Plating as finishing.

Soon we will finish our First Phase of studying, and personally I desire to organise the whall bunch of information given to us by L'Ecole Chefs. For now, I can compare my knowledge in Culinary Fundamentals with sea where I swam being afraid to become food for fishes called Termes, Names and Definitions. I have been studying all this stuff, but feel like everything was blended in my head as Puree of Split Pea Soup. The situation is little bit better with ServSafe, and I even have my first certificate in the USA:

However, it is not 100% knowledge which allows you to answer questions surely and without any multiple choice help. Therefore, I'm looking forward to work hard for many months and have lots of "mug after mug of strong dark roast" as my Chef said. 

Today, I can hold a knife in my hand, hopefully, not bad, know that chicken is supposed to lay on the lowest shelf in the refrigerator, and prohibit my husband to touch food before I make a picture of it. Recently, we've had dinner in Oceano Bistro, and I was delighted by my Grilled Branzino and Daniel's Fennel Dusted Scallops:

Perfect appearance, perfect smell, and perfect taste of these dishes made me excited again " I'm going the right way. I want to do like this. I want to do better."

I absolutely agree with my Chefs in school that wrong plating can really screw up even a delicious dish, so I try now to plate any food we eat at home keeping in mind colors, temperatures, and flavors of my cookies. 

 Crab meat casserole and salt cabbage salad
















Baked vegetables and fresh cabbage salad
( In this case to put a cold salad and hot vegetables on the same plate wasn't a good decision)






Baked salmon with cheesy-spinach mashed                                                                                              potato and a fresh avocado rose

Breakfast again.

Previously, I told about the most common food for the breakfast, the eggs. However, many of us have one more preference in the morning, and this is griddle cakes and crepes. There are thousands of recipes and advice on how to cook the best pancakes or crepes in books, magazines, online, and in the family recipe book we have. Anyway, I've never seen the recipes that we used in the school and I fell in love with them. Our pancakes were nicely moist inside and golden out. I fried crepes, and this process has never been so easy without any of the oil that I usually use. Then we created stuffings for our crepes, savory and sweet. One of our group made sweet stuffing from caramelised apples. Flavored with vanilla and honey, his apples were rich and delicious. The savory filling was developed by another classmate, and she did a great job. Fried spinach with melted gruyere cheese we mixed with fried mushrooms and leek, and I'm going to use this filling recipe in my home kitchen because it is just the perfect taste, especially, in the crepe.

One more exciting experience I got was to make Lemon Curd. Once I tried to cook it at home, so I found lots of recipes and even a video guide, but my lemon curd was too sour, liquid and pale. Using the school recipe I made Lemon Curd with balanced taste and the perfect appearance.

Basic sauces

What does the sauce mean? Is it the compliment to the dish or a compliment from the Chef, or, maybe, it is just masking an undesirable taste? I heard a statement that a good sauce can make you eat anything, even your plate. Definitely, the plate is not delicious. Even though I love to cook meals at home from scratch, I've never cooked real sauces, so L'Ecole's Chefs opened for me a new page in realizing tastes with learning sauces. I was taught that sauces have their own "genealogy" and five families with the main "mather sauce" in the beginning. The basic white sauce is Bechamel, and sauces like Mornay, Cream, etc are made by adding different ingredients to its milk-roux mix. Espagnole's "children" are Bordelaise, Robert, Duxelle, and many more. Bolognese and Spanish sauces are produced from Tomato. The sauce that is a "mother" of emulsified butter and yolk sauces is Hollandaise. Finally, the basic blond sauce is Veloute, and its delicious "descendants" are Supreme and Allemande, for example. All of those basic sauces and some of the small ones we produced in our school kitchen, and I was excited to try their classic tastes. Everybody is different, so we like some tastes more than others, and I found that my favorite sauce from those we cooked is Hungarian. This is a small Supreme Sauce from the Veloute family. Also, I was happy to learn how to make emulsified sauces even though my arm is not strong enough to produce it easily. One of my "beaten" sauces was Herb Mayonnaise:

Cheese

Nutty and crunchy. Creamy and soft. Rubbery and bouncy. Herby and salty. Delicate. Pungent. Sweet and fruity. I can continue forever because I'm talking about the most delicious food I know. It is cheese. We have this name for such a huge number of tastes and forms, so if you ask one hundred people to imagine cheese, you, probably, would not find any two same images. Especially, if those people are from different cultures. However, all cheeses have the same beginning - a mammal's milk. Off course, it is about natural cheeses. Then, the type of the mammal, features of processing, and the environment, including even air movements, make the cheese's flavor distinct and special. Many of natural cheeses are impossible to reproduce in any region but only in the region in which they originate. Even though, I really love this delicious food, I found that I know almost nothing about it. Endless fields of "cheesy" information I have to browse and learn in case to be aware of cheese on a professional level.

Breakfast

People have the great advice about daytime meals "Eat your breakfast by yourself, share your lunch with a friend, and give your dinner to your enemy". During the centuries, people have observed importance of the time of eating, and those observations show that the most important meal of the day is the breakfast. Unfortunately, I'm allowed to cook a proper breakfast only couple times per week when my husband and I can have the morning together.

 I wasn't surprised that we are going to learn breakfast in the first phase of our studying as one of the kitchen basics. Our Chefs taught us to identify and cook the most common breakfast dishes from eggs such as Eggs Benedict, Frittata, etc. We learned the proper way to fry eggs  in different styles and boil them to certain conditions. For example, I didn't know before that boiled eggs should never be boiled. Yes, they should be simmered. In this way we can avoid blue-green-grey color covering yolk after boiling. Also, my classmate taught me to flip "over" eggs. I did it! It is an amazing feeling when you learn the skill which you've seen only in some movie before. Thank you for this. 

Below I put pictures of breakfast dishes made by my classmates in egg-lab. 

Frittata

Quiche with spinach 

Cheese Quiche

 Eggs Benedict

Ravioli

The stuffed dough is the incredibly popular dish around the world. You can find different names for it in different cuisines: Chinese wontons, Russian pelmeni, Central Asian manti, Ukrainian vareniki, Polish pierogi, and etcetera, etcetera. In school, we learned how to cook Italian ravioli which is basically stuffed pasta. My first experience in cooking ravioli was full of mistakes and therefore useful. My dough was okay, but I made the stuffing with fresh cheese which became hard during the cooking process and no juice was found inside when we tried them. Also, I exaggerated the size of my ravioli and made them giants.

Finally, I plated them in the wrong way, too. Instead of putting the tomato sauce in a separate ramekin, I poured it on a top of my fried ravioli, and, in this way, just wasted their crunchy texture. 

The good thing is my knowledge about what I should not do making ravioli. Also, I was interested to know that frying Italian Ravioli was invented by accident in Charlie Gitto's, St Louis restaurant. This is not official information, so do not judge me if I'm wrong.

Pasta

Pasta has always been a wonder for me.  What makes flour and water so nutty and distinctive? In L'Ecole we made fresh pasta, and I was happy to learn how to do it. It turns out that semolina flour makes pasta hard and nutty, so we added semolina to our pasta in school.

Chef has shown us the proper way to make dough and we learned that it's needed to add eggs and water to flour but not vise versa.

The light-yellow semolina gave our dough warm color and needed hardness. Then I used a pasta machine the first time in my life and I was excited and successful. That day we were taught to cook Fresh Pasta Alfredo and our  group did great. Our pasta was al dente, firm and tender, and the sauce was rich and cheesy, so it was real Pasta Alfredo.