HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!

Today is my wife's birthday. No I won't reveal how young she is but we have a pretty long running tradition. Due to my chosen profession it is hard for me to be at home on a regular basis. Especially for birthday's. So every year I cook my beautiful wife a delicious french toast breakfast. I use nice crusty bread and dry it out overnight. My french toast batter is similar to a crepe batter allowing for a slightly thicker crust. Instead of maple syrup I top it with vanilla creme anglaise and mixed berry coulis.

So HAPPY BIRTHDAY SARAH!

Long Time, No Blog

Despite a "poor economy" and an election I have been really busy. So, I haven't been posting much and I apologize. We have been working on some pretty fun stuff. A quick update our dinner menu is updated on our website so please check it out. I would have to say our pheasant is probably or best seller of the new items.

Striped bass out of Virginia is gorgeous. I am a big fan of striped bass and I pretty much always serve it skin on. We press the fish into the pan skin side down to get the best and most even crispy skin. If you really want to learn great techinique for this read The French Laundry. Here we are serving it with a blood orange sauce, slow roasted sweet potatoes and haricot vert. The blood orange sauce is a variation on Alinea's yuzu pudding. You really get a straight flavor of blood orange.
We have had a lot of success with our small plate features and we have continued running most of our specials as small plates. I think it's funny what we call small plates in America. The majority of the world eats small plates as their main course but in the States we tend to eat much larger portions. So small plates have a much different meaning here than in other countries. But I love this style of cooking. It's a lot easier to get creative and really adapt your dishes when you aren't having to load so much food on the plate.

This is another small plate salmon dish. can you tell I like seafood. This is sweet spiced salmon with pomegranate red onion marmalade and roasted root vegetables.
We usually sear our scallops at the restaurant. The caramel richness you get from a seared scallop is pretty much unsurpassed by any other seafood. But this time we strayed away from that. Mainly because duck fat is delicious. I know that may sound like an absurd comment but it is true. get some duck fat and cook just about anything with. So we opted to poach our scallops for a small plate in duck fat. We have large amounts of rendered duck fat on hand because of our duck confit. To cut to the chase: Duck fat poached scallops with black currant sauce and wilted baby arugula:
I thought it was kind of cool how the currants actually look like caviar.

Fall Menu

We have been running a lot of special items which are sooon to appear on our Fall Menu. Coq au Vin, butternut squash risotto, etc. The new menu begins this wednsday. I'll post the final version here.

Tart Tatin and the Economy

I haven't posted in a while, but we have a new dessert menu and one of the things we keep looking at is how to keep up with the fears of the economy. Se we came up with a small version of a tart tatin. I love apples in fall, I love deep rich caramel, and I love hot cinnamon. It works. Here is our petite tart tatin.

Amuse Bouche and The Pantry Hammer

We produce an amuse bouche every night for every table. And while some are more thought out than others I am always happy with what we serve. This past weekend we went to an old pairing of fruit and cheese. Almost like a sample of our cheese plate. We paired our house made fig jam with Mahon cheese and almonds. Pretty simple but delicious none the less.

I took these pictures mainly because of our garde manger or pantry chef Chino. I told him what the bouche was and that was pretty much it. He took the amuse bouche and made it his own. I wanted to show all of you the care he took with something we give away to every table. We charge nothing for the bouche and Chino still took this much love with it. Chino was actually making quenelles of the fig jam like he does for the cheese plate but in miniature. This is pretty time consuming especially when you are making 125 of these in a night. Hence this is why we call Chino a hammer. He drives everything home no matter what we give him. Chino also makes all of the salads and all of the desserts for the restaurant.

Here are some of the nicknames we through around the kitchen on a regular basis. These change frequently.
Chino, pepito, tortuga, chepe, salsa face, salsa pants, polvo, jefe, marica, chucky, torita, scary.

"Roasted Chicken"

I love roast chicken. But all too often roasted chicken is dry in the breast or chewy in the thigh and leg. How does one get away from these problems in chicken or any other game bird? We get around it by using a method called the triple sear. The name is a little misleading. We do not thrice sear this chicken but we do twice sear. Here's how it works: we break our whole chickens down into quarters. Then we brown the chicken in a saute pan on all sides. Then we take the seared chicken quarters place them in a vaccum seal bag with shallots, garlic, white wine, chicken stock, and lemon verbena. We seal the bag and slow cook the chickens poaching until our chicken is cooked. (we take a little more exact approach than what I am describing but I don't want to bore) When the chicken is done we shock the bags in ice water which helps the breast meat reabsorb moisture. Then we bring the chicken back up to hot and when we go to serve the chicken we re-sear the skin in butter making it nice and crisp. The end result is juicy, tender cooked chicken.

We have mimiced roasting a chicken and the results are great. We serve the half bird with lemon verbena scented chicken jus and pommes frites. You may notice we cook sous vide a lot but it really gets great results everytime.

If you are interested there is a new show in England which has a great bit on sous vide steak. They also go into a lot more detail on the chemistry of sous vide. It's called Kamazie Cookery and these guys are smart and funny.

Swoosh Off

This is a good old fashioned swoosh, whatever that means. So John and I have swooshed red pepper coulis on two different plates and we'd like you, the people to vote. Which plate is more pleasing aesthetically. Forget Iron Chef, this means so much more. So please vote no matter who or where you are. For those of you who do know us personally please leave a name so we can poll the jury so to say.

Picture A:


Picture B
TO VOTE CLICK ON COMMENTS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN. YOU DO NOT NEED TO HAVE A BLOGGER ACCOUNT JUST CLICK ANONYMOUS AFTER YOU TYPE YOUR VOTE.
We will check the status in a couple of days. Please vote in the comments section, and Good Luck John your going to need it.

Coming soon: Dueling Specials.

Fried Ravioli and love

Why not. Fried ravioli has been on many menus. Who doesn't like fried raviolis. Well, I guess when it's made in foreign countries and has a ton of food additives, well then yea you might not like fried ravioli. But still the bar food hound in all of us loves fried ravioli.
And this is one way chef's come up with ideas. We love fried foods and especially fried raviolis. Yea it may sound a little base but when you make fresh pasta, fill it with crab meat, blanch the raviolis, and batter them all in house you have shown a lot of love to a fried ravioli. And that is exactly what we did. John being from St. Louis told me fried ravioli were on every menu. So why not.
So here us what we came up with.
Fried Crab Ravioli- corn nage an red pepper coulis.
It sound so simple but there really is a lot of love here. The raviolis alone are a four step process. The crab filling has marscapone cheese, sour cream, cilantro, pimenton, cayenne, and lemon juice. The corn nage is simple, corn, onions, garlic, and chicken stock. The red pepper coulis is great. We took local red bell peppers and roasted, seeded and peeled them. The we took shallots, Garlic and chicken stock and cooked the mixture until liquid reduced by half. Then we pureed the mixture in a blender adding EVOO as neede and the strauned the red pepper puree through a fine mesh chinois. That is love for a fried ravioli.

Farmers Market Caprese

We are really luck to have such a great farmer's market and group of farmer's around the Chapel Hill area. We buy a lot from local farmers but I usually only go to the Farmer's Market on Saturday's with the family. Most of the farmer's here do deliver which is amazing considering the gas prices these days.

These days we have been seeing some great tomatoes coming in. We have featured a lot of tomatoes over the summer, but I hit a chef's writer's block so to say. Sometimes I over think too much and fail to look at the simple beauty of the local products we get. This past Wednesday one of my line cooks John and I went to farmer's market to see what was available. While we were there John suggested mozzarella caprese. I was quick to dismiss the idea as seen all too often and on far to many menus. Luckily John convinced me otherwise and we bought almost everything for the salad at the market.
The Shopping List:
Chapel Hill Creamery fresh Mozz- Chapel Hill creamery uses whole milk Jersey cows to make all their cheeses. Their mozzarella is some of the best i have ever had. They also make some other great cheese from hard too soft.

Lyon Farms sungold, brown roma and grape tomatoes. A great selection of sweet and meaty tomatoes grown in Creedmore, NC.

Perry-winkle Farms Basil- fresh farmer's market basil is always so much more intense.

The rest of the ingridients were silver DOP 15 year Aged Balsamic. Dop extra virgin olive oil and fleur de sel and elephant garlic

Mozzarella Caprese is so simple and so great but only if you let the quality of great ingredients shine through. The Farmer's did all the work on this dish. We just presented it on a plate. And thanks to John for helping break down my Chef's Block.
On a side note our garde manger chef got waxed on this all weekend. Chino (this means chinese in spanish, and chino is a latino) did a great job with these.

Surprise!

We usually leave the camera lying around the kitchen just in case we deem something picture worthy. Of course I find a lot more pictures like the one above, not involving food, usually something vile. But I liked this picture of my 2 nighttime dishwashers. Both great employees, good workers, and really funny.