To Hunt or Not To Hunt

The daffodils begin to peek through the frozen soil, suddenly robins are spotted (only to get shat upon), and for me that means morels are right around the corner.  For some people that means shootin wild turkeys.  The only thing I ever thought about wild turkey was drinking it and feeling not so good but now I'm thinking about killing them.  The only shooting I've done before is beer bottles on my grandparents farm.  I've never been so sure that I could kill an animal, however with eating them so much, and loving to be resourceful with all my foraging and the tough economic times it's starting to make more sense to me.  So this Spring I will be hunting.  Maybe when I get there I will not do it and instead search wildly for morels (cause they love those game preserves).  Or maybe I'll shoot a turkey, cry a little and behind those tears a wild madness will emerge and I'll become a cold blooded hunter.  Either way I'd like to make some pastrami/corned wild turkey leg sandwiches with cream cheese on homemade sage and brown butter bread.  I will certainly keep you posted.  I'd love a deer but my God they are so beautiful and big, not that turkeys are not beautiful in their own way... Oh well, you know what I mean.  This will be tough.

Kitchen Practice

Shrimp, cucumber with cuke "angel hair," in rice wine vin, radish, spinach and lime.  I created this dish because I wanted to practice something I had read about which was to mix Activa with the shrimp then vacuum seal it and pound it out.  I had tried this several other times, cooking the shrimp first then cutting in thin slices and rolling out between plastic wrap, slicing thin, freezing, on and on.  This pounding method, raw, in the food saver baggie was one thing I didn't think of.  Great result.

Same dish-another shot.

This one was created in a similar way but I cut the shrimp differently... The main ingredient of this dish, the avocado, was pounded out in a similar fashion in the food saver baggie but no Activa and was frozen (another technique I read up on).  I took it out of the freezer to just temper a bit and assembled it while partially frozen or else the avocado will just become mush.  Before I ate it I let it warm.  There is also the addition of dulse seaweed, radish spouts (courtesy of moi) and quail egg-one of my new little obsessions.  I love them.

In this pic I cubed the shrimp.

Today I wanted to practice my chiccaron skills.  Lately I've been working on making a Westmalle Trappist Dubel and Oyster "cracklin," or chiccaron.  I can't seem to get it just perfect and aerated enough but I'm continuing to work on the recipe... However in the meantime I thought I would practice by first better understanding the fundamentals of true skin chiccarones.  I cleaned the skin as good as possible, vacuum sealed it and then cooked it sous vide at about 140 for 30-50 minutes, something like that.  Then I let it cool, removed it, and scraped the skin a bit more until all that was left was skin.  It's sticky, beware.  I dehydrated it at 160 for about 2 to 3 hours, until completely brittle, and then fried it in canola oil at 375.  They were perfect, so good. Again, I put the salmon skin with quail egg, salmon roe and cocoa.  I used this flavor combo because I'll be having a similar dish on my Spring menu but that dish will be a little more elaborate and hopefully I can get Shad roe!  This is really a fun flavor combination.  

Shrimp Noodles.

I spoiled myself with lunch today!

Wd-50 and the man behind it, Wylie Dufresne, was the creator of shrimp noodles (as far as I know) but it is certainly one of his claims to fame.  Using about 95 percent shrimp, activa and a couple other ingredients... When I was staging one day at Schwa they were making scallop noodles: blending the seared scallop with 10% activa, white wine reduced with shallots and garlic, then piping it out onto silpats in long noodle shapes and then allowing it to set.  Last summer I decided I wanted to put a shrimp noodle on my menu with a primavera style, right, but I don't have the kitchen space to put those large sheet trays of noodles so that they can refrigerate and set however I did attempt the noodles and with my Kitchen Aid blender-did not succeed.  You really need a vita prep for this it seems.  Now I have a borrowed vita prep courtesy of my Aunt Barb but after some research as well as thought I've figured out another way to go about making the noodles.  I'm not sure that I get the most refined look-a challenge to work on for this week, but I did get a great tasting shrimp noodle expressing the "point."  I blended about 20 raw shrimp with a pinch of kosher salt and enough reduced white wine and 1/2 a small shallot and about 10% activa to get a nice blended, smooth mixture.  Then I put all of the mixture into a food saver baggie, vacuum sealed it and then pushed out the shrimp mixture flat as could be to all corners (I think next time to get a thinner noodle I will use a bigger baggy or less mixture).  I allowed it to sit for 36 hours then I cooked it sous vide for about 6 minutes or so in 130 degree water.  A good indication that it's done will be a nice pink color.  I allowed it to cool, opened the baggie and then sliced the noodles thin and even.  I reheated them gently in an emulsified butter and water mixture, buerre monte, and then added sauteed garlic, shallot, white bread crumbs, toasted quinoa and finely chopped spinach.  This was a fun way to have that old Country Lounge Shrimp Scampi.

Dining In Literature.

November 5th 2002, I remember bits and pieces of that day clearly.  It was an election day.  When I got my coffee that morning I stopped on the street to chit chat with a co-worker about voting.  I think that was back in the day when people had Obama signs for Senate in their lawn.  That afternoon I headed off to work at Trio in Evanston a bit early because my motorcycle had broken down on the way to work the day before and I was meeting with a tow truck.  I was waiting by my motorcycle eating a yogurt covered granola bar.  It was chilly.  I was tired.  A couple nights before I had gone to a post Halloween party with Michael Carlson from Schwa who worked with me at Trio at the time and a couple friends from work and I still really hadn't recovered yet.  The tow truck came and picked up the bike and I headed to work.  We really hadn't started to get too much into service that evening.  That was back in the day when Chef Achatz was just beginning, you know, I loved working with him so much because I loved the passion and creativity he applied to his work.  I think it was the first time I really worked with someone who was doing what they were absolutely destined to do.  He is and was very inspiring.  So anyways not too much later my manager came up to me and told me I had a phone call.  Immediately I knew something was wrong.  I didn't have a cell phone yet so of course they would call my work but my friends and family knew not to call me there unless it was an emergency.  Well it was, my oldest sister who was 39 at the time passed away.  I supposed I remember all those minute details of the day cause as time went on I tried to time what was happening with her that day as I was passing through mine and the actual not knowing that simultaneously someone I loved so much was transitioning.  It's eerie.  Well, at the time I had just changed majors in school from Chemical Engineering to Fiction Writing.  It was quite a change but I was unhappy with engineering and I think it was my time at Trio, seeing people do what they're meant to do which made me realize I should do something I believe in.  I always loved reading and writing and I actually got into Chemical Engineering from having read Jitterbug Perfume, a book my oldest sister lent me when I was 12.  Well, anyways, grief stricken I plowed into the writing.  As an assignment for class, I don't know what the assignment actually was but I know what I did...I turned the entire dinner scene in To The Lighthouse into play format.  My professor at the time loved it.  This was the beginning of dining in literature for me.  I've always loved writing and the restaurant industry but didn't see restaurant writing or criticism as an option for me considering I liked fiction.  And however it's tough to become a fiction novelist.  I tried a myriad of things after college to support myself while writing, from continuing to work front of the house positions at upscale restaurants like Alinea, etc, to even real estate. But I always ended up back in the restaurants, always having a dream of someday owning my own restaurant and being a writer.  I remember the day Henry Adaniya of Trio interviewed me.  He asked me why I was in this business of restaurants, 22 at the time, having been in restaurants since I was 15, a single young independent lady with a small voice probably sounded funny saying, I want to be a chef and writer and have a restaurant someday but I think that's what got me the job.  He had this knack of seeing the potential in people.  Anyways, I transitioned to the back of the house when I knew getting my novels published would still be ways away and I couldn't afford going to grad school to teach writing so that is when I began my business, One Sister.  The duality of the name: one based on sustainability-that I started a garden and wanted to incorporate everything I grew or foraged myself into my foods while also obtaining as much as possible locally and organically so that I could respect our earth as I think it respects us-call it hippie-ish or whatever (it's true).  And two: One Sister-for my sister, who beyond the grave has basically guided my life.  That's what sometimes grief does to us, makes us who we are.  And I just got into all that to explain a fun dining adventure I'd like to do beginning in May, after I take my week off of work, traveling and camping the woods for morels, is to have once a month a dinner that is extracted from a piece of literature.  So often I'm reading thinking, yummm, sounds delish!  Well.  It'll be an abstraction and sometimes a dead on recreation of the meal.  The first one will be To The Lighthouse since I'm so familiar.  It's a great meal and a fun location so I think I can do a lot with it and so on.  This is just for fun, no pretension, blah blah blah.  Hope to have some of you.

Oooo Mommy.

Bacon and eggs or land, sea, and sky, all about umami...this dish has several concepts.  48 hour cure of soy, brown sugar, and lemon grass on pork belly.  Soy, lemongrass, ginger, shallot, caramelized sugar, carrot and chili flake braised kombu and wood ear mushrooms.  Hard boiled quail egg.  Crispy ice fish.  Rice wine vinegar pickled watermelon rind.  Braising liquid reduction and a pork and lemon grass consomme which is not pictured... This dish is one of my new favorites.  I served this over the weekend.  It was a new dish for valentines but I will move it to the winter menu.  I just love it.

Earth Is The Title

Beets, Chocolate, Dandelion

Whenever I first conceptualize a dish I don't often get to bring it to completion the first couple times I make it due to putting together such extensive menus alone and serving each dish only 4-6 times a month.  Lately I've been pushing, even with my limited space to bring my dishes closer to the originals.  However I do get to make them delicious even if they are not always as originally intended and it seems that the first night I put out this dish my customers gobbled it up.  It was a traditional egg custard infused with dandelion, a chocolate sauce, beets cooked sous vide, a chocolate molasses cake crumble, and a beet and red wine vinegar gastrique.  The original concept looks more like this dish pictured here but is still missing elements. It was originally to be served to each guest on a large, somewhat flat stone, there was to be the addition of tufts of cotton candy adorned with flowers and baby beet leaves and the beet itself was to be a collection of multi-colored baby beets.  Since I buy from local farms or whole foods I don't always get the product I originally intend for so I have to go with the flow.  And I honestly couldn't afford stones at this time but I do what I can.  This dish is a beet-sous vide, cylinders of chocolate cream topped with vanilla salt, a beet and red wine vinegar gastrique, a cocoa, cashew, butter, and sugar crumble "soil," a dandelion sorbet and candied beet slices.  I had some excellent guest over this weekend.  I actually always have wonderful guests and the compliments just flowed in.  It felt really really nice.

Lucy In The Sky With Leopard Tights and One Shoe.

The cutest little red head who's mother said something like, "We were going to go to whole foods then I told Lucy One Sister is going to have her pierogi at Green Grocer, so she wanted to come here."  Freaking awesome.  It's things like that, people like that, which make all the pierogi pinching and arduous hours make sense.  Not sure if they know, or if they ever read this, but that made my day!

Inception.

It must have been my writing about mushrooms yesterday and sending out my news letter saying that I will soon be dreaming of mushrooms which led to my dream last night.  I planted the seed.  I dreamt of crawling around the forest floor in search of morels.  Lucky me I found tons.  They were very small but I wrote the coordinates of where I was, set up camp and waited for a few days until they were the perfect size for cutting.  Twenty pounds.  That's a damn good dream!

Beserk For Mushrooms

Noma, voted the best restaurant in the world by San Pellegrino's list of top 50, is Nordic.  And surprisingly there are many other restaurants in Denmark, Sweden and the like that are very avante garde and recognized world wide.  I mean of course we should know that Sweden is a forerunner in style and creativity, after all we have Ikea as an example.  However trips to Ikea, especially when it's with my girlfriend, who I love, still makes me think, "what has become of my life?"  No offense, it's just not my thing.  And then there's Andersonville...Oh how Ann Sathers, Svea, Simon's, Wikstroms and The Swedish Museum with all the hunting/Pippy Longstocking/Dala Horse imagery would really culture and enlighten us on the brilliance of those up there with much longer winter months than we could imagine.  I think it is those winter months, just like the great Russian writers, Dostoevsky in particular (who I always reference when I say crass things, that you have to be in the mind of the evil to write about the evil, or something like that), that unleashes the creative juices.  Either you create or you suffer in the gray and white months.  Ok so where the fuck am I going with this...?
The Norse Warriors, The Berserker Vikings, believed to have taken large quantities of fly agaric mushrooms which made them "berserk."  Fly agaric mushrooms look just like the houses that the Smurfs lived it.  It's the mushroom that most people probably imagine when the word mushroom is said.  It's from the amanita class, mostly poisonous, however it would take very large doses to be lethal.  Anyways maybe it was the mind expansions of the Berserkers which later led to the natural mind expansions and creativity to those artists thousands of generations later.  Just a thought.
And on a side note Maitake, in Japanese, means Dancing Mushroom.

Green!

What a lovely color to drink on such a white cold winter day.  This is it people, I'm convinced, an elixir of life other than that lovely shittake.  Ok so, while in Key West I stayed with my partner's aunt's friends on a boat.  They sell vitamix blenders.  A blender I have wanted for so long but cannot afford to have (my aunt just lent me hers because she only used it to grind coffee). Whoa.  Well this gentleman who was the boat's captain, his name is Mike, was telling us of how he got into the business of vitamix and all the wonderful things it does to fruits and vegetables, pulverizing their cell walls to release something like 90% more nutritional value that usual.  I would have just smiled and nodded as I do when people give me stats, considering possibilities, however, he sold me when he said he was sixty, his hair was coming back, his eyebrows turned from gray back to black, he lost twenty pounds and went from his trifocals to CVS reading glasses.  From that day on I have supplemented one of my meals with one of these lovely green drinks and since all other vices have flown except for coffee I think I will live to 1,000.
The elixir, even if you don't have a vitamix or vitaprep you can use your blender.
10 green grapes, frozen
1 inch slice of pineapple, outside removed, core intact
1/8 cantaloupe, seeded, skinned
4 big leaves of kale
dime size bundle of cilantro
1/4 lime, intact, skin, pith, all
1/2 orange, peeled
6 frozen peach slices
1 whole green apple, seeds, skin, all
5 baby carrots
Enough water, orange juice or other tasty juice (pineapple, coconut water) to cover the blade.  Blend the hell out of this and prepare to be healthy!

Sketched Menu Is Up.

This is the Valentine's Day Menu.

I hope if you haven't gotten a chance to come to my underground dinners that you will for Valentine's Day.  It's going to be a nice intimate setting with tables for two rather than the communal table I usually have.  This is a sneak peak at the menu!  It is going to be much more fun to experience it in person.  Wine will be included.  Dinner for two with fourteen courses will last approximately 3 hours from start to finish.  Sometimes when I have large parties, tables of twelve, those dinners take more time but this seems to be the perfect amount of time to spend with a loved one, experience fun food and nice wines.