Salmon Belly.

Wind blown Oak trees with salmon ;) by the beach.

Last night I had friends over for a sushi party.  It was so fun.  We had an array of ingredients to use.  I think we made at least ten different rolls.  The one I was most excited about was pulled short rib that I braised in beef stock infused with soy.  Yum Yum Yum.  And I rolled it with aparagus, pretty typical but added fresh radish and my own radish sprouts.  Today I was prepping the mushroom tea for my underground dinners and had some nice maitake mushrooms that I sliced in cross sections which gives this beautiful shape just like the Oak tree where you can usually find it nestled.  I seared the cross sections with grapeseed oil and a touch of tamari.  I draped cucumber dressed in sesame oil and rice wine vinegar over them.  I also cut the tiny kernels from baby corn an dressed them a touch with sesame oil, fish sauce, salt, and pepper.  I added a mini quenelle of miso to the salmon, crisped up some skin in the pan that I had cooked the mushrooms in and added a touch of fermented beans to the plate.  The beans were a gift from one of my friends who got them at the Korean Mart.  She was very excited for us to try them.  It wasn't bad. I really like them with this dish.

Love It. Change It. Keep It. Rearrange It.

The same soy, brown sugar and lemongrass cured pork belly which just looks different than perhaps another picture you might have seen in an earlier post.  I didn't like the smallish cube cut so I decided to roll it nice and tight.  I also rolled the kombu-the true umami of the dish, rather than the spaghetti like strands I had cut in the beginning.  Whoa and with the skin cracklin really added great texture.  I also added a watermelon and miso emulsion to the dish which is dotted there in the background.  But I will be changing this dish for this upcoming weekend because I have a guest who has just had it coming again.  I change my menus so often and quite completely because so many of my guests are return diners and I like to keep them surprised.  I also have so many ideas I like to try and bring them to fruition and push myself to see what I can and can't accomplish cooking modern from home .  This dish will be replaced by brown spice cured veal sweetbreads with a pumpernickel breading, apple batons, oatmeal consomme, whipped cherries surrounding almond milk, pureed almonds, shaved white chocolate, cherry reduction and savory glass.  Now if I can get just the right plates I'll be all set.

Carrot cake gobstopper soon to be changed into a rhubarb, strawberry and pie crust gobstopper.  Holy moly this one is a tasty treat.  I always make extra so that after my guests have theirs, my staff and I can have ours.  Hello belly!  People don't believe I eat as much as I do.  Luckily I'm active and have a good metabolism.  But it's catching up.  Mental note-yoga.

                                      

And this dish again, which I'm just loving.  It shall be a menu staple for awhile.    It's really a great dish and a real show stopper, an excellent end for the evening.  One of my dishes that I've been able to get as close to it's original aesthetic conception, very proud to get there when I do considering my itsy bitsy tini wini kitchen.

Damn, this is a crappy shot of a cool dish.  I will eventually tackle food photography but until then this dish was a gem however I will change it a touch for the next round of dinners I have this upcoming weekend.  The prefix to this course is a king crab wrapped in mango which is hanging in a globe.  I've heard from the dining room, "why is that hanging," "that's strange," "that's so cool," "wow, pretty."  I think those are all great responses.

Chicken Fried Oh My Goodness

Chicken frying anything makes almost anything scrumptious.  I cannot lie, I love fried chicken.  When I worked at Table 52, Sunday was my favorite day because it was fried chicken Sunday's and at the end of the night there was usually some left over and even room temperature or chilled it was super tasty.  It's all in the brining and seasoning.  It's imperative to brine chicken if you're going to fry it or even cook it at all, at least at the restaurant level, maybe not at home.  But anyways, oooooo, it is good.  Just this morning I was reminded of it when I woke up and saw that Chef Art Smith was following me on twitter.  Hmm, so I followed him back and told him I missed the fried chicken.  I thought about mentioning him bringing Oprah over to one of my dinners but I decided against it.  That would be so cool though.  And Gale too, she'd be invited.

So speaking of chicken I made a chicken liver pate the other day for one of my dinners and spread it through a stencil which says, "XPLICIT," and we play Busta Rhymes along with the course.  It's also served with a hand cut pasta in a butter and black truffle sauce.  For a dinner I had a couple days following I decided to roll the pate into a torchon shape and chicken fry it.  I served it on the bottom of a shot glass as a single bite with a pickled onion and mustard seed sorbet with watermelon rind.  This dish has several plays of traditional charcuterie elements, southern picnics, and pate en croute....
This is what I do to chicken fry.  I coat whatever I am using in corn starch and tap off the excess starch.  But remember to have your chicken, fish, pate, whatever it is seasoned, brined, etc first.  Then I make an egg and buttermilk mixture-two egg yolk and about 1/2 cup of buttermilk, more or less depending on how much you are frying.  I coat my elements in the egg mixture.  Then I have a combination of all purpose flour, fresh thyme leaves, cayenne pepper, salt, black pepper, garlic and onion powders (in this case I didn't go heavy on the last two powders because there was black truffle in my pate and it was served with the onion sorbet which was strong as it is so I didn't want to over power).  So I take the element, the pate, from the egg and roll it into this flour and spice combo.  Once it's coated I put it back in the egg mixture, coating it again, being careful not to lose my seasoned coating and then I put it back in the flour spice combo again.  Essentially I want two layers of this last seasoned mixture bound with the egg.  I fry it at 350 till it's golden and crispy.  That's it.  The tricks of chicken frying are in your seasonings and brinings.  Have fun with it but not too much fun because it's not the healthiest cooking method and it's addicting.  Oh and especially if it's a liver pate.

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.