Roux and Lament

So, life kind of exploded on me.  In a good way, really, but an explosion is an explosion and now I’m hip deep in chaos.  That’s ok.  I’ve got a knack for chaos.

As you may or may not be aware (I really never have any idea who reads this.) this man right here is going to be a father come October.  October 19th, theoretically, which would put his/her birthday exactly one week before mine.  That means that right now I’m getting ready to buy my first house at the same time as I’m getting ready to have my first child.  That also means that, right now, I’m working two jobs for the first time in my life.  That does nothing to distinguish me from the majority of working cooks in America, in my experience.  Cooking jobs generally don’t pay well enough to support a man, let alone a family, until you start to reach the upper echelons of the profession.  Nearly all of the cooks I’ve worked with have second jobs, either helping out with catering or with side gigs as private chefs or even just pulling down shifts on the line at a second restaurant.  In fact, I’m sure any of them who are reading this are wondering why I even bother to point this out.  It’s just how it is.  Let me address them for a moment.

Cooks, you may not be aware of this, but there are gigantic swaths of the population with entirely different work schedules than what we’ve become accustomed to.  Not only do they get EVERY weekend off, but they often even get to GO HOME EARLY ON FRIDAYS.  Also, get this, they spend their entire workdays sitting down in CHAIRS.  No, seriously, they’ve all got these swively little padded office chairs that go up and down with a little lever and that recline when they want to relax, and those office chairs are in front of computers that they do their work on.  Hell, bunches of them only spend about three quarters of their workday doing actual work.  I mean, there’s a computer right in front of them!  You think anyone notices if they minimize Excel and pop up Youtube?  I know several people who have watched entire SEASONS of tv shows at their desks.  Yes, this is what a large portion of the working world considers normal, so if what I’m saying about our profession sounds a little obvious, just try to remember who I’m talking to.

So I’ve got a good friend who’s a caterer who is in the process of opening up a little cafe of his own in Sterling and I’ve been spending as much time as I can helping him out after I finish my shifts at Tuskies.  I’ll open the grill at 8:30, be out of there by 4:00, and then spend from 4:30 to 9:00 working at the cafe and prepping for catering events.  Last week I doubled at Tuskies on Tuesday and Wednesday, opened Tuskies and went to the cafe on Thursday, opened Friday and then catered all day on Saturday.  In five days I worked nine shifts.  It sounds like a lot (to THEM, cooks, not to you.) but I’m really starting to get used to it.  I keep reminding myself that this extra work is putting a roof over my baby’s head.  That helps.  In my mind I imagine a little red needle on a dial going from 0 to Down Payment on a Mortgage and every little bit makes that needle tick up a little more.

Meanwhile, my home life is a little crazy.  Pregnant women in their first trimester have a lot of weird food aversions.  For a while there, any kind of cooking smells would send Anna running for the hills.  This put me in the entirely off-putting position of being unable to feed my wife for the first time in the last seven years.  For all of that time, it is no exaggeration to say that the lion’s share of her caloric intake was prepared by my hands.  Then, without warning, that was stripped away from me and suddenly her nutritional needs were being filled with Lipton instant chicken noodle soup and Kraft Easy Mac.  I don’t know how to explain how weird that’s been.  When you knock up your wife, the nurturing and nesting instincts all kick in full blast.  I want to make sure she has her favorite foods and that she doesn’t get hungry and that she’s always got enough pillows.  Hell, I’ll turn on the tv, find a marathon of Reba re-runs, tune it in and leave the room.  She’ll find it eventually.  The moment I start chopping an onion, though, I’m suddenly doing more harm than good.  She has no idea what triggers her food aversions and what doesn’t from day to day, so half of my attempts to bring her food home from work wind up getting eaten by my roommates and I when she discovers that she suddenly doesn’t like scallops.  Or she’ll love something one day and be completely unable to be in the same room with it the next.  She has no control over it, so there’s no way to keep up with it.  I am a COOK, God damn it!  Feeding the people I care about is what I do!  That is my bone deep, basic function on this Earth, and here is the person I love more than anything in the world, carrying my child, and I can’t even give her dinner.  It has made me feel so helpless.  Thankfully, it seems like we’re finally getting through that phase as we enter the second trimester.  It’s been rough, though.  I’m not sorry to see it end.

So a few months back, before getting through the holiday season became the only thing I could think about, I did a beer dinner with Chef Patrick.  At the end of it, after the desserts had been sent out but before we were called in to talk to the diners, in that little lull, we got to talking with one of the managers about what other beer dinners were coming up.  He started ticking off a list of breweries and dates and when he got to the Troegs dinner in February I voiced my enthusiasm for their beers and for that dinner for what must have been the thousandth time since I had learned we were doing an event for them.  Sick of my incessant chirping, they replied with something along the lines of “Jesus, Jason, why don’t you just do the menu for it?”  Needless to say, I latched onto that idea and refused to let go with typical zeal.

I started checking in with the manager every week or so to see if he knew what beers we were going to be serving for the dinner.  The first couple of times he just said he’d get back to me.  A dozen times after that, though, he reminded me that we had a long holiday season to get through before I had to worry about that and that I’d may as well just shut up, put my head down and get through it.  That was the end of that, until the morning of January 1st when he walked by me while I was tending the omelet station and I took the opportunity to resume my interrogation.  Eventually he yielded our Troegs contact’s information to me and I set out to figure things out for myself.

As soon as you show up for a beer dinner at Tuskie’s, you’re handed a beer.  It’s called the “Greeter Beer.”  It says “Hello” and makes it very clear that for the duration of the evening, you will not be thirsty.  I was hoping to get Troegs’ Sunshine Pils for this, as it’s as light and refreshing of a pint as you could hope to find anywhere, but apparently it’s a summer seasonal.  We ended up going with their Hopback Amber instead, which isn’t as light as I would have liked to start with, but that was a pretty mild setback.  On the other hand, Nugget Nectar was about to be released and it looked like we were going to be able to get our hands on some.

I wanted to start out the dinner with something fun.  Our mad genius of a grill cook, Ricardo, had been playing around with these chorizo-poblano-cheese poppers that we were either cornbread battering or just breading with cornmeal, depending on whether we wanted a crunchy or a corn dog vibe.  They’re spicy and cheesy and the poblanos have a great flavor and I thought they would pair really well with Troegs’ Pale Ale.  I think that’s a really underrated beer, by the way.  I mean, Troegs in general is a pretty underrated brewery, but their Pale Ale should really be getting more attention.  It’s crisp, hoppy and refreshing and something I’d be happy to relax with a pint of any day.  Troegs tends to be more well known for their seasonal releases, but their Pale Ale is a year-round workhorse that I’d love to start seeing in more stores.  We wound up taking the poppers and flattening them slightly so that they were in the shape of a small crabcake.  That let us put a little pile of pico de gallo on top of each one and we finished it off with a bit of a cilantro ranch on the plate.

Ranch dressing, or any derivation thereof, is a tricky thing to make.  People have some very specific ideas of what ranch dressing should taste like and if what they get doesn’t make them think “Hidden Valley,” they tend to be disappointed.  I started out mimicking our chipotle ranch dressing that we have on the menu, but omitting the chipotles, obviously.  Once I’d tinkered it into a semblance of ranch-yness I started pureeing cilantro and whisking it in until the whole thing was getting bright green and herbal.  I ended up being really happy with the result, even if I don’t know for sure if I would have identified it as a “ranch dressing” if I hadn’t known ahead of time.  I was told that tasted delicious with the beer, and that’s really all that matters to me in the end.

The course after that was going to be paired with their double bock, the Troegenator.  That’s a big, full flavored, malty, 8.2% abv monster that I knew I had to do right by.  I decided I was going to go creole.  I’m a big fan of dirty rice, as I am of most dishes containing any kind of organ meat, and I thought all of those dark, rich flavors would be a perfect compliment.  We planned to top it off with a little bit of shrimp etoufee and leave that at that.  It’s always hard not to overcomplicate things for these dinners.  With the money that people are paying to be there I always feel like I need to show a lot of work on the plates.  That’s an instinct that I need to fight, though, because I truly believe that the best food is often the simplest.  A nice pile of dirty rice, a couple of jumbo grilled shrimp and an ounce of dark, spicy etoufee sauce with a few sliced green onions was all that needed to be on that plate.

On the other hand, we followed that with a chicken Tikka Masala.  My love of Indian food is well documented and I wanted to do something a little more authentic than would normally be expected from a modern American style restaurant.  We do a very nice Tikka Masala sauce that we use from time to time, but I was convinced that I needed to reinvent the wheel.  I broke out my trusty copy of 660 curries, made a trip to Global Mart for ingredients and set out to see what I could make.

Part of any curry experience for me is all of the accouterments that go along with it.  I really feel like my raita is top notch but I’ve never been able to make a really good mango chutney.  I turned to one of my favorite Indian food websites, Sify.com, for advice.  Sify is a website that provides news from India to English speaking users.  Its user base appears to be made up of mostly people from India who have moved away and want to keep up on what’s going on at home.  Their food section is a collection of recipes submitted by their readers.  I was turned onto this by an office co-worker from India years ago and ever since I’ve checked Sify any time I needed good, basic Indian food recipes.  It’s not a resource for complicated, restaurant-style food, but if you ever want to see what thirty different families do with lentils when they want a quick, Wednesday night dinner, it’s the place to go.  A search for mango chutney came back with a few dozen hits and I finally decided to try a coconut-mango recipe that sounded good.  It was pretty simple, which is always a good sign.  Dried shredded coconut, processed fine, mixed with a paste of fresh mango, dried cane sugar, green thai chilis and some spices like cumin and coriander.  The flavor was great, but the texture wasn’t exactly where I wanted it, so I brought it to a simmer on the stove to smooth it out a little and added a bunch of fresh diced mango, so it would have chunks as well as being a puree.  The end result was something I was really happy with and that I would love to keep around the house for curry nights.

The Tikka recipe itself was a lot more involved.  A lot of Indian meat preparations seem to involve a yogurt marinade, which was how this started.  Strips of breast meat were coated in a mixture of yogurt, dried spices and about thirty other things.  Seriously, I think about half of our spice rack went into that marinade.  The next day, when we were selling leftover chicken Tikka as our Square Plate Special one of the servers asked me what it was seasoned with.  My brain started trying to remember what had gone into it and promptly shut down.  It gave the chicken an amazing tenderness, though.  The sauce wound up being made with many of the same ingredients, along with a mixture of tomatoes, raisins and nuts, all pureed together into a vibrant, velvety sauce.  That and a glass of Nugget Nectar made for a very satisfying third course.

After that, the main course was a mini-tenderloin of seared, chili rubbed beef along with a celery root polenta and some sauteed spinach with apricots, cherries, hazelnuts and pecans.  It was being paired with Troegs’ Java Head Stout, so we made a Java Head bordelaise to go with it.  Moochie had taken this course from the beginning and did an amazing job of it.  The beef was perfectly seasoned and was a beautiful medium-rare all the way through.  As usual, he refused to come out and take a bow with the rest of us, no matter how instrumental he was in the production.  I made sure to give him some props, though, especially since that beef was considered by many to be the best dish of the night.

At this point in the conception of the dinner, I ran into a problem.  You see, I had had something in mind ever since I heard that we were going to do a Troegs dinner.  That was the dessert course.  One of Troegs’ best beers is their Dreamweaver Wheat.  They sell it at Wegmans, thankfully.  Pick a pack of it up and give it a try.  It’s light, it’s wheaty, it’s got those hints of banana that you always seem to find in a wheat beer and it’s got just a little bit of clove in the aftertaste.  It’s not my personal favorite of their beers, but I can appreciate it as being an excellent example of the form and I know a few people who absolutely swear by it.  My plan was to have our pastry chefs downstairs whip me up a banana creme brulee.  Then I was going to seal up a pound of sugar in a plastic bin with a handful of cloves until the sugar absorbed all of the clove flavor, the way people do with vanilla beans to make vanilla sugar.  Brulee the banana custard with the clove sugar, pair it up with the Dreamweaver, and I figured I had a can’t-miss dessert.  One of the best parts about it, in my mind, was that for once we weren’t going to end the beer dinner with the heaviest, sweetest beer or barleywine that the brewery could give us.  We were going to end things on a light, crisp note and it was going to be perfect.

So the manager takes me aside a few days before the dinner and tells me he has one concern with my menu.  It’s with the dessert course.  I assured him that I had taken a trial batch of the custards and paired it with a six pack of Dreamweaver and that the results had been stunning.  He asked me if I had pounded a stout beforehand.  This took me back for a second.  Of course, I hadn’t.  “I wish you had,” he told me, “because there’s a reason we go from the lightest beers at the beginning to the heaviest beers at the end.”  This is, obviously, Beer Dinner 101.  Once your palate has been blasted by the biggest and best that a brewer has to offer, any of their lighter, gentler brews are going to taste like nothing at all.  I didn’t want to abandon the brulee/Dreamweaver combo, though, so what I needed was a palate cleanser.  Something small and refreshing to bridge the gap between the flavors.  I knew that our TuskCorp affiliate, Fireworks, still had some of Troegs’ Mad Elf left over from the Christmas season and we started talking about what we might do with it.  We thought about maybe doing a Mad Elf granite, or a Mad Elf sorbet, but eventually decided to make a Mad Elf syrup and use it to garnish a small scoop of lemon sorbet.  Mad Elf has a lot of cherry and honey tastes so this seemed like a good fit.  I got one of their large bottles and reduced it down to about half a cup.  The flavor of the Mad Elf was very prominent, but I didn’t think it was quite sweet enough so I threw a handful of dried cherries into the simmer, let them steep for a while, and then blenderized the whole thing.  The flavor was nice, but not quite sweet enough and didn’t have a syrupy enough texture to do a good drizzle so I whisked in a little bit of honey and found the end result to be just what I was looking for.  We thought about garnishing it with a little bit of basil chiffonade, but wound up just keeping it simple.

Somehow, miraculously, this all ended up going according to plan.  Chef Patrick had been out administering to the needs of Fireworks 2 in Arlington so all of the prep for the dinner was done by myself, Moochie and Joaquin.  Still, everything was done when it needed to be done and it all got plated and sent out.  The chicken Tikka ended up being a little more complex than would have been ideal.  When you’re throwing together 40 plates, every little element counts, so when you’re going “Rice, chicken, sauce, raita, chutney, naan” and you’ve got five hands crisscrossing each other getting everything on there, things get chaotic quickly.  I couldn’t have been happier with how everything came out.  Anna and some other friends were out in the dining room providing me with a steady stream of feedback via text message so I knew exactly how everything was hitting the diners as the night went on.  Everyone seemed really happy, and the guy who came out from Troegs said that he loved the pairings and that he could tell that a lot of thought and work had gone into them.  Eli told me that during the dessert course he saw a couple of people take a sip of the beer, a bite of the creme brulee and then a sip of the beer again and then close their eyes.  I mean, what else could I want?  I really put my heart into this dinner, and people got that.  They could taste it.  I don’t know what could be more satisfying than that.

It’s January 4th, and the holiday season is behind me.  In the past, back when I was a normal person, this was a time of year that was marked by a certain melancholy.  The tree taken down, the New Years revelries recovered from, and an entire season of celebration packed back away neatly in a cardboard box in the attic for another year.  When I got off work on Sunday, though, I wanted to sing and leap and dance through the parking lot.  Sunday brunch was officially the last, dying gasps of the holiday season as experienced through the restaurant and I could not be happier to see them go.  Starting the Friday after Thanksgiving, I have been in a death spiral of ever increasing volume.  Almost every day was busier than the one that had preceded it in a steady escalation that ran straight on through New Year’s Day.

Now, it’s entirely normal for me to get home from a busy day on the line and say “I got my ass kicked today.”  It’s a useful phrase.  It neatly encapsulates the pounding feeling you get when the orders are coming in faster than you can work them and you’re desperately trying to get everything plated when it needs to be plated at the same time as you’re firing all of the things you need to fire.  You’ve got a grill full of chicken, burgers and flank steaks and you’re reheating three meatloaves and trying to get them ready to go out since they’re supposed to be going with a shirmp and grits that sautee had done two minutes ago and it’s sitting there, steadily un-freshening on the pass, but you’re running low on mashed potatoes so you run to the warming cabinet to get another third pan of them and you slam that into your steam table and burn your fingers getting the meatloaf plates down since they’re piled up to a bare inch below the plate heater and all the while more and more tickets just keep chattering their way out of your printer and expo yells for you to throw on three more burgers and JESUS CHRIST as many chicken breasts as you can find room for since the 12-top of health conscious ladies in the garden room all just ordered chicken salads and so you get that on and get back to plating up the meatloaves so that long-suffering shrimp and grits can finally make its way out to the dining room and you turn back to the grill just in time for expo to ask you how that RARE FLANK STEAK is on the grill and you realize that its been on for way longer than it should be and you’ve got to re-fire it but everything else for the ticket is ready to go RIGHT NOW and it feels kind of like a punch in the stomach.  When the line gets on top of you, it beats you up.  It just keeps hammering and it doesn’t stop until all of the food is out and once you start getting behind it just gets worse and worse and worse until you can get on top of it again.

I’ve found that once things start getting really busy, I just don’t have time to read my tickets.  I’m not the only one like this, so I think it may just be universal.  That’s what the expo is for.  He’s the guy on the other side of the pass who is also getting copies of all of the tickets and is lining them up nice and neat on his side and making sure everything for every one of them comes up hot and at the same time so they can all go out at once.  Once the point is reached where a cook has too many things to do with his hands and he no longer has time to pull tickets and read them and prioritize them, the expo starts to really come into play.  He’ll start saying what to fire and when to fire it and telling you how many of each thing you need to have on the grill and let you know what items are for the next ticket coming up.  This seems to be referred to as “going verbal,” although I’m sure there’s a less verbose, probably coarser term for it than that, but “going verbal” works for me.  Now, during all of this, the tickets keep on chattering out.  The printer perforates each one, but doesn’t separate them.  This means that the other day when I lost my stuff and went verbal for a good forty minutes, at the end of it I had a perfect visual representation of how badly my ass had gotten kicked that day.  This took the form of a stack of connected tickets a half an inch thick.  Here’s a picture of it, snaking it’s way from my living room into my kitchen.

I considered also wrapping it into a noose, but I thought that may have been a step too far.

So, yeah, that was from 12:40 to 1:20 the other day.  Some fifty odd tickets.  After that I managed to get back on top of my stuff and was actually able to start working from the machine again.  For those forty minutes, though, I was just trying to keep my head above water.  Now that we’ve breached January, though, I won’t see anything like that again until…  Well, Valentines Day, I guess.  But it’s a reprieve.  I’ll take it.

Happy New Year.

We do two or three event dinners a month at Tuskies.  I try to make sure I’m involved with all of them.  Working service shifts on the line helps me to hone the skills I’m developing on each station and makes me more and more consistent with my speed and plating every service, but the event dinners…  They’re different.  I never know what I’m going to learn when I show up to one of those.  It was the event dinners that originally sold me on working at Tuskies, really.  My first stage there, when I was a L’Academie student considering his choices of externships, was the annual Game Dinner.  The first night I worked there after being told I could have the position was the Bell’s Beer Dinner.  (That was also, incidentally, the night I covered myself in Tomato Asiago Bisque in the walk-in and had to be put back together by Moochie.)

Last week the calendar came round full circle and brought the crew from Bell’s Brewery back to our kitchen.  It felt like an anniversary for me, and my friends and family treated it as such.  The Bell’s Dinner starts selling out months before the actual event, leaving me scrounging to get as many tickets as I could together for my friends.  I ended up being able to score 8 reservations, meaning that one of the two biggest tables in the dining room was filled with my peeps.

I was pretty nervous going into the night.  Seats at the dinner were $85.  Granted, that includes tax and tip and gets you five courses and nine beers, but that’s a lot of money to ask your friends to pony up to come to a restaurant.  I felt a tremendous pressure to make this worth their while.  I didn’t want anyone to be finishing up the final course and looking around the table with a shrug.  In retrospect, this was a little silly of me.  We do some very good work for these dinners, but this was my first opportunity to show the people who have supported me through all of this what kind of food I was making when I was really given the chance to shine.  I just wanted everything to be perfect.

I showed up a half hour early and got to work on what I figured would be my most time consuming job.  Remember that Indian chickpea curry that I got put onto the menu?  Well, one of the items on the beer dinner was “Incendiary Indian Chickpeas” topped with grilled tandoori spiced shrimp.  Now, when I make those chickpeas for the line, I have to make them in such a way that they won’t kill anyone’s grandmother who happens to take a bite out of the appetizer trio.  I think I use maybe half as many Thai green chilis as I do when I make it at home.  Well, the word “Incendiary” gave me free reign to go full blast on this batch.  Unfortunately, that meant spending a little more time than I necessarily should have trying to make everything just right.  (You de-stem, clean and finely chop five pounds of mustard greens and let me know how long it takes you.)  By the time I had all of that balanced and packaged and had a batch of cucumber raitha ready to go, I had spent nearly three hours working on that one plate.  Chef Patrick had tactfully noted that I just may have had other tasks patiently awaiting my ministrations.  Yes, I believe those may have been his exact words.  I have to admit, though, I think that was one of the best curries I’ve ever made, a belief that was to be borne out on the table later.

Next on my agenda was Red Eye Gravy.  That’s a southern staple that I’ve always wanted to really get a handle on, although it’s been very elusive.  Basically, a Red Eye Gravy is what you get when you sear off a bunch of country ham and then deglaze all of the lovely hammy browned bits off of the pan with a mixture of coffee and water or chicken stock.  Sometimes it’s got onion in it, sometimes it’s thickened with flour or cornstarch, but the heart of it is country ham and coffee.  It’s an item that’s held a near mythological state in my mind ever since I learned about it.  I’ve tried to make it maybe half a dozen times at home with varying levels of success.  Those levels varied from “inedible” to “not entirely unpleasant.”  In fact, Anna had politely suggested to me at one point that maybe Red Eye Gravy just wasn’t very good and that my efforts to bring an enjoyable version of it to our breakfast table might be better spent elsewhere.  (This was in nearly the exact tone of voice that she used when telling me that, since I hadn’t particularly enjoyed the last three brands of durian flavored ice creams and popsicles I’d gotten, that maybe I should stop purchasing durian based products.)  The dream lived on, though, and when I tasted Bell’s Java Stout-  Wait, hold on.  Credit where credit is due.

Anna and I were eating in Fireworks a while back and I decided to try a Founder’s Breakfast Stout (an AMAZING beer with strong coffee flavors) since we were featuring it in the upcoming Beers of Winter dinner.  We both tasted it and were tossing ideas back and forth about what to do with it, and Anna said that she thought it might finally be the key to the Platonic Ideal of Red Eye Gravy that I was always trying to capture.  This, of course, was brilliant.  It wouldn’t have worked with the venison dish that we were pairing it with at the Winter dinner, but when talking about it with Chef Patrick we decided that if we were going to do it we would just as soon serve it with a slab of country ham and a poached egg over top of some potatoes.

So, yeah, let’s be clear:  That’s truck stop food.  That’s Southern diner fare, served to you by a waitress named Flo with fallen arches and butterfly glasses and cooked by a paunched, balding man in his 50’s with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.  You know what, though?  Flavor doesn’t care where it came from.  That’s one of the things I love about this business.  Pedigree doesn’t matter very much anymore.  Strong, coffee and ham flavored gravy mixing with hot yolk dripping over salty country ham and crispy potatoes is a beautiful, wonderful thing and diners these days are more than happy to pay talented chefs to put forward their best versions of dishes like that.  I love that I cook in a restaurant that understands the value of properly refined comfort food and I love that we have customers who can appreciate what we’re doing.

But I digress.  The gravy actually ended up being one of the easiest parts of that dish.  Bell’s Java Stout, a little espresso, lots of country ham and a little bit of love wound up turning into the best Red Eye Gravy I’d ever had with very little effort.  The trick to getting a strong, deep ham flavor in the gravy wound up being lots and lots of ham.  Who knew, right?  All of the components were together in the sauce along with loads of ham.  I’d let it reduce down to the right consistency, and then I’d add two or three cups of water.  I’d then let it reduce again and then add more water.  All of that ham was simmering away in there the whole time, and the longer it spent in the gravy, the more ham flavor came out of it.  Adding water was a way to artificially lengthen the simmering time, and since the water was constantly evaporating out of the sauce I was able to get that perfect balance of hamminess and thickness.

The tricky bit wound up being the poached eggs.  I mean, I really should have seen that coming.  Poached eggs for 70 people is a delicate process of pans of barely simmering water and pans of ice water and perforated pans full of eggs going from one to the other.  The end result was well worth it, but if I had really thought through how it was going to work, I don’t know if I would have committed to it as whole-heartedly as I did.

All in all, the dinner ended up going off without a hitch.  I suppose I should have known that would be the case, but you know how I work myself up over things.  After the dessert went out we all walked up to the dining room and found a room full of clearly full, very happy people.  My table was very loud and I would like to thank everyone who came.  My friend Mark came into town from New York for this dinner, and Tripp drove all the way from Roanoke, so they absolutely get the prize.  Anna and our roommates Alan and Eli were both there, and had been giggling at each other all night over how much the food tasted like the food I made at home.  They’ve really seen my style develop over the past six years so it was a real treat for them to see the skills I’d spent all that time practicing at home wind up on a plate being delivered to them in a fine dining restaurant.  My friend Mike, who I’ve barely seen in years, turned out to show his support for me and for Bell’s, and I even had my parents in attendance.  The dinner was two days before my Dad’s birthday, so I made sure to toast him when we came out at the end of the night.  Then I sat down at their table with a bottle of Expedition Stout and a bottle of Cherry Stout and helped people finish off their desserts.  It was the perfect end to a night well spent, and I couldn’t be more grateful for all of the people who contributed to it.

If you’re a turkey, and the end of your days is going to bring you to our kitchen, there’s something you need to know.  This is the last thing you’re ever going to see.

That’s Ben Jammin.  In the days before Thanksgiving, he roasted somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 turkeys.  On Tuesday alone, he cooked 90 of them.  90 turkeys, one day.  The sheer scale of a project like that is hard to take in, until you realize that he had turkeys crammed into every oven he could commandeer, both upstairs and down.  The end result looked something like this.

Shortly thereafter, it looked like this.

That’s our refrigerated truck that we rented from Sysco.  We needed to rent a truck because otherwise we would have had nowhere to put the 150 turkey dinners that we prepared.  Also in that truck were 600 pounds of mashed potatoes, 300 pounds of carrots, 199 orders of stuffing and 70 gallons of gravy.  This was Thanksgiving on a massive scale.  I think we diced up around 200 pounds of onion, too.  I’ve honestly never seen anything like it before.  All hands were on deck.  We had servers throwing on aprons and lending their hands to the project, helping to fold sausage into stuffing and package sides.  I worked a double on Tuesday, glazing carrots and blanching green beans and loading and unloading and loading and unloading a seemingly endless stream of orders from the back door of Tuskies to our van to our refrigerated truck and back again.  The most amazing thing about this, though, is that service was not in any way disrupted.  As far as anyone out in our dining room could tell, it was just another day and the cooks working the line managed to turn out the food as though their ovens weren’t all stuffed with turkeys and their burners weren’t all being used to prep vegetables.  We’ve got an amazing team there and as a whole we’re capable of accomplishing some amazing things.

When I think about the things that I’m thankful for, one of the first things that comes to my mind is my family.  And I don’t just mean the family I was born with.  I mean the family that slowly accumulates around you through the years.  I haven’t even been with this restaurant for a year yet, but I already feel like I have family there, and that is something I feel very, very grateful for.

That is the incomparable Emmanuel Cuatlacuatl Juarez, AKA “Moochie.”  He was in a restaurant near the beginning of his career and he was addressed as “Sir” by someone he was working with.  This didn’t sit well with him, and when he was asked what he should be called instead he replied “Muchacho.”  I guess that didn’t roll off the tongue too easily for the guy he was talking to, so it ended up being abbreviated to “Moochie,” and the name stuck with him ever since.  I’ve talked about Moochie a bit on here.  You’ll remember him as the one who picked me up off the ground out of a pool of tomato-asiago bisque that was rapidly pooling in the back of my pants.  And then there was that time that I put a sachet of herbs into a soup I was making without telling him, and then he went to puree the whole thing with a stick blender when I wasn’t looking and ended up having to unwrap cheesecloth from the blade for the next fifteen minutes right before service was about to start.  Then he invited me into his home, introduced me to his family, gave me beers and beat my ass at Street Fighter.  He’s a friend.  Honestly, I don’t make those easily, but he didn’t give me much of a choice in the matter.  I’m very lucky to know him and even luckier to be able to work with him and learn from him and I will always be thankful that our paths converged.

This is Ricardo, AKA “Rich,” “Richard,” “Rick Diculous,” or “Captain Jean Luc Ricard.”  As you can see, he has taken a cloth napkin, wrapped it around a turkey in such a way as it resembles a diaper, and is cradling it in his arms like a baby.  Let me add that he did this in the middle of lunch service while working the sautee station.  (Quick aside, of course he sanitized his hands before going back to his station.)  If you don’t have people around you who are capable of having fun, you go crazy.  I have not yet been driven mad by this profession.  I have people like this to thank.  He is also a consummate flavor builder.  Dude understands what makes things taste good on a cellular level.  I tasted his lentil soup and threw my hands up in despair.  I gave some of it to Anna and she asked me why the ones I made didn’t taste that good.  I’ve been making lentil soups for YEARS.  I like to think that I know a few things about lentils.  Ricardo will run circles around me, flavor wise, and he’ll turn out five gallons at once in a third of the time it would take me.  Of course, right now he’s just biding his time until his business plan takes off for the two restaurants he wants to open, “Falafel on a Waffle” and “Brisket on a Biscuit.”  They sell themselves, he tells me.  I cannot argue with his logic.

And then there’s Ben up there, lord of the turkeys.  Ben graduated from one of those culinary schools that impresses people when you hear about it.  Johnston and Wales, I think, but I’m probably wrong.  You see a lot of people come out of places like that and they expect that their degree is going to do their work for them.  It seems to me like Ben is the opposite of that.  He can tell you, flat off the top of his head, the best way to do damn near anything.  He’s an encyclopedia.  He’s also an asshole, but he’s the good kind of asshole.  As an example, I mentioned that I’ve recently made the transition to the grill station.  I did this by working next to Ricardo while he ran grill for a week or so, watching what he did and learning the plate ups and trying to get a grip on things.  I was starting to figure things out, but I was nowhere near a point where I would have felt comfortable doing it myself.  Then one Saturday came along when Ricardo was off and I saw that it was me and Ben on the grill.  Ben walks in and asks me if I’m ready to fly solo.  I must have gone a little bit white in the face.  No, I certainly was not ready.  Not at all.  He told me I was wrong, kicked me out of the nest and watched to see if I would fly.  The tickets started rolling in and he just started telling me everything I was doing wrong.  I was moving too slow, I was pulling tickets off of the machine before reading them, I was letting them sit too long, I should be reheating my broccoli in the water as soon as the meatloaf hits the microwave, I should be toasting my bread as soon as the meat for the sandwich goes into the oven, and why the hell haven’t I looked at my ticket machine yet?  It’s talking to you, Jason!  I was everything short of overwhelmed.  At the end of the day I was shell shocked.  I came home and I could barely even talk about it.  I tell you what, though…  After that day, I could run the grill station.  It was the kind of step that I have a hell of a time taking on my own, and I would have sworn up and down that there was no way I was ready for it, but Ben decided it was time to make me ready.  You don’t run into people who are willing to help you like that every day, even if you do want to punch them in the face a little bit while they’re helping you.

So that’s my family.  Of course, that’s not all of them.  There’s Julian, who’s always pushing me to be better, and Luis, who shepherded me through my early days of learning the pantry and Berta, who is always helping me with my Spanish, and of course Chef Patrick who seems to see some sort of potential in me even when I don’t.  I’m having a really great time working and learning at Tuskies and that is all because of these people.  I couldn’t do it without them, and this year I think that might be what I’m most thankful for.

I have a friend who’s a chef and a blogger.  He once told me that one of the difficulties of being both of those things at once is that the work of a chef is to do the exact same thing, day in and day out with very little derivation.  In a strange way, quality is easier than consistency.  That being the case, it’s not a realm of experience that lends itself readily to repeated discussion.  Writing about the same things, time after time after time, does not make for interesting reading.  If what you’re writing about, though, is doing the same thing over and over and over again, how do you avoid that trap?  It’s complicated, but I suppose in a way it’s a good thing.  It exercises two different halves of the self.

All that aside, it’s been an interesting couple of months in the kitchen.  I have graduated from the Pantry station and have been moved up to working the grill during lunch.  Cooking during service is something I find much more satisfying than simply assembling plates, which is what the Pantry line spends most of its time doing.  It’s an entirely new set of challenges which I’m actually starting to get the hang of.  Can I tell you a secret, though?  I came onto the grill entirely lacking one of the most basic skills a grill cook needs.  I had absolutely no idea how to properly temp meat.  Is “temp” even a word when you use it like that?  Is that just a term that cooks use?  You can see how lost I am here.  “Temping” is short for “judging the temperature of a piece of meat to see how cooked it is.”  Anyway, I’m using it.  You’d think that maybe this is something that would have been brought up in culinary school.  Nope.  It’s just something that it’s assumed that everyone knows how to do, and it’s one of those skills that can only be developed through repetition.  Some people seem to know how to do it naturally.  They just press their finger against the center of the steak or burger or whatever it is and they immediately know “medium rare” or “mid-well” and they move on.  Sadly, this is another one of those innate skills that I was not born with.  I’ve sent out burgers that I would have sworn were mid-well come back nearly raw in the center.  I know, it’s embarrassing.  I’m getting much better at it, though, and my last few lunch shifts have gone by without any food being returned.  Hopefully I’ll maintain that.

You know, it’s funny, I used to stress out so much about working on the Pantry, and about all of the different dishes they sent out and how stressful it was to keep up with it all.  Then the Pantry became much more in my comfort zone, and I started stressing out about not knowing what I was doing on the grill and not being able to feel the difference between a medium rare flank steak and a medium one.  There were a half dozen days when I was flying solo on the grill station and the lunch rush would just come in and crush me and someone else would have to come in to bail me out and get me back on top of my orders.  I would judge how busy a day was by how overwhelmed I would get.  These last couple of weeks, though, have been some of the busiest I’ve gotten through.  We did 230 covers during lunch on Saturday last week.  It just didn’t feel that bad, though.  I stayed on top of it.  I remembered what all ten of the pieces of meat on my grill were and where they were going and when they were coming up and they all got flipped and positioned at the right times and they all made it onto their plates and everything went out and nothing came back.  My hands learned what they were supposed to be doing, the hours between 11:30 and 3:00 went by in a flash and at the end of it all I was surprised to find that I had broken one of my personal records.  Now, mind you, I’m not getting cocky.  The holiday season is nigh upon us and it brings with it levels of volume that I’ve never had to deal with before and I am fully aware that I have some very, very hard days ahead of me.  I am, however, starting to exhibit a base level of competence.  I am doing this job.  I’ve spent a lot of years working all sorts of retail and customer service and office jobs where I was fully aware that a trained monkey with 2nd grade math skills could have been put in my place and none would have been the wiser.  This, though…  This is different.  If the me from two years ago, the me who was struggling not to maim himself taking apart those butternut squash at Patowmack, if that guy was put on the grill during a lunch rush at Tuskies, he would shit himself and die.  I’ve never had a job that required quite this level of skill and consistency and when I step back and actually think about what it is that I’m doing, it’s shocking.  Now, of course, some time in the next year or so you can look forward to posts about how the Sautee station is impossible and too complicated and about how I don’t know what I’m doing and how I got crushed by the dinner rush.  For right now, though, it’s nice to find myself in the comfortable part of the arc where my skills are mostly adequate to the challenges presented to me.

So, you know how when I find a new food or a new chef or a new restaurant or something like that, how I just can’t seem to shut up about it?  Let me tell you about Ford’s Fish Shack.

We do not have enough decent fish restaurants around here.  In fact, Bonefish is pretty much all we’ve got if you don’t want to make the drive out to Tyson’s to go to Coastal Flats.  (And, no, we’ve not even going to discuss The Dock, other than to say that if servicing the cougars of Northern VA is more important to you than properly cooking your fish, you might want to consider readjusting your priorities as a restaurateur.)  Bonefish is decent enough, but I’ve heard it described as “the Outback of seafood” and that’s a hard label to quarrel with.  They offer an impressive level of consistency, which I have to give them credit for.  I’ve never seen an overcooked piece of fish on a plate at Bonefish, which is why I keep going back, but in my personal opinion, I’ve never found their works to be particularly inspiring.  That has left a very significant niche waiting to be filled in our local dining landscape, and I could not be happier to welcome Chef Tony Stafford’s efforts to fill that void.

I’ll come right out and say that I’m partial to independently owned, non-chain restaurants, and if they’re chef-owned joints, all the better.  I mean, that’s really the dream, isn’t it?  To have your own place where you can make your own food and serve it to people who appreciate what you’re trying to do?  It’s a difficult thing to do, though, and can be a very frightening proposition.  The success rate of new restaurants is generally understood to be terrifyingly low, and opening your own restaurant is NOT cheap.  As I hear it told, though, Chef Tony had a dream of opening a New England style fish house, and by God he was going to do it.  A space opened up in the ice rink shopping center off of Waxpool and he jumped into it, which is where I found myself on Saturday night, flanked by enough friends to let me try a broad cross-section of his menu.

Now, I’m pretty critical of most restaurants.  I have a tendency to pick apart whatever I find on my plate and on the plates of pretty much everyone around me.  Ford’s gave me very, very little to complain about and I found something I loved in almost everything I tried.  There were tons of little touches that really grabbed my attention and made me feel like I was eating something DIFFERENT.  And, really, isn’t that what we’re looking for when we dine out?  Little things like the shredded radishes that were adding crunch to the shrimp tacos, and the big chunks of gorgeous Spanish chorizo in the mussels.  Then there were some flat out, balls-to-the-wall comfort foods, like the house made potato chips with warm blue cheese, lobster-basil aioli and scattered with chunks of lobster meat.  Yes, seriously.  If it wouldn’t kill me, I could probably eat that three times a week for the rest of my life.  Even their coleslaw was original.  I had read online some people complaining about it being “weird,” and one person on Yelp said that their server had told them that it had basil and cinnamon in it, and that they couldn’t imagine anyone putting one of those ingredients into coleslaw, let alone both of them at once.  As far as I’m concerned, they can keep feeling that way.  It just means more for me.  I got the crab cakes, which came with a big pile of that slaw, and it was one of those things where you take a bite and you just have to stop for a second to really pay attention to what’s going on on your palate.  It’s a mayo based slaw, which generally I’m not a huge fan of.  I think that coleslaw needs the acid that a vinegar based sauce brings to really make it great, but this kind of turned me around on that.  Instead of having a vinegar dressing, the slaw had bits of raw onion in it.  Now, raw onion is another ingredient that I don’t generally seek out, but it absolutely gave the coleslaw that acidic bite that I was looking for while maintaining the creaminess that most people seem to favor.  On top of that, the cabbage was deliciously crunchy instead of being soggy and wilty the way it gets when sitting in dressing for too long, and I loved what the basil and cinnamon brought to the profile.  All in all, it was just one of those amazingly well balanced foods that reminds me why it is that I love to cook.  I literally spent about three minutes sampling and tasting and thinking about that coleslaw and grinning to myself about what was going on in my mouth before I even got around to tasting the crab cakes.  Which were, by the way, phenomenal.  They were my favorite kinds of crab cakes, where it’s a pile of delicately seasoned lumps of fantastic crab meat with just enough binder to hold it together, like the crab meat is a “cake” by proximity only.  It’s this level of attention to detail and flavors that will bring me back to a restaurant again and again and again, and that will get me to spout off about it to absolutely anyone who will listen.  I also got to try their cod and their trout, both of which I was delighted to find were perfectly cooked and nicely done throughout while still being succulent and juicy.  My mouth is watering just thinking about them.  As far as their desserts go, the Whoopie Pie was described by a friend as “lighting up all of the pleasure centers in my brain,” which is a pretty apt summation of what was going on on her plate.  I will definitely be back to try the blueberry pie.

I could go on, but what it all boils down to is that Ford’s Fish Shack is a restaurant that is doing everything right.  There are a lot of times when you go to a restaurant and a plate comes out to you and you look at it and what you see is a line cook cashing a paycheck and slapping cogs into a widget.  Then there are those rare times when you look down at your plate and you see that someone, somewhere really deep down cares about what they’re doing.  You can see it when there’s love on a plate, and you can taste it when someone is making a dish that they would love to eat themselves but instead are transmitting that desire out to the dining room.  Those are the experiences that get me to come back to a restaurant, and that is exactly what Chef Tony is doing at Ford’s, and we are all very, very lucky to have him.

So if you happen to be in Tuskies any time soon, I’ve got a recommendation for you.  Actually, a few of them now that I think about it.  The new pumpkin bread pudding we’ve got on the menu is just delightful, and we’re doing a wine dinner this Wednesday that’s going to feature a 72-hour short rib.  Yes, that means it was braised for three straight days.  It’s a technique that’s become pretty popular since Michel Richard first pioneered them at Citronelle, but this is going to be the first time they’ve been on a plate in front of me so I’m pretty excited.  All that aside, though, check out our new dip sampler for a taste of my favorite new dish.

The other day, Anna was listening to NPR and she heard a story about Raghavan Iyer and his cookbook “660 Curries.”  Yes, that sounds like an excessive number of curries, but stay with us here.  This is a man who knows what he’s talking about.  He’s got more teaching and writing awards than I care to recount and he’s writing on a subject that is very near to his heart and my own.  I’ve been finding myself more and more fascinated by Indian cooking in the past few years.  It incorporates many of the techniques I developed during my French culinary instruction but takes them in some directions I never would have expected.  One afternoon in class, the incomparable Chef Somchet instructed us in the development of a Bangladesh style curry.  Now, I’d made a few curries before, but they were all with the aid of store purchased curry pastes and powders.  I’m still quite a devotee of Mae Ploy’s Thai green and red curry pastes, but I always wish I could make them from scratch.  The curry we made that day was composed of all things that we had available in our classroom and gave me an idea of how simple and delicious the process could be.  After that day I started improvising curries at home.  I’d sweat down a load of onions and garlic, bloom a handful of spices in the pan (cumin and coriander, mostly, with turmeric and hints of cardamom, cinnamon and clove to bring some vibrancy) and then drop in a can of diced tomatoes to make a gravy.  While it doesn’t thicken the same way that an oil and flour based roux does, the oil and the spices form a paste that can turn tomatoes or chicken stock into velvet.  Sometimes I’d use the mix as is, or sometimes I’d puree it to make it smooth, and then I’d bring it to a simmer and add lentils or chick peas or white beans with enough stock or water to cover and just let the whole thing roll until my legumes were ready to eat.  I’d make quarts at a time so we’d have easily re-heatable lunches for weeks at a time.  Usually they’d turn out tastier and more refined than the ones that came before them and it eventually became something that I could get rolling on the stove in twenty minutes or so.  Those made some of the easiest, quickest and most delicious weeknight meals we ever had around.  When “660 Curries” came into my field of view, then, it seemed like it might be time to get serious.

Let me tell you, my horizons have been considerably broadened.  Thank God that a new global supermarket just opened up in Ashburn.  I could spend an hour pacing up and down their Indian aisle, wondering what I would do with pigeon peas or crimson lentils or split baby garbanzo beans.  There are countless bags of spices that I’m only beginning to learn how to use, but every time I walk through there I walk out with another six or seven brilliantly colored bags that I half remembered seeing in one recipe or another that I can’t wait to get home and start playing with.  That, in a roundabout way, is what leads this back to Tuskies.

So I had the book in my possession and I wanted to make something to have around during the week and I basically threw a dart in my mind and it landed on chick peas.  I told Anna to pick out a curry and she was drawn like a magnet to Yogurt Tart Chickpeas with Mustard Greens.  I saw a spice blend I had never seen, some techniques I’d never used and a green that I’d never found in a store.  Perfect.  I wish I could reproduce the recipe here in its entirety, but I’m fairly certain that wouldn’t be legal, so allow me to summarize.  Red onion, garlic, ginger and Thai chillis all get tossed into a food processor and become what Iyer most accurately describes as a “pungent blend.”  This is then sauteed in ghee (which is basically clarified butter taken a few steps further than the French would, until it’s slightly browned and nutty tasting, while still a few steps short of my classic Cajun Blackened Clarified Butter) until it starts to get deliciously browned around the edges.  A mixture of cardamom, cloves and cinnamon (called Bangala Garam Masala) is bloomed in the mix and is followed in by a can of tomatoes.  The mustard greens are chopped up very finely and tossed in the pan a handful at a time until they wilt down, release their liquids and form a slightly thickened sauce in the pan.  The chickpeas then go in and simmer until they’re delicious, and then a mix of yogurt and heavy cream is added to bring both tanginess and creaminess to the curry and it’s finished off with a mix of cumin and coriander.  That’s actually the step that seems strangest to me.  The spices are toasted when you grind them, but then you add them to the curry after you’ve taken it off the heat.  They aren’t cooked in the curry at all.  I had to re-read that about four times before I took the leap of faith and just stirred them in.  Everything I’d learned prior had told me that they would give a harsh bitterness to the dish that comes along with using uncooked spices, but when I finally tasted the finished dish I was floored.  It was just perfect.  Somehow that edge rounded out everything else that was going on and it ended up being this amazing blend of tart and savory and bitter that I could have eaten bowls and bowls of.  It also seemed to me like something that Chef Patrick might take an interest in, so I brought him a portion of it and delivered it to him out back of Tuskies where everyone goes to take their smoke breaks.  After a few minutes of deliberation his reaction went from “Eh, not bad” through “Wow, there’s a lot going on here” all the way past “Do you have any more?” before landing on “I think this is the best thing you’ve ever made.”  It wasn’t long after that before he was asking me what ingredients we’d need to keep in the kitchen to whip that up and then a box of mustard greens showed up in the walk in and I was asked an hour before service if I could have a batch ready before lunch.  I told him that if I stopped what I was doing right then and there that I could probably have it ready and he responded that he was confident that if I quit being a lazy, slow whiner that I could have a quart ready for him by the time orders started rolling in.

Yes, he was right.  Damn it.

So our Cafe Special that day was a trio of dips with ciabatta toast points and flatbread.  The first of the three was a potato spread with an amazing punch in the mouth of saffron and chipotle, the second was our always reliable spinach and feta dip, and the whole thing was rounded out with yogurt tart chick peas with mustard greens.

Yes, a dish just went from development in my home kitchen straight to restaurant production.  You could say I’m a little proud of that.  If you get a chance, give it a try!