs, cooks, dishwashers, and food runners alike, with only the shades of dread and/or schadenfreude varying by source.

The Restaurant Week pickups were designed to be dead simple and blazing-quick. I had to deal with just four different proteins, all of which should either be already cooked or extremely fast to cook. Inevitably, hiccups arose and the whole endeavor turned into a slightly more complicated beast, but not by a degree that made it unmanageable. Nevertheless, by the end of the second day I was exhausted. The shear amount of new information and procedure, as well as the unusually hectic atmosphere of the kitchen, took its toll on me mentally. Of course, on Day 2 there's no stopping and there's no end in sight, so I just had to grit my teeth and dive in every morning, then slam some energy drinks before service.

Somewhere in the fray, I turned a corner, stopped being depressed and angry, and started performing acceptably. My mind cleared up a bit during prep and I was actually ready by the time we opened. I have no idea how that happened, but the energy drinks definitely helped.By Friday, service was boringly easy and heaping on another day of work didn't faze me. My sous-chef even went from being constantly frustrated with me to only being intermittently pissed off. Now I'm just hoping that week was a real turning point, not just a statistical blip.