Friday, May 9, 2008

guess the restaurant

May 9

Guess which restaurant’s incompetent publicist had the following e-mail exchange with me over the past three weeks:

April 23:

Hi Bret,
I wanted to touch base regarding any upcoming stories you might be working on that feature up and coming young chefs.

[The restaurant I represent, badly] has several young chefs and pastry chefs that are quickly making their way through the ranks. They have recipes, entertaining tips and general cooking advice that I would love to share with you and your readers.

Finally, I wanted to let you know that female sommelier, [name deleted for obvious reasons] was recently made Head Sommelier at [this quite famous restaurant with a bad publicist], an accomplishment we are very proud of and would also love to share with your readers.

Please let me know if you are interested and I will be happy to send along bios and whatever else you may need.
Many thanks,
[bad publicist]


On 4/24/08 4:47 PM, "Thorn, Bret (NRN)" bthorn@nrn.com wrote:

Do you think I could have a five-minute phone chat with [the new female sommelier for whom you claim to want exposure]? I'd like to mention her promotion in my Kitchen Dish column in The New York Sun.


On 4/29/08 11:39 AM, [the bad publicst] wrote:

Hi Bret,
My apologies for not getting back to you sooner. Do you think it would be possible to send the questions you would have for [the sommelier] as opposed to arranging a phone call?
Many thanks,
[bad publicist]

On 4/29/08 1:39 PM, "Thorn, Bret (NRN)" bthorn@nrn.com wrote:

Okay. All I really need is [her] job history and a brief statement about what she plans to do with the wine list.

On 5/08/08 11:39 AM, [the bad publicst] wrote:
Hi Bret,
I have been working on getting some information for you regarding [the sommelier, something that could nearly be accomplished by a badly trained seal] and unfortunately it is proving a difficult process.

I wanted to suggest in the meantime mentioning [a totally different person], the pastry sous chef at [a restaurant that certainly has the money to hire a better publicist] who began as part of an externship but whose talent was immediately recognized by Chef [a famous chef, really] and he subsequently employed her permanently.

If you are interested please let me know-apologies for the delay with [the sommelier, quickly vanishing into obscurity]’s information.
Best,
[bad publicist]


So I wrote her back, asking for a résumé or bio or something of this fabulous pastry sous chef, but I haven’t heard back.

Enter your guesses in the comment section below, if you like.

Spaniards don’t take siestas

May 9

Spaniards don’t take siestas! That’s what I was told by my dining companions last night at a dinner at Sea Grill promoting the food and wine of the Spanish region of Rioja — a small, wine-rich area west of Aragon and Navarre and south of the Basque country. At my table was a young American publicist representing the region, a Spanish journalist, a Spanish publicist representing the region and Pedro M. Sáez Rojo, general manager of the Rioja government's food quality and agriculture research department. Somehow the topic came up of how it’s not uncommon to have dinner in Spain after 10 p.m. Yet they’re expected to show up at work in the morning at the same time Americans are.
Thus, I suggested, the need for a siesta. And they politely laughed at me — they don’t siesta, certainly not in seasons other than summer. They just don’t get much sleep.
Hmm.
The food was prepared by five chefs from La Rioja, starting in the cocktail hour with some sort of raw fish preparation I didn’t get around to trying. They also passed spoons of sweetened white asparagus purée with a piece of green asparagus stuck into it, a raspberry to the side and lots of black pepper. That one got mixed reviews from the crowd. I tried two of them and I’m still not sure what I thought about it.
While I tried to figure that out I chatted with Glenn Collins from The New York Times (and good friends with cousin Leonard Kamsler) and his wife Sarah about Thai food, Caesar Augustus’ use of the institutions of the republic to become Rome’s first emperor, and other light topics.
The food of the evening definitely was showing an experimental side of Spanish cuisine.
At the table was a bowl filled with a spread that I later learned was made of some sort of crustacean (probably langoustine, but we didn’t work too hard at translating it accurately), mayonnaise, cucumber and mint.
We also had:
sunflower seed tuiles
country bread to use in tasting Rioja olive oils
cherry gazpacho with langoustine
asparagus with mushroom mayonnaise
cod in pil-pil sauce
meat ball over potato parmentier
French toast with cheese mousse served with cacao jelly
assorted mignardises, including a chocolate bon-bon filled with olive oil.

Making a right (and left) pig's ear of it

There is a truly wonderful cookbook called ‘Nose to Tail Eating’ by a chap called Fergus Henderson who is the chef/owner of the famed St. John restaurant in London. His philosophy runs as follows ‘Nose to tail eating means it would be disingenuous to the animal not to make the most of the whole beast; there is a set of delights, textural and flavoursome, which lie beyond the fillet’ (Henderson, F. 1999). And he is right. Within the pages of this delightful monochrome tome are such gastronomic adventures as Duck’s Neck Terrine, Pot Roast Brisket and Pheasant and Pig’s Trotter Pie with Suet Crust all of which will grace our table at some point. By the time I finally bought it I felt as if I’d already read it several times over due to the number of times I’d flicked through it in bookshops and so when I learned that there was a follow up on the way I was overjoyed, and with chapter titles as gloriously simple and intriguing as ‘Pig’s Head’ how could a budding foodie adventurer fail to get excited?

The first step was to procure some of the more interesting ingredients that you won’t find behind the butcher’s counter at Waitrose and so a trip to somewhere with slightly less squeamish and sanitised attitudes to food was in order. Cambridge’s Mill Road is a multicultural melee of shops, cafés, bars and restaurants with Middle Eastern eateries squeezed next to Chinese supermarkets, sheesha bars and independent bookshops. Consequently, it is one of my favourite places. At the far end of the road is an Asian supermarket where, towards the rear of the shop tucked behind the brightly packaged noodles, fresh vegetables, Thai curry sauces and frozen seafood, is a freezer section for bold gastronome. Hand written signs, predominantly in Cantonese, offer tantalising clues as to the contents of each section. A block of what looked like locusts turned out to be a hefty chunk of about a hundred duck tongues, next to those a lurid red mass was labelled simply as ‘lung’ and there was no mistaking the bag of chicken feet or the, now standard, trotters. It wasn’t all like Dr. Frankenstein’s deep freeze – liver and oxtail were also sat happily alongside the more exotic cuts – but it was the pig’s ears that I was most interested in. So with a degree of what could be termed, in hindsight, foolhardy hubris I bought four, each the size of a large hand. The small Asian man at the till looked at me with a mixture of surprise and delight that this farang was willing to explore the gastronomic delights that, in the words of Fergus ‘lie beyond the fillet’. Granted, I wasn’t jumping straight into pig’s uterus or cow tendon, but it is still quite a step to go from juicy, tender sirloin to the slightly less juicy and more cartilaginous ear.

On returning home I proudly showed my purchases to my girlfriend who was strangely excited by them, although less sure as to why I bought four. I struggled to find an answer that sounded reasonably coherent and sensible so I shrugged and muttered something about how they ‘might be really nice’. She looked less than convinced but left me to carry on regardless.

Step one was to wash them. Thoroughly. Why? Because, and I wish I was joking when I say this, because pigs get earwax too and no-one, not even the Chinese, eats earwax. Once they’d been completely cleaned they went into a pot, complete with a healthy selection of stock vegetables, onion, garlic and a bay leaf, to cook for three or four hours over a low heat. The smell was good, not unlike trotters – distinctly porky with a homely warmth added by the veggies and as they cooked I was feeling more confident about the prospect of giving them a go and perhaps even getting through all four. Eventually.



After four hours cooking they become well and truly floppy so they were left to cool whilst we decided what to do with them next. Our new bible, the River Cottage Cookbook, suggests barbecuing an entire ear and eating it with tartare sauce but after careful consideration we felt that this might be little too adventurous for first timers so we went for the ‘slice, smother in butter, mustard and breadcrumbs and bake’ option. After half an hour they’d taken on a tempting golden brown colour and occasionally jumping off the tray so the consensus was that they were ready. And they were good. Not so good that I felt the need to eulogise about them, taking a plate of them into the street with a megaphone and attempting to convince innocent passers by that the crunch of porcine ear is a treat to behold, but good in a way that they were akin to slightly tougher pork scratchings – crunchy, salty and with a definite piggy taste. Of course the generous helping of pungent aioli helped and we didn’t manage to chow down all four but they remain in the freezer, ready to be roasted and passed off onto unsuspecting guests as a gourmet treat. You might not be able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but you can certainly make a tasty snack.

Cooking for Carnation

Last March an Account Supervisor from TBWA asked me if I wanted to create recipes for Carnation Milk. By the way, Carnation is no longer with Nestle, Alaska Milk bought it already. She offered me the project supposedly given to a famous chef/food stylist in the advertising world. I definitely offered half the price of my competitor. Still not a bad offer. To think food stylists nowadays charge very expensive rates because their services are in demand. Luckily the Account Supervisor was able to let the client to approve the Cost Estimate I gave them. So I started the project and cooked the ten dishes they gave me. My task: To come up with recipes using Carnation Milk. They briefed me that every dish should be very Pinoy, ingredients are not hard to find and very easy to prepare. Despite the parameters, I tweaked the Pinoy style cooking by adding ingredients that will surprise the person eating it. A kick in short. Cinnamon, curry, paprika, lemon and so on are the condiments and flavors I added to the recipe. I brought the food to the agency and the Account Supervisor sent it to the client's office. True enough they were surprised but then again they are afraid that the consumers might not be ready with those kind of tweak and they do not want to veer away from the typical Pinoy recipes. Well for the payment's worth, I revised the recipes. The real reason for tweaking the recipes is for presentation purposes–so that the client would know my range and my potential. Good cooking experience, indeed.

Here they are!!!!

Mango Cream Refrigerated Cake.

No bake Sweet Potato Pudding with Cinnamon & Cheese.


Cherry-Buko Salad.