Oatmeal: the perfect dorm food

This morning I ate a gigantic bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and was so greatful that I had made such a good decision to put it on my pre-college grocery shopping list because its AWESOME! I LOVE oatmeal! And I love everything about it, its healthy (whole grain), easy, cheap, versatile, convenient, has a good shelf life, and it takes up a small amount of room. It is perfect dorm food. I put dried apricots, sliced 1/2 an apple, a big bunch of oatmeal, and water in bowl and then cooked it in my microwave until it was thick. Added some sugar and cinnamon, and it was delicious. I love awesome breakfasts.

Today we learned the slicing, small dicing, and chiffonading techniques. I tend to have a huge streak of attention to detail that some people might call crazy. Well, let me tell you when my chef gave me exact measurements today for these knife cuts (1/4x 1/4 x 1/4 for small dice) my "attention to detail" got very comfortable. I could feel the knots forming in my shoulders as I crouched over my cutting board. My feet were twisting all around, doing anything but standing flat on the ground, and I was measuring like a maniac. Some people would hate something like that. If I were measuring bricks or threads for a carpet, or anything else, I would hate it. But I didn't, I loved it. I want to go back tomorrow and cut more. In fact, I have potatoes in my room and I'm practicing in the morning before I go back to class. I loved obsessing over these tiny details and trying and trying again to get something right. I like to see my progress and I like to see my results. I was proud to look at the mound of onions on my tray and say, "Now that's a slice!" Precision is perfection.

Skills I Day 1

Attitude and Preparation are crucial to success here.

As for attitude, be open, work hard, and be humble:

• I want to know all there is to know about food.
  
• My work habits in the classroom will shape my work habits in the work place.
  
• And I am not too good for anything.
  

These three ideas have served me well since I've been here.

As for preparation:
Do your homework. I know this from both sides of the fence... after doing it and being glad I did because I was tested on it and not doing it then feeling like a fool in class because I didn't know the answers. Preparation is your best defense in a constantly competitive and ever changing industry. Be prepared.

Day 6 & 7

It's funny how at other colleges the classes are measured in semesters and broken down further into weeks. Here, classes are broken down into days. Meat was 7 Days, Fish was 7 days. So its appropriate when the lectures online are labeled Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, etc. because that is the best way to keep track of the class. But I am still struck by how odd it is that I know what day of the class it is. Like I could just say, "Oh! Today is Day 5!" Never before in my life have I ever kept track of what "Day" class I'm in. It's always been measured by quarters (9 weeks) or semesters (1/2 a year), so its funny to me that when I'm trying to think back to last Thursday and Friday the first thing that comes to mind is that it was Day 6 & 7.

Thursday (Day 6) was Crustacean Day. Crustaceans are animals with exoskeletons and jointed legs. There are four major families: Shrimp, crabs, lobsters, and crayfish. They are also the tastiest of seafood families in my opinion. We prepared soft shell crabs, peeled and deviened shrimp, and filleted haddock (which didn't fit in out crustacean themed day, it just provided extra cutting practice). The process for preparing soft shell crabs is as follows:

1. Cut off the Face, a little graphic but just make a cut right behind the eyes and cut straight down. You can then gently squeeze out the inner parts of the crab which includes the "mustard". The mustard actually works to filter the impurities out of the crab, very similar to a liver. People advise not to eat it because it has a higher level of contaminants than is generally advisable to consume. However, my chef brought up a good point. We eat foie gras which is liver, it filters contaminants and nobody complains about that, we drink alcohol which in excess can pickle your liver, we smoke cigarettes which contaminate our lungs. He loves the mustard and thinks its the most flavorful part of the crab. His advice: "Pick your poison."
   
2. Remove the apron, located on the underside of the crab, it is joined at the rear of the crab and extends toward the front, and is either long and slender shaped indicating a male or rounded indicating a female... the two respective shapes are often compared to the male's apron looking like the Washington Monument and the female's apron looking like the dome on the Capitol Building. It just peels right off.
3. Remove the gills, pick up the edges of the crabs shell on the sides and pull off the little ruffled gills.

We also peeled and deveined shrimp. He told us to cut along the back of the raw shrimp up to the tail and then pinch the opposite side (where the spiny little legs are located) and pull the skin off. It worked so well! I was very excited because I love new tricks.

At the end of class we did a tasting of different shrimps and we tasted two white shrimp. One was peeled and the other was not. The white shrimp with its peel on was sweeter and cleaner tasting, it was awesome. It tasted like a totally different shrimp and all because it was cooked with the shell on. Try it sometime if you have shrimp with the peels on, peel one and cook it, then leave the peel on another one and cook it. Taste the two side by side and see if you can tell the difference. We also tasted pan fried soft shell crabs, and they were so delicious. The little claws filled up with the butter they were fried in and just burst warm, salty butter in your mouth when you chewed them. They were seasoned with Old Bay which to me is one of the most perfect blends of spices and we always have Old Bay in our spice cabinet at home so whenever I eat it I think of home.

Friday (Day 7) was our final exam day which included an Identification portion (looking at fish and telling what they are) and then a written exam. We also shucked 30 oysters a piece. And we had a caviar tasting.

I actually like shucking oysters because you can so obviously see your progress when you reveal that tender, little oyster inside its dark, gnarly shell. One of the things I love about cooking is that it's very easy to see results, good or bad. I like the honesty of that. There is also a wonderful sense of pride in your work and the ability of your hands when you're shucking oysters.

I am so glad I don't like caviar because gosh darnit that would be one expensive habit. Bleh. I honestly didn't like a single one I tried. They all had very different flavors and interesting textures, if I had liked them I would have a lot of fun trying to find applications for them because they are all so unique. The picture at the top is of our caviar tasting plate, clockwise from the top we tasted Tobiko (3 kinds: orange which was flavored with soy sauce, red flavored with fish sauce, and green flavored with wasabi) ($1.10/oz), Trout ($4.98/oz), Salmon ($2.50/oz), Whitefish ($5.50/oz), Pike ($14.40/oz), California Ossetra($43.48/oz), Iranian Ossetra($89.50/oz), Israeli Ossetra($62.97/oz), Russian Sevruga($99.71/oz), and Paddlefish($14.36/oz). In order for caviar to be labeled just caviar it must be from the sturgeon fish, if not it must labeled with what kind of fish the eggs came from. If I were to eat any of them again I would eat either the orange or green Tobiko because they were really crunchy which made for a cool texture, and they had pretty good flavor. They tasted like salty soy sauce and bitey wasabi. We also tasted a cucumber lime grav lax (11:00 on the plate) that one of the T.A.'s made and it was deliciously fresh and cucumber scented, chef remarked that you can make fish taste like anything and I agree. We also tasted uni (right center, orange blob) which is the reproductive organs of sea urchins and I did not like that either, it was sweet but weird. There's a flavor in uni that tastes like it shouldn't be there but I think that is its characteristic flavor, it was not a nice taste. I did seriously love the smoked shrimp (left center) we tasted though. It was brined (in salt, sugar, and water) for 5 minutes and then pan smoked, which is when a pan is heated really hot with wood or burning flavorings, closed, and the food inside is smoked quickly on the stove top. That was one good little shrimp.

the beauty of fall

Its days like this that make fall my favorite season. It is so darn gorgeous here, even right now at 9:22 p.m. the beauty of the day is still hanging around coming through my open window and making me really happy.

The Hudson Valley is just a beautiful place, way to go CIA for picking such a great place to have a school. Kudos :)

Today we ate oysters for breakfast. I was really excited when my chef looked at me and said "These are from your neck of the woods," as he pointed to the Virginia oysters. The last time I ate them was Christmas with my mom and my uncle standing around the counter in my kitchen. We ate them in a similar fashion today, everyone lining the counter in the fish room, shucking and then slurping back raw oysters. It made me inexplicably happy and I had a goofy grin on my face that confused several people because we were eating raw shellfish and it wasn't even 7 a.m. I whispered to my friend that they tasted like Christmas. I love food.

We also ate Bay Scallops and Sea Scallops. I was excited for the Bay Scallop but anxious about the Sea Scallop because Sea Scallops have been consistently bad in my life, I've never had a good one. Bay Scallops on the other hand are sweet and tender, and so wonderfully delicious to me. Today's case was exactly the opposite. The Bay Scallops tasted soapy and dirty (which is from Sodium tri-polyphosphate, a common chemical used to bleach, preserve, and add water weight to scallops) while the Sea Scallops were sweet, tender, and amazingly meaty. Always give food a second (third, fourth, fifteenth...) chance because it deserves it.

I hope the weather is just as beautiful where you are as it is here.

butterflied fish, home, and top soil

So last Friday was an awesome day and the fact that I didn't post anything about it (yet) is no indicator of its awesomeness. So my day started out as my days do since I've started fish class, my alarm goes off at 4 a.m. and I get out of bed (which I am still proud of every day because I never would have guessed I would long for my 6:45 a.m. high school alarm, that's almost 3 MORE hours of sleep than I'm getting now!), make the quiet and beautiful walk up the hill to Roth Hall and into the basement where I start fish class. However, today was different because I was going home after class. I surprised my family Friday night and spent the weekend in the irreplaceable comfort of my own home. When I woke up on Saturday morning I laid in bed and went over how to do a straight cut on a fish (making a cut behind the gill plate, and cutting straight down along the spine of the fish over the ribs) in my head. We had cut salmon on Friday and I found a strange pleasure in pulling out the pin bones. I say its strange because I know some/most people hate that tedious task, but I love it.

On Friday we also butterflied fish. "Why did you cut the head and tail off?" my chef asked over my shoulder. "I thought you asked me to, Chef" I replied. He walked away. Nope. In order to properly butterfly a fish, one removes the dorsal (back) and adipose (lower back) fins and the spine, leaving the head and tail intact and ending with a fish that is opened flat. Lesson learned, I will never make that mistake again.

Today we tasted Wild Striped Bass, Black Sea Bass, Hybrid Stripe Bass, Acadian Red Perch, Lane Snapper, Tile Fish, Swordfish, and Tuna. The tuna honestly reminded me of pork. It was juicy, meaty, and mildly delicious. Chef got the most beautiful golden color on it and seasoned it with the perfect amount of salt and pepper. Then the Hybrid Stripe Bass tasted like something I'd eaten before and I chewed and chewed it, rifling through my memory bank of flavors trying to match it to something I knew, when I finally said out loud to my class "it tastes like something I've had before that's not good...," I trailed off. "Top Soil," Chef replied. Bleh, he was right. After he said it, I could spit it out because I knew what it tasted like, dirt.

the smell of the ocean and the taste of crab

Today when I leaned down to smell my chef whites in class, I closed my eyes and actually smelled the ocean. To the untrained nose I smelled like stinky fish, but to me it was July, the windows were down and I was driving towards that salty, briny, fresh smell that unmistakably indicates the ocean.

We did our first cutting of fish today. We each got three fish and two were cut into 1/4 fillets and the third was cut into whole fillets. Fish are so much easier to understand than meat because there's flesh and there's bone. There are a couple different methods for cutting fish, but they all have basically the same simple, beautiful anatomy.

We also had our first fish tasting where we tasted 5 different kinds of fish: Flounder, Dover Sole, Turbot, Halibut, and Skate. They were all lovely fish but each had distinct differences. The texture of the Halibut was chewy like Salmon, which can be attributed to the fact that it has the highest oil content of the low activity fish that we were tasting today. The activity level of a fish directly correlates with the oil content of a fish, high activity=high oil. Salmon are highly active and therefore oily, which give them that characteristic chewy, rich, mouth feel that the Halibut was reminiscent of today.The flounder was classic fishy flavored (in a very nice way). The Skate tasted like corn on the cob, and had a really cool texture with ridges in it. The one that stuck out to me most was the Dover Sole. If I had been blind tasting, I would have thought it was crab meat. I was shocked at how sweet it tasted and how silky the texture was. It was an awesome little piece of fish.

Food for thought: Yesterday my chef said that a vegetarian cook is better than any other cook because animal fat instinctively tastes good to us, but making a vegetable taste good takes so much more skill.

flex, flat, out

That was our mantra today for cutting fish. Besides coming back to my dorm and immediately starting the process of defunking my clothes, hair, and skin, fish today was awesome. There's just something so exciting about food that despite being 5 a.m. when I walked into the Fish Room (and it smelled just like you would imagine a fish room to smell) this morning, I still got that giddy feeling in my stomach. Its similar to the feeling I get when I see a boy I like, or when I know I have really good plans for the weekend. Or the feeling I woke up with on prom morning, or my birthday. It's just a downright good, exciting feeling. That's how I know I'm in the right place.

My chef is also a very interesting man, he loves fish, has strong opinions, and knows a lot of information. Another reassuring sign of a good school is good instructors. He shared some interesting facts with us that I'm eager to pass along:

• American consumption of fish has declined from 16.6 lbs/person annually in 2004, to 14.8 lbs/person in 2006, today in 2010 the consumption hovers somewhere around 14 lbs/person
  
• The number one reason that 67% of seafood is eaten in restaurants is that people don't like the smell of seafood in their house
• This could be the last year we are able to catch Bluefin Tuna because they are being caught at an outrageously alarming rate, and they are disappearing fast (check out this link to learn more about Bluefin Tuna: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/11/60minutes/main3700644.shtml)