Chefs for a Day

Not a day goes by I don't think of something special, funny, or delicious I experienced in France.  One of the highlights of my trip was cooking in a restaurant kitchen in Paris.  I've been waiting for just the right moment to tell you about it and finally that moment is upon us.

Kelsy (who you may remember guest blogged here about those delicious sloppy joes!) was searching for cooking classes and stumbled upon an opportunity of a lifetime.  She told me about Un Jour Un Chef's concept...   Vouz vez les recettes, nous avons le restaurant (you have the recipes, we have the restaurant).  This means that we'd get to work in a professional kitchen with professional chefs who would help us execute our own menu!  My immediate reaction was that it sounded terrifying, but something that we had to do, and would be reminiscing about forever.  The next thing I knew, we were planning our menu with an American food theme and writing a bio that would be posted on their website along with our menu. We were locked in for June 1st.  We wanted to represent classic American food (which I hear is a growing trend in Paris right now) with a home-made, dressed up spin.  

Our menu:

spicy fried chicken strips 

on a green salad with herb buttermilk "ranch" dressing and cornbread croutons

Petits beignets de poulet épicé sur lit de salade 

bourbon and beer BBQ marinade pork ribs 

with green bean casserole and fennel garlic mashed potatoes. 

Ribs de porc caramélisés bourbon/bière, sauce BBQ, haricots verts à l'américaine

red wine brownie, carrot cake cupcake, and peanut butter cookie

Brownie, cupcake carottes et cookie au beurre de cacahuètes 

Les chefs du jour!

Kelsy and I set out early for a  coffee and croissant as we imagined what our big day would be like.  Giddy with excitement but not sure how much we'd get to do, or how everything was going to work we quickly headed to the restaurant after breakfast to make sure we'd be on time!  We arrived at the restaurant at 9 a.m. to find Ludovic, one of the chefs who would help us all day, putting away vegetables.  He showed us where to put our things and where to find chef jackets to change into.  Chef Jackets?!  We were in the big time now.  Very official.

 We got right to work in the kitchen, which was tiny by the way, chopping vegetables.  We were set free at the counter,where a long magnet stocked with knives hung along the wall at eye level.  We set to work on a large pile of potatoes, fennel, mushrooms, and onions.  Then, Ludo left us alone to finish preparing the pork ribs, which had been marinading over night.  It was here where we quickly picked up on the rhythm of the how this day in the kitchen was going to play out.

We got to work and the work didn't stop until after lunch service when everything was clean.  But it didn't feel like work since we were having a ball!  

As you know, I love to chop things, so this was a comforting way for me to get my bearings in a kitchen  where I didn't speak much of the language. The food was the one way I was certain I could communicate what I was capable of.  I really appreciated how we were trusted in the kitchen and nobody was overly concerned as to just how were were cutting the mushrooms, only that we were being safe.  Our second chef arrived, Pauline, the pastry chef/sous chef who spoke some English.  Between that and my limited French and Kelsy's translations, it was smooth sailing. 

we chopped giant bag of onions

While the chefs were not hanging over our shoulder at all, they were aware of what we were up to the entire time.  Every so often, we'd hear "les filles, cava?" (girls are you ok?) to which I'd reply "tres bien chef! oui!"  They loved to teach and share their love of cooking,  and stop to give us a good kitchen tip now and then.  They also never wasted a minute.  Every time we ran out of vegetables to chop, something new to do arrived in the kitchen as Ludo seemed to disappear every few minutes to retrieve ingredients or run a quick load of dishes through the dish machine. 

  

pork ribs marinating

green bean casserole!

After about 90 minutes of chopping vegetables, Kelsy and I prepared our chicken for the salad.  This included making a spice mixture, dredging and frying the chicken strips.  Then in came Ludo with a huge pile of fresh herbs for our ranch dressing.  Kelsy and I tried to get this dressing to a beautiful creamy consistency by whisking buttermilk but it just wasn't working.  We added cream cheese and mascarpone to the buttermilk and herb mixture, but it just wouldn't thicken.  Then Pauline stepped in and saved the day.  She taught us to mix the thinner liquid into the thick liquid to get the right consistency.  Ah-hah!!

I didn't get a picture of us making the chicken, so here is Kelsy stirring a gigantic vat of our mashed potatoes!!

At about 11:30 the restaurant manager peeked into the kitchen to see if things were ready to taste before lunch service began at noon.  When we finally got everything together, he tasted our dishes. 

"wee!! they liked our food!"

First the salad, then the pork, then deserts.  Every time we presented our dishes, which Ludo and Pauline showed us how to plate exquisitely (and instructionally since we'd be preparing each plate during service!!) , Eric would taste and we'd anxiously wait his reaction. 

"yesssss!"

It was nothing but mmmmmmmmmms as he shared it with the rest of the staff.  Our ingredients were prepared and our dishes had passed the taste test!  We were open for business.






It seems that this restaurant, which seats around 40-50 diners at a time, was a lunch spot for locals. They could choose any dish from our menu, the chefs menu or a traditional menu. 

As soon as customers began to arrive, Ludovic began calling out orders in the kitchen, "deux entrees du chef, un plat du chef, !"  It was time to work!  Funny side note here... in French, the appetizer is called the "entree" which threw me for a loop since in America the entree is the main dish... but  thanks to Kelsy I figured out that when he said entree I needed to make my salads asap!

So the service continued for two hours.  Orders would arrive, Kelsy and I would heat things up and plate them, place them in the window for pick up and hit the bell... ding!

DING!

 

 

Kelsy plating the ribs, potatoes and beans.  I think that I was one drizzling the sauce while holding the camera with my other hand!

The four of us worked in harmony during the busy service and whenever there was a lull, Pauline put me to work preparing the deserts as they were going to be flying out of the kitchen any minute!  

At the end of lunch, the manager called us into the dining room.  There sat six people finishing the last crumbs of their dinner and when Kelsy and I appeared out of the kitchen they started to applaud.  I took a little bow and said "merci, merci!" while Kelsy and the diners started having a conversation in French.  I tried to follow along, but the words began to flood together as my mind wandered and I took in the moment in.  Here I was, with one of my best friends, in France, having just served our American themed lunch to Parisians.  My feet hurt, my chef jacket was utterly food-stained but my heart was soaring.  


Find out about more Un Jour Un Chef here.  If you are ever planning a trip to Paris, I highly recommend this as an adventure.  It's free, but they really put you to work for the day!  It was fantastic. 

Kelsy has also blogged about our experiences on her blog A l'Americaine.

Les gourmandes!!!

An Extraordinary Cooking Adventure

When I was living in NYC with Jordan, she got a job at a restaurant called Market Cafe.  It's a little neighborhood gem in the  Hell's Kitchen area that had amazing, gourmet yet down to earth food.  This is the place where I really started to get into simple, but delicious and thoughtfully prepared food.  On my limited City budget, this place was affordable, it was one of those places where you could spend a lot if you ordered certain things but could also walk out there completely satisfied for under 15 Bucks, and having an "in" allowed me to get some free food from time to time too.

When Jordan moved to France, it became a meeting place for mutual friends to stay connected without her.  Every Wednesday night, for several months we'd dine at Market Cafe and catch up.  I looked forward to this camaraderie over dinner every week.  I also looked forward to the food.  If you ever travel to NYC, make sure you have dinner at Market Cafe, you will not be disappointed. 

My most favorite dish at Market Cafe still remains the scallops.  My mouth still waters just thinking about them.  Next time I visit NYC I will surely stop by for the scallops.  It is the kind of treat that my mom still reminisces about, because I took her there a couple of times when she visited.  They were  swimming in brown butter  served on on a bed of potato puree, and greens.

Jordan and I recreated the scallops dish and several others on Monday in her tiny cottage kitchen.  It was a massive culinary undertaking, I mean, we taught ourselves to sear scallops, baked two cakes, and made two varieties of bread!!

les cuisinières audacieuses

les cuisinières audacieuses

I missed the cultural experience of going to le poisonnerie, because it was closed that morning for a holiday... so we bought our fresh scallops at the supermarket, who had a special person dedicated to the seafood section.  The scallops were around 1 Euro a piece.  We bought 10, one for our trial run of searing, and 3 per person at the table (her partner, J, was a very fortunate beneficiary of our cooking adventure).

raw scallops

We looked up how to sear sea scallops on the internet and voila, it wasn't that difficult, though, they were delicate little things that could have been overcooked very easily... so not difficult, just required attention.

here I am trimming off the "feet" of the scallops, which is actually its muscle

our trial run scallop!

During this cooking adventure, we made tons of brown butter.  It really added a depth of flavor and richness to the dishes.  We used it for the scallops and one of the cakes.  :)

FRENCH BUTTER!

voila: the nutty, brown butter

I will let the photos describe the rest of our adventure, but first, here is the menu: and some links to the recipes.  Bon appetit!!

Jordan & Allison's Triumphant Recreation of Market Cafe

first course: sea scallops on q bed of mashed potatoes with brown butter and mache
second: green salad with oatmeal pumpkin bread and pumpkin hummus
third: baked flatbread "pizza" with potato puree, rosemary and green olives (i didn't get pictures of this as the excitement in the kitchen was at a maximum while it was being prepared, the photography fell by the wayside.)
desert:  brown butter banana cake (adapted from this recipe) AND amazing chocolate cake

mixing up a cake with this cool springy whisk we picked up at the le marché the other day (best impulse purchase ever)

batter for the brown butter banana cake

Can you tell how excited I am?!

This meal was a great way to reminisce about our days of life in the big city, while we bonded over our mutual love, as adult women, of cooking for friends and family.  Life doesn't get much better than this.  As I said as we finished our small pieces of cake...  Nous avons une belle vie!

We have a beautiful life!

Au Marché des Saveurs & Couleurs

A Market of Flavors and Colors 

Here I am in the South of France and my belly is full of the wonderful regional products that my sister and I purchased in the morning at the Saturday market in Sommières.  (here is a video that shows the market aka le marché) in action.  In America, local, artisinal, organic, from-scratch and DIY are buzzwords reflective of the style of food that is coming back in fashion (thankfully) and often used as marketing and a reason to jack up the prices (boo); but here local, organic and DIY is normal and often less expensive than the supermarket.  The market sells everything from cheeses and spices to baskets and mattresses. 

I bought one of these awesome market baskets, you will see me toting it around DSM when I get back.

The typical foods of the region are plentiful.  Being so close to the Mediterranean, there are plenty of olives (les olives), one of my personal favorite snacks.  From my first trip to France, I fondly remember eating the olives from a gentleman who had several giant barrels of olives cured in different ways.  He was very kind (he did not disappoint this time either) and I was charmed by one barrel of olives in particular that was labeled "my father's recipe".  They were slightly spicy with peppers and pimentos. 

Me & The Olive Guy

We also picked up some sausage (le saucisson) prepared in the charcuterie fashion, all different preparations hanging around, literally, in the open air. And oh, the cheese stands.  Heaven!!  Knowing there is no shortage of cheese around to be eaten meal after meal, snack after snack we decided to take it easy and only get two kinds.  A nice soft goat cheese (le chèvre) a specialty of the Cevennes Mountains nearby and a sheep's milk cheese called beaufort des montagnes.

Platter of regional delights from the Languedoc-Roussillon: the sheep's milk cheese; saucisson, bread bien sur!!, the chèvre and the olives.  Bon Appetit!!

I probably don't need to tell you that everything was delicious.  But, yes, it was. 

I continue to eat too much and enjoy every bite. 

Allison Says: Au Revoir, Kitchen Table!

There will be no weekly menu for the next few weeks.  I'm setting up an auto-post about the roasted chicken but I might not be writing a lot in the coming weeks because I am leaving for France on Tuesday night!!  I will be spending a week in the Languedoc-Roussillon region near Montpelier in the South of France then taking the high speed train North to Paris to spend time in the city as well as in Normandy.

I hope to blog about some of my French culinary adventures while I am gone. Some will be about eating and some about cooking.  I have plans to do a lot of both while I'm there. I also have some plans that I am just so excited about I can't even describe them accurately... yet!

Stay tuned.

Au revoir mes amis! Bon appetit!!

Allison

Guest Post: Kelsy's Romantic Dinner

Dear Readers, I'd like to introduce you to one of my best friends...

Kelsy and I have known each other since high school when we thought that Taco John's was the pinnacle of good food. My how things have changed. She's living in France now where food is serious business. She's working on a plan to bring the popularity of the food truck trend to France. You can read more about her cooking adventures on her blog. She wrote me an e-mail describing her romantic Valentine's dinner making the Bombay Sloppy Joes recipe I've posted here on Kitchen Table Friends a few times. So I asked her to share her take on turning a messy, unromantic dish into a nice evening for two. Take it away Kelsy!!


 This is my first time guest-posting on Kitchen Table Friends! Thank you to Allison and Cara for having me. My goal in the kitchen is to constantly reinvent, from modernizing classics like roasted turkey, grilled cheese, meatloaf (coming soon!), etc. to completely new flavors, winging it. I love the idea of passing recipes along to one another, and seeing how they evolve. So glad to be a part of it!

I'm not a romantic. I'm not the girl that tells her partner she loves him everyday, or every time we're on the phone together. I think that romance, and love, should mean something, and that hearing those words over and over again makes them less special. I certainly don't expect my boyfriend to get me flowers on Valentine's Day. Why this day? Why not on March 21st, just because? Romance, for me, takes form in the simple and mundane everyday gestures that we accomplish day in and day out. It's knowing that I'm with someone that cares about me more than anything, and loves me unconditionally. I don't need roses or chocolates or *shudder* cutesy stuffed animals to prove that to me. Jérôme knows me pretty well. Aside from our first year together, we haven't ever celebrated Valentine's Day together, unless you count the time a couple of years ago that we both went in on a Nintendo Wii, calling it our V-Day gift. Plus, who wants to waste time and money going out to a crowded and sub-par restaurant on this occasion, when you could be cozied up at home, drinking cocktails made with the magic of recently imported Guadeloupean rum and home-made ginger ale? Or nestled on the couch between your loved one and your adorable cat, dreaming about your next vacation? Or in the kitchen, working together to prepare a fun and delicious meal that has nothing to do with hearts and pink roses and candy but just, us? All I really wanted for Valentine's Day was good food and good company, and that's exactly what I got. Knowing that Jérôme doesn't care about Valentine's Day either but wanting to cater to his tastes (in honor of the day, why not?), I concocted a simple man friendly, America meets India meets Italy, home cooked meal that I knew would please both of us.

Gingery cocktails (an aphrodisiac is always a hit with the guys!). Fresh, crisp coleslaw. Sloppy joes with a twist. Garlicky baked baguette. Hand-cut french fries. These, my friends, were the keys to his heart.

fresh, crisp coleslaw (recipe found here)

The idea came to me around 4:00 p.m. yesterday while I was at work. After a few text messages back and forth, Jérôme popped the question: "What's for dinner tonight?" I sheepishly responded that we had the choice of leftover curry potage, leftover crustless quiche with salmon, or leftover chicken with tomatoes and ginger. As usual, he didn't really seem to mind, but something about the day made me think that it couldn't be leftovers.

My brain did a quick scan of what we had in the fridge: ground beef. I'd already made meatloaf the week before... And then it hit me. I knew exactly how I would win him over: with something he had no preconceived notion about, and would likely find odd (he is French, afterall), but that would blow his mind. It didn't hurt that I, being full of preconceived notions, was also dying to put my own spin on this "classic." I immediately knew what would go with these sloppy joes: coleslaw (because I love it on a sandwich) and hand-cut french fries. Not to mention that the sloppy joes were to be served on garlic bread. Made from fresh baguette.

It was the perfect romantic evening: as I began browning the vegetables for my sauce, Jérôme seductively helped me tie my apron on. As he was cutting the french fries, I snuck up behind him and kissed his neck. As the ingredients were slowly simmering together, we enjoyed a very ginger-and-alcohol-packed fizzy drink and laughed until our sides hurt. We stared at each other from across the table as we attempted to eat our sloppy joes in some sort of civilized manner, and laughed even harder when we were both covered in spicy red sauce. The rest is history.

Spicy sloppy joes Inspired by Bombay sloppy joes from the Food Network (and recommended by Allison!) and Bolognese sauce from Smitten Kitchen The recipes for the coleslaw, frites and ginger ale cocktail will be coming soon on alamericaine!  

Ingredients: 1 kg ground beef (for leftovers!)
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 large carrot, finely chopped
2 T olive oil
1 roasted bell pepper, seeds and skin removed, diced
3 cloves of roast garlic, roughly chopped
3 cloves of fresh garlic, finely chopped
4-5 T smoked paprika
3 T ground ginger
1 inch piece of ginger, finely chopped
2 T ground cumin
1 T piment d'espelette or other mildish chili flakes
1 T crushed, dried chiles
1 T sea salt 3/4 T pepper
3 T tomato paste
3 C red wine
1 T ketchup
2 T honey
2 T brown sugar
4 roma tomatoes, blanched and skin removed, roughly chopped


If you can, you should try to take your time with this dish. My sloppy joes were finished in about 2 hours total. Start by heating your olive oil over high heat in a very large skillet or dutch oven. Add your onions, carrots, gingers and garlics, and cook about 15 minutes, stirring often (if not constantly) and browning the vegetables. Add the bell pepper, spices, salt and pepper. Cook another five minutes or so, before adding the ground beef. You want to really brown it, without burning of course. Lower the heat slightly and keep an eye on it; you can probably safely start preparation of your side dish while waiting for the meat to cook through (it should burn less easily than the vegetables). Once the meat is thoroughly browned, turn the heat down to medium-low and add the tomato paste. Don't hesitate to taste the mixture and adjust the spice levels now. Add in the chile powder and flakes, along with the brown sugar, honey and ketchup. Let this mixture thicken slightly, cooking for about five to ten minutes more. Now it's time to add the blanched tomatoes. Give it another few minutes before adding the finishing touch (other than minor spice adjustments), the red wine, starting with two cups. This will give the dish that extra something, and brings a lot of body and flavor to it. That's it! I turned the heat down to low and let this just barely simmer for about another hour after the last step. You can add extra red wine depending on how much sauce you want in your sloppy joes, just remember to let it cook another 15-20 after the last addition. Bon appétit!