Keep Moving Forward

"Keep Moving Forward" is a quote from one of my sons favorite movies "Meet The Robinsons." It really is a great movie and one I don't mind watching 10 times in a row. But the line keep moving forward relates to an inventor who get excited every time he has a failed invention. So often we come up with dishes and I look at it and think somethings not right. More often than not it has to do with plating. Do we keep it high and tight, spread through out the plate etc. And often I get frustrated with myself for not being able to get the plate the way I want it to look. I was so frustrated the other night I hucked a spoon across the kitchen because I couldn't get my chicken to stay on top of the vegetables. I was also in the weeds and I didn't through the spoon at anyone just a wall. At the end of the shift I thought about keep moving forward. If you don't get the desired result keep moving forward. So I did and completly revamped our pan roasted chicken. I am much happier the dish. We are always refining, improving and revamping in the kitchen to make sure we are putting out our best.

Here is our new pan roasted chicken breast. We use Tanglewood Farms free range chicken from Winston-Salem. Leek and gruyere bread pudding, sugar snap beans, roasted garlic veloute and tomato fondue. It was a big hit this weekend.


We have been getting some fantastic NC coastal shrimp for about 3 weeks. They are super sweet. I have always been a fan of paella since I traveled to Spain when I was younger. We took the paella idea and revamped it slightly. We cook the shrimp sous vide in lemon, thyme and butter. The shells, and heads when we can get them, go to stock for the risotto. We serve the shrimp over a saffron,shitake, and chorizo risotto and top it with basil oil. I can't by enough shrimp to keep up with the demand.
Here are some shots of the guys and the pass this weekend.
Things to work on/new ideas

• Update dessert menu
• Floating Islands- on a caramleized white chocolate anglaise
• Death by chocolate- chocolate marquis, white chocolate and raspberry jelly, mexican chocolate pot de creme
• Cane Creek Braised pork shoulder- deconstructed NC barbecue, spaetzle au gratin and braised red cabbage
• Salmon, orzo salad, farmers market sorrel.
• Foam amuse bouches
  
• Hot Foie Torchon.
• Get to the Farmers Market- produce is starting to hit
• We need to get ECOS on Board
  

New Menu Layout

We have been making some changes in our menu style and layout and we have been really happy. Less is more is the theory. We have been running a two page menu with one side highlighting specials. We now only have one menu which we are printing on a regular basis, and changing pretty often so try and keep up. This allows us more flexability with what's in season. We can change on a dime if need be and we are having a blast with it. This week we are looking at 2 new items going on.

First is a wild stripped bass bouillabaisse broken down. We are going to grill the bass and serve it with a slightly spicy bouillabaisse sauce, rouille croquette, and french bean salad. I
ll try and get picture up soon.

The other is Braised Cane Creek Farms pork butt with spaetzle au gratin, braised red cabbage, and spiced cider gastrique A big twist on Alsatian food and NC barbecue.

We have also been getting amazing NC coastal shrimp fresh!!!. It's been a long time since I have worked with shrimp this good. We are cooking the shrimp sous vide with butter, lemon and thyme and putting it over a spin off of paella. A saffron-chorizo risotto with shitakes, and topping it with basil oil.

Valentines Day Shots

Here we have the start of our chocolate dipped hazelnuts with fleur de sel. This was our amuse bouche for valentines day. On this tray alone there were roughly 400 hazelnuts. We poured hard ganache over the four different times and then topped them with fleur de sel.


This is our almond brittle thuile being molded on our back line. We used it for the Banana Split for Two shown below. My sous John and I write a lot menus over many beers and we play the what if. Example, what if we did a banana split for valentines day. Yeah, maybe we could make a huge sweeping thuile to come off the plate. Sounds great. Well the next part is actually making the thuile. I am no pastry chef, but with a little trial and error and one quick run to Ace hardware we actually pulled this one off. These are the types of experiments for me that really get me excited. Especially when they work. It is actally pretty scary how many of our ideas come through versus how many fail.

Thanks to all who came for Valntines day. I am pretty sure the banana split is going on to our regular menu.

Separation

Some vinaigrette's are easy and some are not. A lot of of our recipes use very few emulsifiers to bind our dressings together with the idea of keeping our flavors as pure as possible. But this often results in line cooks (and myself) breaking the vinaigrette. So we used to start over and try and re-emulsify. Thanks to cooking for engineers we saw a better way to start over. Of course using a basis from chemistry we force the separation to speed up using a zip lock bag. Hanging the bag allows for a complete separation and when the mixture is finished we cut a small whole in the bottom of the bag and allow the mixtures to drain into separate containers and then we can start anew. It is a great method for separating any liquid.This is our pomegranate vinaigrette. A constant source of frustration.

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.

Short Rib Ravioli

We have been working on our ravioli dough recipe for a while and really trying to get it down to a science. Now, ravioli dough has been around for a long time and many many people make great ravioli. This shouldn't seem like something hard to make. But when we looked at compressing the dough for tenderness we ran into a slew of visual problems. After lots of experimentation we have finally put our compressed pasta dough to bed and we can move on. Here we took shots of our local grass fed short rib raviolis from start to finished plate. The finished dish:
Local Grass Fed Beef Short Rib Ravioli with Shitake Ragout, Edamame, and Red Wine Syrup.

A lot of goat cheese and marscapone went into the mix

Lobster Lasagna

It is always strange where inspiration can come from. While down in the USVI my sister in-law made us lasagna one night for dinner on the boat. The lasagna was great filled with great Italian sausage, cheese and a great tomato sauce. The thing that set of the light bulb was the fact that my sister in-law rolled the lasagna instead of making a traditional layered lasagna. What a great way to present a uniform dish. Here is my thanks to Leigh.

We took her idea and ran with it. Lobster hit ur minds and trying to use all parts as always. We used our base pasta dough recipe and added the coral from the lobsters.

The lobster coral makes the dough bright green when it is raw but when cooked the dough turns a light a red. We rolled out the sheets and blanched thm. We then mixed the lobster meat with ricotta and marscapone and rolled it in the pasta sheets. Using the shells of the lobster we made lobster stock which we used to make a rich tomato sauce. Here is the finished product. While the sauce is running a little with the basil oil I can't help but love these imperfections.

Tender Ravioli Dough

We are working on a spur of the moment VIP amuse bouche. Something we could have on hand for surprise VIPs. Then we had one of those light bulb moments. Ideas in Food had written an article on the perfect chocolate chip cookie dough. Most people rest their cookie dough for 36 hours for the flavors to fully combine and for the flour to be fully absorbed. Aki and Alex figured out that by compressing the dough it seemed as if the dough had been rested, but with out the lapse in time. Pretty Cool.
Next, Michael Ruhlman wrote about a dinner he had with Symon in which Symon kneads his ravioli dough very little. Almost like he was kneading biscuit dough so as not to develop large gluten strands. We put these two ideas together to make or new ravioli dough. We put our ingredients together as one usually does with pasta. Eggs and oil in the middle and flour around the outside. We slowly draw the flour in and when the dough just starts to come together and it becomes like a shaggy biscuit mix we stop and compress the down for 50 seconds. Our dough was finished. It couldn't have been an easier pasta recipe. We have also used this method for tart shells and we will probably use it for biscuits as well. We have made a bouche ravioli of red wine braised oyster mushrooms with chevre.

Here is our recipe:

All Purpose Flour 1200 grams
Kosher Salt 15 grams
Whole Eggs 5 ea
Egg Yolks 25 ea
EVOO 100 milliliters
Whole Milk 100 milliliters


Mix flour and salt together and put on a large work surface and create a well in the center large enough to hold eggs and oil. Put eggs and oil in the center and slowly stir, gradually drawing in the flour. When you have a fairly solid dough work in the rest of the flour until just barely combined. Compress for 50 seconds and refrigerate.