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Hey, check out my Star Trek Cookbook recipe audit over on Television Without Pity -- it's tranyatastic! Also, those new cheddar Triscuits are EV-IL! I ate a whole box and now my tongue feels funny. The most frequent response I get from people when they talk to me about culinary school is: "You know, I'd love to cook more but it's just too complicated" or "If there's one step involved, that's just a step too many!" I gotta be honest with you, that's the reason why I love to cook. I mean, recaps aren't exactly those nasty, chemical-filled Pillsbury dough sausage cookies that you simply peel back, slice, and bake. Remind me to tell you the time my sister purposely put salt on top of those cookies instead of sugar. Also, the time she stuck a bouillon cube inside a blue cookie and force-fed it to me. Anyway, recaps are difficult, time consuming, and very often a pain in the ass, so why do I do them? Because I can. It's the same with cooking. Why make a four-layer, sugar-soaked genoise cake filled with lemon curd and frosted with lemon-infused mascarpone? Because I can. Except that, like my recaps, sometimes it can come out a little tilted. I like playing around with difficult things, and the fact that I get to eat my spoils in the end makes victory that much sweeter. For me, recipes are like a puzzle. Every piece gets snapped in for a reason and, although you can get an idea of the big picture, you don't really appreciate the extent of your work until it all comes together. In your mouth. I also love the chemistry-kit experimentation that can happen. For instance, remember a few weeks ago when I mentioned that lovely Italian white bean and chard soup with parmesan cheese and garlic? Well, as soon as I got that made and frozen for future meals, the wheels, well, they started to turn. I thought about other ways of varying the exact same recipe to bring out different flavors. Specifically, I considered how interesting it would be to bring in an Asian influence by adding minced ginger to the garlic and using baby bok choy instead of the chard. I wanted to keep the white beans in because I wasn't trying to change the whole recipe but for a complete revamp, noodles. Because soups and stews follow a fairly basic recipe, it's very easy to extrapolate ingredients and get all creative with them. It sounds complicated but if you like that kind of stuff, it's really not. That said, Classical French and Haute Cuisine taught me that there's a limit to just how many complications I can take. Especially when they made me make cream of veal soup. You heard that right: cream of veal. Of course they call it Potage Bagration. Veal is a meat. It should not be creamed. How did I cream it? I'm glad you asked. I will give you all the gory details and maybe you can tell me how I managed to get creamed veal behind only one ear as well as in the middle of my back. Inside my shirt. I believe I've mentioned before that when there are 12-15 recipes assigned for the day, it is quite possible you'll not get your first choice of assignment. This is what happened the day I used my bare hands to process veal down to a pulp and nine months later still can't get my cats to stop gnawing at my nailbeds. When Chef Directrix rattled off the recipes, no one. NO ONE raised their hands for the Potage Bagration which had the additional description "Cream of Veal with Macaroni and Cheese." I sacrificed myself. It started off with whipping up a simple velouté and lightly sautéeing one-and-a-half pounds of lean boneless veal, cut into half-inch cubes. Fine. No problem. Happy to do it. Then I processed the veal in the Robot Coup until the meat was finely ground. Cheers. I put the veal back in the skillet and added the velouté, a quart of veal stock and salt and whisked everything together. Still not seeing the annoyingly freakish part? Just wait. I brought the stuff to a bare simmer and cooked it (uncovered!) for thirty minutes, skimming all the way. Half hour gone, I was to "strain the contents of the skillet though a fine sieve set over a heavy 4-quart saucepan, pressing down hard on the pieces of veal. Discard any excess sinews." At first glance those instructions did not make me quiver in my clogs at all. I got a fine mesh strainer and followed the instructions to the letter. Using a spatula, I pressed down hard on the veal and squeezed out every last bit of veal juice. Then I looked in the pan and felt gypped. After all that, there really wasn't much in the saucepan to make soup for more than just four. I shrugged it off and figured everyone would get a shot of Potage Bagration. But then I remembered that this was Haute Cusine, not Jean-George-cum-The-New-Basque-cooking where the world is weird with foams, froths, and flavor concentrates. Chef Directrix took a look and informed me I needed to get an even finer mesh strainer. Nope, this wasn't a job even for the chinois. I had to break out the tamis. The tamis is large, awkward, and really hard to manipulate. Nevertheless, this was Haute Cuisine, so the hard way was always the better way. Here's what I had to do: balancing what basically amounts to a very, very fine mesh screen stretched between a circle of wooden planks over a much smaller saucepan, I had to take the veal solids and scrub them through the screen. Chef Directrix was convinced that using a rubber spatula in sort of forceful painting motion would do the trick. I painted. I smeared. I rubbed and I scrubbed. And after a half hour of this, I still had most of the veal to push through. The first course of Petit Pojarski (miniature faux cutlets) came and went. I can't remember if I even had the time to taste them. My soup course was next up. Nothing doing. Quenelles de Brochet Mousselines with Sauce aux Crevettes were plated and served. I tore myself away from partially liquified veal to snatch a quenelle and some shrimp sauce and then it was back to to wrestling with the tamis. Being on one's feet and dashing about a kitchen for eight hours out of the day is workout enough, but smashing young cow flesh through a screen is certainly deserving of its own Olympic category. I was sweating, rubbing strained finger muscles, and swearing under my breath. And sometimes over my breath. Whenever Chef Directrix wasn't around, I kept tossing clumps of un-creamed veal into the trash, thus depleting the sheer amount that had to go through the tamis. Finally, I was left with some sinew and a pan of cloudy grey matter. The sinew went into the trash and the cloudy grey matter was warmed up. Because we were going to eat the cloudy grey matter. I made a liaison with egg yolks and cream and used it to thicken the cloudy grey matter. Next cooked macaroni was added and butter swirled in. The cup of freshly-grated Parmesan cheese was served on the side. How did the cloudy grey matter taste? Well, I adjusted it as much as I could with about a pound of lemons and presented it without flourish for, I ask you, how do you flourish cloudy grey matter? I'll give that it was warming, but what hot soup isn't? It had a rich meaty taste without chunks of meat to break up the monotony of pure liquid, but then who would chew when one can swallow? I went home and collapsed, bone-tired and heartily sick of veal. That recipe with its small list of ingredients and very few actual steps was too much for me. That's not experimentation and extrapolation, that's protein liquification! It's not Haute Cuisine, it's a box of powder sold at GNC! So there it is, I draw the line at turning expensive meat into a bare essence of its former self. I will not make cloudy grey matter again.
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