Tag Archives: meat

How I fed 15ish people

The Occasion: I was hired by a repeat customer to cook for a dinner to feed 15 people. I don’t know if it ended up being that many or more, but the food was a hit and there was plenty of it!

The Menu included bread, 4 dishes for the meal plus dessert and I was told to keep things somewhat light, highlighting the spring season.

Salad: Arugula, Purple leaf lettuce, watercress, mesclun, pickled red onion with a scallion oil and white balsamic vinaigrette and shaved aged cheese.

For the salad option, I like to blend greens for flavor, color and texture. Pickled red onion was actually my dad’s idea, and it ended up being the perfect pop of color dotted throughout the salad. Instead of the slivered pickled onion you normally see, I diced mine and added a small handful of rhubarb to add some depth and help keep the color a deeply rosy pink color. As for the aged cheese, I used grana padana and galmasano, the spanish equivalent to Parmesan, just to keep things a little more interesting yet cost effective.

Bread: My tried and true no-knead focaccia, with a generous layer of chopped spring onions and fresh white pepper cracked over the top just before serving.

I worked on this recipe for years before finally getting it down to an easily repeatable process, and it hasn’t failed me yet! I’ve been using a Spanish blend of Picual and Hojiblanca olive oil from a brand called Zoe and it’s been giving me delicious results.

Main: Spatchcocked Roast Chicken with lemon curd piped under the skin after curing in the fridge for 2 days.

I used scissors to cut out the backbones of 4 large air chilled chickens from a supermarket near me. The choice of air chilled means there is less water surrounding the chicken and thus will season itself a little quicker in the curing process. I used a piping bag once the skin was seasoned and nicely firm to get the salted lemon curd under the skin all the way to the hard-to-reach parts. After roasting, there was nice caramelization across the skin due to the sugar and eggs in the curd. The meat came out perfectly cooked and the skin was nicely caramelized.

Starchy Side: turnips and sweet potatoes roasted in chunks under the chicken with nutritional yeast, salt and white pepper.

I cut the root veg into roughly 1″ chunks and tossed with a little salt and nutritional yeast before placing the chickens on top and roasting.

Veggie Side: Carrots and Edamame on top of Golden Herb yogurt

To help with ease of prep, I took 1 and a half bags of baby carrots and quartered them, along with 2 bags of shelled frozen edamame. I cooked them in butter, nutritional yeast, white balsamic vinegar, a pinch of sugar, a pinch of salt and a pint of richly reduced chicken stock that I made from the backs of the chickens. For the base of golden yogurt I mixed turmeric, umeboshi vinegar, chopped tarragon and dill, salt and nutritional yeast for a deeply flavorful and bright yogurt sauce. Guests were scraping the plate to make sure every bit of it got eaten!

Sauce: Caper Beurre Blanc

I reduced white balsamic, caper juice, chopped shallots and a couple stems of tarragon until the vinegar was nicely thickened and slightly syrupy. For service, I added a half cup or so of heavy cream, a few tablespoons of capers and I mounted in a half stick of butter, adjusting seasoning for taste with salt and white pepper.

Dessert: Cherry Rhubarb Compote with Cornmeal Crumble and Burnt White Chocolate Chantilly

The compote was simple, just chopped rhubarb, a frozen mix of sweet and sour cherries, sugar, agave, salt and white balsamic. I cooked it down until everything was well broken down and tender.

The cornmeal crumble really came out more like a giant soft cornmeal shortbread, which I’m not mad about. Melted butter with Jiffy corn muffin mix, spread across a glass baking dish and baked until golden brown.

For the final component, the cream, I caramelized some white chocolate in a saucepan and then cooled and beat it into some softly whipped cream with crème fraiche until everything was stiff and rich. This whipped cream balanced the whole dessert perfectly with its richness, tanginess and toasted marshmallow-esque bitterness.

All in all, the meal turned out very well. There was plenty of leftover chicken, turnips, sweet potatoes, beurre blanc and focaccia, which is how I like it. Plenty of food for everyone to have enough of. I’m glad I was given the opportunity to cook for a return client.

De-Elitizing High Quality Food

The year is 2024.

Consumers are scrutinizing what they put into their bodies more than ever. Regular, middle class people are actually caring about how they eat, going so far as to label certain ingredients as “toxic” based on advice from non-experts on social media, and further blacklisting a ton of seemingly inconspicuous products because they can’t pronounce a handful of the listed ingredients. These people needlessly fear mongering over “seed oils” and other superfluous buzz words only do so because they can afford to. Meanwhile, the rest of us have become practice dummies for the greedy corporations to crank prices up to see just how much stress they can put on the working class beneath them. The real issue isn’t antibiotics in your chicken, it’s the fact that a lot of people can’t afford anything but the cheapest option in the meat section.

I’m all for caring about this side of processed food, and holding a magnifying glass up against greedy companies pushing “health food” to people desperate for nourishment. More than ever has it become clear that a lot of the mass-produced foodstuff that we see advertised as wholesome and healthy are really just a branding exercise on how deeply misinformed so many of us are about food. In terms of fresh produce, prices are unsettling to say the least. We can tout “eat organic” all day, but when the organic onions are almost 50% more expensive than their non-organic counterpart ($1.69 for non-organic vs. $2.49 for organic), it feels like less of a “rule of thumb” and more like a luxury most available to those who are ahead financially.

I understand the concept of making more money and rightfully being able to provide yourself with a better quality of life. Love it or hate it, that is the reality of the capitalist society we live in. I would be pissed if my raise in pay ended up not showing in how well I can live for myself. However, it should affect things like your brand of sneakers, the size of your TV, or the maker of your car, not the quality of your necessary provisions. After all, from early childhood onward we are told that god himself wants us to have access to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Obviously that “life” isn’t guaranteed, the “liberty” has become a shrinking list of shit choices, and the “pursuit of happiness” has been reduced to a desire to achieve what others have, rather than an actual path upward in life.

I’m not saying that everyone needs organic everything all the time. I’m not even saying the organic issue is the most pressing part of our food system here in the USA. What I am saying is that eating healthily shouldn’t be a luxury. Having access to clean, well processed meat and poultry should be expected in the “richest country of the western world,” without exception. Our cultural obsession with always getting bigger and faster and more profitable has officially undermined our ability to properly provide for ourselves, and even when a company comes along to provide that service, it’s typical, sooner or later, for that small business to sell-out to the highest bidder and rid themselves of the headache of operating a business like that as a non-corporation. And the cycle begins again and again. “We want our high quality product on she shelves of every grocery store in America,” is what we hear time and again from local mom-and-pop brands on the come-up. The American Dream was never about creating a better America, it’s been about winning at life. And now it’s not even about that, it’s become more about just getting to the finish line of line with you and yours intact and nothing more. Don’t worry about your neighbors getting screwed, just keep your head down and make it to the end and you’ll be just fine.

I don’t know about you, but I want better for my fellow American no matter how differently they look, think, or vote than me. Better starts at the bottom with strong integrity of individuals, and I fear that we may never return to that type of strength. Yes, an 80¢ difference in onion prices seems insignificant. It’s a minute difference that a lot of people won’t notice, but it is a sign of something that’s wrong with the priorities of our leadership.

Yes, I think everyone at some point in their lives should experience the taste of a perfectly ripe, in-season tomato. Yes I think that sort of experience can convert seasonal produce detractors to agreeing that local, seasonal produce might be good for our communities, even if a little more expensive. But that’s the difference in that sort of thing. Produce like that is a luxury right now for a disturbingly large majority of our populous, not an expectation.

My goal is not necessarily to make the absolute best version of every single dish or idea. My goal is to make the best version of things that can be made just as well for a family who eats produce exclusively from Walmart-Mart or any other large-scale chain grocery store with mediocre produce. I used to easily get caught up on specifics like particular ingredients and brands. I used to get very frustrated when people didn’t take specifics like that as seriously as me. Now I know that technique, intuition, and the ability to adapt are the most important aspects of cooking, and the world would be a better place if everyone had that capacity.

The Demonization of Washing Meat

It’s funny to see so many chefs that are blown away by the concept of people washing their meat. “If you’re buying chicken that seems like it needs to be washed, you’re already fucked” is what I heard most recently, and it got me thinking; Not about why people wash chicken, but why so many people have a problem with it. Though food standards are good enough at this point in time that washing chicken is technically unnecessary, the tradition still holds strong for many households of color. 

The reason behind this is an unfortunate one, but one that more people aught to know. For decades, there has been fear in colored communities that the people that don’t want them to live where they do sabotaged products and services in their communities to get them to relocate. In sociology there is a concept that states “if one defines situations as real, they are real in their consequences,” and that means whether these communities were sabotaged or not, they believed that they were, and acted accordingly. Washing chicken is a byproduct of overcoming adversity and doing what one needs to keep their family as healthy as they can. Not to mention the fact that many don’t have access to cushy Whole Foods meat sections with their corporate-friendly overly sanitized kitchens and meat cases.

So let me ask all the chefs that scoff at home cooks for washing their meat: If generations of your family felt that they had to wash their chicken so it would be safe to eat, and there wasn’t a trusted-by-you food-handling professional there to tell you not to and explain the reasoning, wouldn’t you wash your meat too? “That’s unsanitary, it spreads chicken particles everywhere” I hear so many cry as they judge behind their smartphone screens. Has noone ever heard of a wipe down? Surface cleansing wipes for the surfaces around the kitchen? If kitchen cleanliness in these situations leads to people getting sick, the cook probably would’ve made a similar mistake in the case that they didn’t wash their chicken. 

It’s time to stop assuming and start letting people prepare food how they and their families have prepared it for generations. It seems many are mistaken believing that it was a “trend” around the mid 20th century, and that big names like Julia Child, Betty Crocker and James Beard were doing It in their own kitchens based on antiquated food cleanliness practices. This whitewashes the early struggles of a marginalized America, which is a regular practice in the US’s culinary zeitgeist. This information is out there, we just don’t see enough white chefs acknowledge this practice as traditional and not foolish. 

Wash your chicken if you want. Simply pat down the meat with a paper towel if you want. But whatever you do, don’t demonize a whole culture of people just because you don’t get it.