From the Farm to Your Holiday Table

Merry Christmas!!! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday with family, friends and great food!

Earlier this month I started writing for my school's blog, The Hot Plate. Here's a link to the blog and my most recent post, so make sure to check it out!

http://blog.culinarycenter.com/2013/12/from-farm-to-your-holiday-table.html

Thank you for continuing to follow my journey at ICC, and see you all in 2014! Cheers and nom on!

A Field Trip for Foodies

During our second week of class at the International Culinary Center, we took a class field trip to the Union Square Greenmarket! The farmers market at Union Square is one of many markets in the city backed by Grow NYC, a non-profit organization that strives to improve the city's quality of life. The market is open Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday throughout the entire year. It was amazing to see all the different product that comes from local sources around NYC, especially the range of produce in the winter months. I have been to many farmers markets in my life, but this one was especially large, making it a very memorable experience.

As a chef, it's important to understand that great food comes from outside the kitchen walls. The Farm to Table program teaches us all about this concept, and I truly believe everyone should learn to eat and cook with more concern of where their food is coming from. Sustainable food not only improves a dish, but also improve the environment around us. As I continue my education at ICC in the Farm to Table program, we will have the opportunity to take many field trips around the city. I cannot wait to learn more from these field trips, as well as from the program as a whole!

My Saturday Filled with Snow

I woke up last Saturday with big plans to hit the town. I wanted to explore SOHO, as well as stop by a cooking store to pick up some items for class. However, when I finally rolled out of bed around 11:00 am (don't judge me, it was a long week of class), a blanket of snow covered the streets 21 floors below me. It was my first official snow in New York!

The snow didn't ruin my day in the slightest. I was actually even more excited to walk around the city knowing that snow would be falling around me. So I quickly got dressed and headed out the door. I jumped on the R train and heading up to Spring Street in SOHO. (By the way, I think I'm starting to get a handle on this subway thing! It's definitely not as intimidating as it use to be now that I have the help of Hop Stop.)

Anyways, a short ride and two stops later I was at Sur La Table. The store was packed with restless Christmas shoppers, but I made it through and collected what I needed. After seeing a woman wipe out on the slippery sidewalks about 2 feet in front of me, I decided it was time to head home.

At the end of the day, the city got somewhere between 4 to 6 inches. It was a beautiful snow, and I'm sure it won't be the last!

The view from my apartment...bring on the snow!

The park across from my apartment was covered with snow, yet people were still sitting on the benches, enjoying the beautiful winter day! I love this part of town.

Stocks, Soups and Emulsified Sauces...OH MY!

One of the fundamental techniques of any style of cooking is stock making. Stock even comes from the French word "fond" which means foundation.  Stocks are truly the foundation for numerous sauces, soups and dishes, so you can imagine I was pretty anxious for "stock day".

We started off making a brown veal stock together as a class. It took about 10 hours to cook before completion, but once it came out and we got to taste it the following day, it was beautiful. So rich in color and flavor from the sucs (brown bits), all I kept thinking was, "Did I really help make that?"

We then made a white chicken stock. We cleaned the chicken pieces, cut up the mirepoix and added the aromatic elements to a stock pot of water. After hours of skimming the fat and simmering, we drained the liquid, and another delicious stock was completed.

While working on these stocks, we also made a fish stock, a vegetable stock, as well as a marmite (a white stock made with beef and onion brûlée). Overall, it was an extremely busy day, but also a very informative day that was extremely interesting.

After stock day, we had a full day of sauces! We learned the five mother sauces: tomato, béchamel, hollandaise, veloute, and espagnole. This was also an important day as we were learning five classic sauces that have hundreds of derivatives sauces made from each. We made every mother sauce except for the tomato, and we added a delicious butter and wine sauce. We even added cheese to the béchamel and turned it into a mornay, then added it to penne pasta and had "mac and cheese" for lunch. Absolutely delicious! Sauce day was long and grueling, but again very fun.

Our espagnole sauce bubbling away! The picture is not so great because the soup desperately needed to be skimmed here, but it was a long process and I wanted to capture it in the making!

Finally at the end of the week we made emulsified sauces, meaning a sauce that has a binding element (ex. a roux, egg yolk, etc.). Some emulsified sauces we made included a classic mayo, a bernaise, and a delicious sweet sabayon. Emulsified sauces are very tricky for many reasons. For one, they are very temperature sensitive and can break very easily. They also take a ton of elbow grease...I've never whisked so much in my life! Even though they take a lot of work, nothing compares, and the final product is velvety and delicious.

I will be the first to admit, the first full week of culinary school was intense and challenging. However, it's amazing how much we're learning, and I cannot wait to learn more. Cheers, and nom on!

Chervil and tarragon for one of the sauces we made in class at the International Culinary Center!

A Bite out of the Big Apple and an Apple Vinaigrette

This past weekend was full of delicious food finds in New York City. To start, Friday night was rainy and cold, so I knew luscious Italian food would warm my soul. One of the best places to get authentic Italian food, as well as shop for Italian product, is Mario Batali's Eataly. It's basically the Disney World of Italian food, but it's also a great place to find authentic Italian dishes. At one of the restaurants called La Pizza and La Pasta, I had a crispy, think crust pizza with red sauce, buffalo mozz and fresh basil. It was so simple yet so delicious. I cannot wait to go back and try more.

I also enjoyed the Bengals vs. Colts game on Sunday at a small restaurant and bar on Fulton Street called 121 Fulton Street. I had never heard of or read about the place, but wanted to try it since passing by a few days earlier on my way to the market. Once I walked in, there was dim lighting and comfortable seating, along with countless televisions; it's a wonderful place to watch a game. The menu has a lot of typical bar food items (i.e. quesadilla, wings, etc.), but they are wonderfully elevated. The quesadilla was full of vegetables and juicy chicken, and the sliders were made with a crab cake, tartar sauce and sprouts. It was a great find right around the corner, so I'm sure I'll be back again, maybe when the Bengal's make it to Super Bowl XLVIII?

After a relaxing weekend in the city, it was back to school early Monday morning. We started the week off with a lesson on product identification. In other words, we learned countless fruits, vegetables and herbs, as well as how each enhance and flavor food. After many demonstrations from our chef instructor, we started cooking the classic French dish called ratatouille. This dish is a rustic stew of tomatoes, onions, red and green peppers, eggplant, zucchini and many other ingredients. The completed dish was deep in flavor and a wonderful balance of savory and sweet. My first experience with ratatouille was definitely a memorable one. 

Once we completed the ratatouille, we moved onto a more composed dish, roasted beet and goat cheese timbale with apple and vinaigrette. We used a ring mold to stack our roasted beets, then added a layer of goat cheese. We then topped it with a salad of frisee, parsley, chives and chervil dressed in a olive oil, shallot, tarragon, apple and white wine vinaigrette. It was incredibly fun to make and really tasty! The beets were sweet, and they paired perfectly with the salty goat cheese and acidic vinaigrette. It was really fun learning to make this dish, as well as round out our lesson on product identification.

Roasted Beet and Goat Cheese Timbale with Apple and Vinaigrette, delicious!

Tuesday was another full day and one of the hardest lessons yet because we learned the infamous tournage. Dun dun dunnnnnnnn! Learning to cut a seven sided, football looking shape out of a small vegetable is very tedious. Our chef instructor made it look so easy, shaping the bright orange carrot with ease! Then when it was my turn, they looked more like lumps of coal rather than footballs. We practiced on carrots, turnips and potatoes, prepping for our two dishes called garniture bouquetiere and pommes rissolees. The garniture bouquetiere is basically a traditional French technique to plate many vegetables, by themselves or around a protein. It was interesting learning how to cook all the different vegetables, especially since most were in tournage form. It was also a great learning experience for time management, since we were working on many different items all at once and they all needed to be hot for the final plate presentation. All in all, I feel like I'm learning so much at the International Culinary Center, and I love knowing the best is yet to come. Cheers, and nom on!

Garniture Bouquetiere...a traditional French technique!

Learning the City and the Kitchen

My first week in NYC has been busy to say the least! I moved into my one bedroom apartment in the Financial District, finally recieved all my shipped boxes of belongings, went grocery shopping (which if you live in the city, you know is an adventure in itself), and started culinary school at ICC! And of course ate at some amazing places along the way.

At the apartment with my first round of groceries...here goes nothing!

One of my new favorites in the city is Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten's ABC Cocina on E 19th Street. The dimmed restaurant and friendly staff serve tapas style, innovative dished created by sustainable products. It's a great place to try little plates of everything while you enjoy a basil, jalapeño margarita.

Another one of my early stops in the city was momofuku noodle bar on 1st Ave. It's one of David Chang's many restaurants in the city, and it's my particular favorite. Not to mention that David Chang also attended the International Culinary Center, so he has a special place in my heart. Anyways, it's a quaint little space, filled with people clawing for Korean pork buns and ramen noodles. I absolutely love this restaurant, so you can only imagine how excited I was when I learned that they take orders for pick up!

After some delicious meals and a full belly, it was finally Tuesday and time for my orientation at ICC. I was nervous to say the least. Meeting a school full of new people and starting a new program that I have limited knowledge in, not to mention knives and blistering ovens would be involved, can be very daunting. But after my four hour orientation, I was reassured that this is exactly where I should be.

We were told to meet at school at 8:30am on Thursday, ready to get our final few items and dress in our chef's coats for the first time. I kind of expected it, but my pants were too long, my coat too baggy, and I had no clue how to tie my neckerchief. But I threw it all on anyways and made it upstairs to the Level 1 kitchen. There, myself and 13 other classmates waited for our chef instructor to arrive and begin. Our chef instructor turns out to be a badass woman chef who has worked at some of the top restaurants in the city. I cannot wait to learn from her and hopefully be half as cool as she is one day.

The first class was especially exciting because as we approached our work stations, we noticed our brand new knife kits waiting for us. It was Christmas a month early! The rest of the class we took a tour of the kitchen, learned the proper French names for all of our equipment, and began to learn knife skills. By the end of the class, we even started cooking, learning to make pearl onions A L'etuvee and green beans A L'anglaise. By the end of class my dogs were barking and I had a growing blister on my finger from my hand clenching the chef's knife too tight, but honestly, I couldn't be happier to be in the city and learning to cook classic french techniques at ICC. Cheers, and nom on!