My favorite liver recipe.

When we say "meat", we usually mean steak, chops, ribs, or roast. However, by definition, offal - animal organs - is considered as meat also. Everybody is different, so some people like it and some don't. I like it. Most often I cook liver, and below is my favorite recipe for it. This simple way of cooking liver doesn't require a long time or special skills but has great results. You need liver, onion, some milk, and a little bit of vegetable oil (I use olive oil). Definitely, you want to use salt, but any additional spices and herbs are used only to your taste and wish.

Let's start from soaking cut liver in some milk. I like to do this because milk takes out strong metal flavor of blood and makes the final product more gentle. You can leave it for up to 2 hours, but 30 minutes is, actually, enough time.

Meanwhile, let's prepare the side. The accompaniment is one more reason to love liver, because you can chose any vegetables or starches that you like and it will be a good suit to this protein which is rich in B-vitamins . I like potato today and want to roast it with garlic. If you agree, you want to take some waxy yellow potatoes that is not big in size, wash them well and cut in bite-size pieces. Then toss cut potatoes with olive oil, minced garlic, salt, and pepper; I like to add dry thyme and basil as well. Next, put it in the oven for 30-40 min for 350*F (time depends on size of your potatoes).

Hit in saute pan olive oil with ground black pepper and dry oregano for a couple minutes and add well drained liver with sliced onion. Onion is the key - you want it a lot. For 1 pound of liver I put 2 pretty big heads of yellow onion. 

Leave it alone, mixing occasionally, and go to make some fresh salad. Green cabbage with fresh chive, dill and arugula is what I like. You can like something else, but remember that baked potatoes and rich hot liver will ask you about some greens anyway. 

Believe or not but liver already done - all process of frying takes about 15 minutes. You can serve it when extra moisture evaporate and onion become golden-brown color.

Bon appetite! 

First experience in a professional kitchen.

Last Saturday I had may first experience working in a professional kitchen. It was voluntary help with plating for 400 guests at a party. Once again, I was convinced that I'm going the right way. Even though I didn't actually cook anything, I was excited and proud looking at hundreds of salads and desserts plated partly by my hands. An atmosphere of unity was around, yet most of us were seeing each other for the first time. The thank from Chef Moore sounded to me as "Keep going! Do what you do!", and I'm going to keep going.

Charlie Gitto's - toasted ravioli's home.

I wanted to have toasted ravioli in this restaurant from that moment when I learned that this type of ravioli was invented at Charlie Gitto's, St Louis. This Sunday my dream came true, and I had the famous CG toasted ravioli for my appetizer. 

I really enjoyed tasting those gentle, juicy, and full of flavor small bite-size ravioli. Also we had a conversation with the CG Chef, who is a L'Ecole graduate, and with his recomendations ordered for dinner Seafood Pasta Suzanne for my husband and Shrimp Scampi with fresh tagliatelle pasta for me. My fresh pasta with shrimps and savory sauce was excellent! 

Of course, I put my fork in my honey's plate and was impressed with his dish also.

One day, I would like to have the work experience in a restaurant with such a varied menu with a number of signature dishes and so much rich history. By the way, about history they have a funny story that toasted ravioli was invented in 1947 by a Chef, who had too much wine while cooking, so the incident with dropping ravioli in oil happened. 

Meat.

Humans are not predators by the nature. We do not have enough speed or power, and nature has not given us long fangs and sharp claws, but we are given the most powerful ability between mammals - the ability to create. I'm not going to criticize the ways how humans use this treasure, but one of the first men's creations was a weapon to hunt animals for meat. The other significant developments were tools to cook it and fire. Many thousands of years went by, but fire stayed an incredibly popular way of cooking even though we've learned to use electricity, natural gas, and even microwaves. Also, meats used by people became more diverse and professionally processed. We still hunt, but it is not the main method to get meat in now days; farms and facilities offer all types of meats people consume.
However, today I want to make a stop around fire. We started using a grill in our second phase almost from the very beginning and our first meat was STEAK. Yes, it is not a mistake, I write this word with capital letters because for many of Americans steak is a symbol of their life style. I can't argue with them because when I tried real American steak, I fell in love with this simple juicy meat.
L'Ecole started to teach me to prepare this famous meal. My first steak wasn't perfect for me because I wanted to make it medium rare, but it was a little medium in places.  Now I look forward to learning the science of making a perfect steak.  Below is a picture of my first steak with potatoes and broccoli.

Hibachi experience.

Last week my husband surprised me by taking me to lunch at a Japanese restaurant.  I have had sushi before, but this restaurant also had a hibachi grill for cooking in front of the customers.

 I had only heard of this style of cooking.  My friends told me you have to go in a group in a hibachi restaurant, but the hostess seated us with a couple strangers and we all enjoyed the experience together.First I shared with my husband a couple of traditional Japanese appetizers.  We had a calamari salad and lobster roll.  Both were as pleasing to the eye as were delicious. I made a picture only of the salad.

Then the show began.  Chef Peter brought his cart with a mis en place out and began cooking lunch for us.  To start with he flamed the grill with oil. I was really impressed!

He also entertained us with an onion volcano and rolling and tossing eggs with his spatula.

He began making our lunch by preparing fried rice. I did not realize that all fried rice has egg in it.  It was interesting to watch him grill the rice and quickly made us a tasty start to our lunch.

Next he grilled vegetables for us.  It was a combination of mushrooms, onions, carrots and zucchini. While the vegetables were cooking he again entertained us by trying to toss zucchini into our mouths.  He missed everyone, but my husband almost caught his bite.  It was all very much fun.  Chef finished our vegetables with a teriyaki sauce.

Lastly Chef cooked our entrees on the grill.  I had calamari and steak, while my husband had shrimp and sukiyaki, which is a mixture of steak, onions and carrots.  Again Chef made a show of cooking our entrees.  He finished all our dishes with soy sauce and teriyaki sauce.  He also provided us with two dipping sauces.  One was from ginger and the other was mayonnaise based.

The hibachi restaurant is a delicious and fun experience I look forward to repeating.

Meatballs

Traditional american meatballs I tried in restaurants and at home as well, but I did not cook them. This week I made it! We cooked whole wheat pasta with L`Ecole meatballs.  It is some kind of magic when you make thin sheet of basic pasta from a dough ball, and we actually had fun doing it.

After cutting long sheets of pasta into spaghetti we dusted it with flour and let it rest while we made meatballs.

Half of the meatballs we made according to the L'Ecole recipe and the other half we created by ourselves in groups of two.  We made minor changes to the L'Ecole recipe by substituting ingredients, such as using real onion and garlic instead of onion and garlic powder. Ground beef, salt, pepper, parmesan cheese, worcestershire sauce and fresh bread crumbs were ingredients for our meatballs along with garlic and onion.

Baked for 20 minutes in the oven and simmered in tomato sauce, our meatballs became rich in flavor and attractive.

Pan-Fried Chicken Breast with Pan Gravy

The first dish of our second phase was fried chicken, and it is a way that I never use to cook chicken at home. My favorite place to cook any food is an oven, actually, because this way is always successful, simplest, and really healthy. Therefore, I was really interested in that class. So... To make fried chicken tender and juicy you need to season it well and bread it properly. Our Chef taught us to season chicken breast with salt and pepper to our taste first, then put breast in mix of buttermilk and egg, and then bread it in flour with added seasonings like pepper, salt, cayenne pepper, dry thyme, etc. After that, our chicken laid in the refrigerator for 15-20 minutes. Meanwhile, we prepared baked finger potatoes and sauteed zucchini. I learned that taking out seeds from zucchini makes them more firm while cooking, reduces time of sauteing, and makes the finished product more attractive. We plated our dish and I found my way not really creative, because , in fact I repeated plating of somebody else. I've just seen photo with this plating before and unconsciously repeated it.

Fish. Salmon.

One day, being in Ukraine, my husband made a joke "Oh, I know what she will order - fish and greek salad". It was funny, but it was true. I prefer fish in a restaurant to any meat. An exception is kebab restaurants because they have excellent meat and no fish. I grew up 25 miles from the sea coast, plus our town was surrounded by a number of natural ponds, so our table was always full of a variety of salt and freshwater fish: carp, sturgeon, mackerel, eel, flounder, and, finally, goby fish are some of the most popular species in our family. On the other hand, we used just few methods for cooking fish such as pan frying, roasting with vegetables and fish soup "uha". Therefore, I was excited to start learning fish fabrication in L`Ecole, especially since we started from salmon which has a distinctive rich flavor and fatty body.
After Chef demo how to filet salmon properly and beautifully, we tried to do it by ourselves. The result was far from desirable but better than expected. Then we cooked salmon using two recipes with different marinades and different methods of cooking. The first one was Teriyaki Salmon, and we grilled it and served with sticky rice, and the second portion of our fillet we soaked in a lemon marinade and cooked in parchment paper. Both fillets we vacuumed for 15-20 minutes to enrich fish with marinade as quickly as possible. I`ve seen the vacuum machine for the first time in my life and was impressed... and scared a little bit - bubbling and jerking accompanies the process of vacuuming.
Next, salmon in teriyaki marinade went to the grill and our Chef helped us a lot to make our fish presentable and fully cooked in the same time. Steamed Salmon en Papillote we wrapped in a piece of parchment paper cut in a heart shape and put it in a oven. The result of grilling was just perfect to me. Thank you, Chef!

 Steamed salmon was beautiful but a little to dry. Probably, I just overcooked it at some point.