Week 4: What Hurts

Below, I have shared some photos of blistered burns from Week 3. Chef saw my arms and said, "Now you look like a real cook!"

Oui, Chef. Thank you, Chef.





I am learning which parts my hands and arms actually contain sensitive nerves. That fat part of my hand? Not so much. The blister fascinated me in its perfect bulbous beauty, but didn't hurt at all. The burns on my arms itched more than they hurt.

The injuries that hurt are the little scrapes on my fingertips that don't make for dramatic pictures. They are scrapes like the one Friday night from the special yuzu grater - scrapes that are small like paper cuts at the tips of your fingers. Then add the squeezing of a lime, and you have the sharp biting pain of a thousand tiny needles stabbing into a millimeter area.

Week 4: Don't Forget your Veg!

The week started with A LOT of prep to do. But when don't we have a lot of prep to do? Chef always says that the most difficult thing to prepare are vegetables. People don't realize the amount of labor that goes into them - the cleaning, the cutting, the preparation. The protein on the plate looks sexy to people; the veg is the workhorse.

Insert usual bitching about the delicious pork belly dish here. As an illustration of this concept, I present my favorite (read sarcasm) dish to plate at LudoBites. Pictures can be found at this foodie blog. Oooh, pork belly. Such glistening goodness. Sexaaay. But what compliments all this fat and savory? Why an artfully and generously placed tumble of vegetables dressed with a tasty vinaigrette! Quick! Brush aside all that healthy stuff and get back to the money shot. Ooooh. Fatty belly yeah...

Take note, man, of the number of veg you just pushed aside to get to that pork belly:

• fingerling potato
  
• green papaya
  
• jicama
  
• savoy cabbage
  
• pickled red onion
  
• thai basil leaves
  
• fried shallots
  
• fried lotus root

How many ingredients is that? Count it. EIGHT. Eight veg! most of which are julienned in a mandoline at the risk of bodily injury. And four of those ingredients are processed by boiling, frying, or pickling - an extra step!

I went to a shabu shabu place the other day for lunch. As my raw beef was sitting there all bright and red and beautiful, the waitress brought out my plate of vegetables and I felt myself overwhelmed with appreciation and sympathy for the man behind the curtain. I turned to my friend and said, "Some poor schmuck had to do all this!"

I am that poor schmuck. Please think of me the next time you forget to eat your vegetables.

Week 3: Thank you, may I have another!?

So I have more wonderful photos of a recent burn that happened when I was lifting a heavy pot from the back burner over a giant pot on the front burner, but I don't have my camera with me. I've spent the weekend watching my grandmother while my parents are out of town. It's very quiet here, but it's stressful trying to keep her from scorching garlic in the sautee pan.

Also, I've realized that I never learned the Taiwanese word for "please." This is because growing up you were never asked to "please" do something, you were just told to do it. My grandmother just kept telling me to do things (put the pan here, put the vegetable in the fridge, get the bowl, etc.) and it was driving me crazy. I tried to ask her to use the "polite" words but wasn't able to communicate it.

But I'm okay with no "please" or "thank yous" in the kitchen. When Chef says something, you answer, "Yes, Chef! Oui, Chef!"

When I hear the ticket machine clicking away during service and the order is called, I answer, "Thank you!" And in my head, I'm thinking "Thank you, may I have another!?"

The professional kitchen is run like the military. Respect, hierarchy, chain of command. There's no time to question, just do it.

Not completely sure why this doesn't apply to my grandmother in the kitchen except that there is this complicated cultural component where you're supposed to be taking care of her, but she also wants to assert her independence and knowledge... knowledge you know is 50 years out of date.

I Dream of Shallots

Week 2 of the internship at LudoBites: More shallots! More shallots! Every night Chef wants more fried shallots in the charcroute. Every night, I literally dreamt of shallots: slicing them on the mandoline, frying them, drowning in a sea of shallots. Every day, I played chicken with a mandoline trying to get the best yield from the little buggers I could. (My husband said there were too many f-bombs in my last post, so I'm trying to keep it clean.) Most of the time, I won, but it only takes one loss to the mandoline to totally screw with my day. I'm investing in Band-Aid stock.

My goal on Friday was to NOT hear "More shallots!" from Chef. Success! And the shallots that haunted my dreams were gone that evening.

So what did I learn this week? I learned that during service, communication and coordination is absolutely key. When you get slammed with order after order in no particular order (pork belly! bass! belly! foie gras! duck! duck! belly!), you have to absolutely be aware of what proteins are going down on the plancha and you have to know what dishes are on deck to be plated. Wednesday was a total clusterfuck and I got my ass handed to me. After a sit-down meeting about coordination and communication with Chef and the sous, I started getting a handle on the movements of service and by Friday, it was starting to become more natural.

I still suck, though. It's easier, however, to spot the efficient movements that Chef and the sous are using to plate the dishes. I'm trying to mimic as best I can.

Quenelle update: the two-handed quenelles of cucumber relish go down on the plate pretty easily now. But now there's a one-handed quenelle of soft mustard ice cream that goes on my favorite pork belly dish. I practiced at home this weekend, but I have about a 1% success rate. And even that one ice cream quenelle looked so much like crap that I couldn't be bothered to take a picture of it to post.

On the plus side, my body has started getting used to standing all day. My feet weren't in any pain at the end of the week. Also, Chef yells at us if we don't take a break between prep and service. He sits in the dining room in front of the staff meal and knows who has come to take a plate and who hasn't. "I will be very angry if you don't come eat now!"

Yes, Chef. I was just coming to eat right now, Chef!

None of us really wants to stop because we all want to make sure our stations are set up properly, but he's right. Making us sit down for at least 5 minutes before service - and preferably 15-20 minutes - makes a huge difference for the rest of the evening.

Next week, the Chef has promised a couple changes in the menu. Just as I was getting the hang of the old one! Oh well... what dreams may come...

From Foodie to Kitchen Bitch

I am privileged to have an internship position with the infamous Ludo Lefebvre at LudoBites 5.0. I have finished week one of this run from July 21 - September 3, and I got my freakin' ass kicked.

Day One wasn't really a "Day." We came in for an orientation, toured the kitchen at Gram and Papa's, met some of the staff, and went over the menu on paper. About halfway through Chef's descriptions of the menu items, he had to go back to the kitchen to answer a question from his staff who was prepping hard for the next day. I took the opportunity to hold my head in my hand because my head was about to explode. There were so many unique components on each dish! Here are my notes:





Day Two was easy in retrospect. We were just in prep for opening day on Wednesday. My first task was to segment grapefruit and dice the peel for grapefruit jam. Easy. So why was I sweating like a pig? And I'm talkin' full-on rivulets running down my neck. I chock it up to nervousness. It's different when you're prepping food for paying customers who expect the best instead of making a cozy dinner for kind family and friends. Other prep involved the vadouvan naan and the creme patisserie for the caramel souffle.

Day Three, opening day, was marshmallows, graham crackers, cheese cupcakes, naan, and souffles. Things seemed to be going okay until I started falling behind. I screwed up the graham crackers, salvageable, but I lost time because I thought I could do the math in my head instead of writing doubled quantities down. The problem is, when you're rushed for time and you're reading a recipe, you don't always remember to do the math! So I have a new rule: ALWAYS DO THE MATH ON PAPER.

On service, I made two souffles fall - which basically set each order back 15 minutes. The aggravated sous taught me how to get the souffles out of the oven correctly and my third souffle came out of the oven without falling... even if it was a slow and nervous process. With relief, I sent it out and the rest of the souffles that evening were cake. Still felt like shit, though, for those two fallen souffles - which was essentially 30 minutes of delay.

It's not even worth describing my poor piping skills with the chocolate ganache and my inability to torch a marshmallow for the s'mores.

Here are my oven burned left arm and my torch-burned right elbow. Pretty sure my hand-modeling days are over.

Oven burns


Torch burn



Day 4 and 5 plating main courses. I love pork belly. I love it as bacon. I love it as quivering cubes of fat and meat in Asian preparations. I even love touching the raw skin that feels eerily human-like. But I fuckin' hate plating it at LudoBites. No question, the dish is fabulous. The pork belly has been brined and pressed and cut precisely by the sous. The raw charcroute is dressed with lime, fried shallots, fried lotus, and a Thai vinaigrette. Delicious. But there are a thousand components in that charcroute and Chef knows every single time I forget one component. This ain't rocket science and I feel like a dunce. I know I lose focus I have to work on that.

On top of it all, Day 5 we ran low on fried shallots and lotus root. Crash course on how to use the fryer during service. Burned the first batch. Lucky me. Did okay on the second batch. Will need to learn how to change out that oil because I think part of the issue was that it was used up and I definitely had it too hot.

Fuckin' quenelles. The foie dish has a quenelle of cucumber relish on the plate. I've never done a quenelle in my life. I've seen it demonstrated. I know what they look like. The cook in charge of me does them very well. I let her do it and I just watch. I practice on one plate. I get the nice quenelle shape in my spoons, but when I go to put it on the plate, I hesitate because I have no idea how to get it off the spoon and on to the plate without ruining it. Chef yells that I must practice all weekend long! I know I'm over-thinking it because when we're slammed and the cook in charge of me is running around doing other stuff, I HAVE to get those quenelles on the plate. Three of them, right in a row, no overthinking.

So I practiced this weekend. Yay:

Quenelles


Oh, and just a random shot of an injury from prep this week. Good thing I heal quickly.

Mandolin cut



So what did I learn this week?

I learned that standing 12 hours a day hurts your feet, ankles, and legs. On the plus side, the pain in my legs completely distracted me from the pain in my left hip that has been there for over a month.

I learned that you have to really really love preparing food in a restaurant to be a chef, sous, line cook, etc. because it's fuckin' hard work.

I learned that there is a weird line I've crossed from being a foodie to sweating in the back with the sharp implements and the fire. After the first couple of nights, I took a look at some of the foodie blogs to see what they were saying after they had their first meals at LudoBites 5.0. Mostly everything was well-received. It was strange reading these reviews. In the past, when I have read them, I've read them with the thought, "Woah. I want to eat THAT." Now, when I read them, I think, "Who the fuck are you to write so much about this?" And when there's a questionable review about a dish, I think, "Fuck you! You have no idea how hard people worked for that!"

I'm not sure on which side I'll eventually come down, foodie or kitchen bitch. I still unconsciously begin hopping with joy when I taste something really really good. And I'm not sure I'm young enough to do this hard work anymore. But when a friend of mine asked me if I would work another LudoBites after this, without hesitation, I answered, "Yes. If they will have me!"

Roasted Bone Marrow Powder

When I blitzed all the bone marrow with tapioca maltodextrin, I thought it was nuts, but the result on hash browns was a keeper!

Ramps!

Spicy garlicky leaf. Sweet stem/bulb.

Midnight Macaroons

I don't know if it's the sugar rush from taste-testing, or if it's because I figured out how to use the self-clean cycle on my oven. A revelation! Next time I broil some eggplant, I hope I won't have to have the sheet pan ready to fan the smoke detector.

I couldn't sleep, so I decided I would try to make some macaroons. After my pathetic attempt this summer, I thought I'd try to do it again with the full experience of a baking class backing me.

This time, I did it!

Piped and ready to bake:



Dried out as much as possible, but I'm still going to sit it in a warm oven overnight:



Time to attempt the Bryan Voltaggio macaroon again. That's what inspired me and got me in trouble the first time.

Oatmeal philia

I wrote a while ago about my Oatmeal phobia. My friend the ProFussor emailed me about oatmeal that would change my life.

He was right. I had been exposed only to the horrible instant rolled oats variety of oatmeal (cardboard with a hint o' ass). This morning I tried his preparation with steel cut oats toasted in butter before simmering. It's oatmeal with bite and teeth and not a hint o' ass or cardboard anywhere. I didn't need a fried egg to cover up the flavor because the oatmeal was nutty and flavorful.

Pate a choux

Better known as the pastry dough that forms cream puffs and eclairs, I tried out a savory version with chives,sprinkled with gruyere, and stuffed with fenugreek mashed potatoes.



I've really learned a lot in my 8-week intro baking class. Prior to the class, I didn't think much about baking, but now I have a whole new appreciation for this art which creates such a variety of different products from a handful of standard ingredients.

Prior to this class, I also used to think I was a nice person, but after 8 weeks of dealing with classmates who had the mental capacity of a peanut, I realize I will probably go to hell because I have so little tolerance for idiots. I am chock full of horror, bitterness, and a little bit of shock. Raised in the Asian way, I believed if you worked hard enough, you'd learn. Work problems over and over and eventually, you'll know how to do calculus. Basically, I was taught nurture over nature. Now, I don't know. A lot of it is the luck of the genetic and socio-economic draw. There is a lot of nature involved. I find this very disturbing and contrary to the American way of thinking.

Maybe it's not so good to have this American ideal of achievement when so much of American society is stacked against the odds of having nurture overcome nature.

Bread

New loaf, same aesthetics. For some reason, this loaf turned out drier than the last.

Dammit.

I suspect I baked it too long. The internal temp was upwards 205 Fahrenheit when I took it out of the oven.

Home-made Bread

My first two attempts at a sandwich bread loaf in the last two weeks have tasted fine, but have looked unappealing - lopsided, too brown on top, too light on the bottom.

Today, I used a different "recipe" (from Michael Ruhlman's book RATIO) and let it rise overnight in the refrigerator so some lethargic yeast could lazily munch on some sugar in their slowed metabolic state. I also brushed on some egg wash halfway through the baking.

MUCH better looking and better tasting!

Cross-run

Now I'm just getting ridiculous. Crossing in a panic = running forward and back on the board like a chicken with its head cut off.

Do chickens surf?

Backward

Cross-stepping forward is getting slightly easier.

Backward is non-existant as I shuffle-hopped back to the tail only to lose it and have the board shoot out from under me.

Cross-step

I did a few honest-to-goodness cross-steps this weekend instead of my usual sideways bunny hop.

Now I just have to learn how to do it at the right time instead of at the end of the wave when I just sink the nose into the water.

Things to note

I stepped on a weight scale yesterday out of solidarity for our dog Otis who was having his annual check-up. Oof. Both the dog and I are heavier than last year.

This is why I decided to surf this morning.

I'm rusty and surfing without a leash at El Porto does not help my rusty-ness. Swam once and that was enough to make me really picky about my waves.

Stupidly took the wrong key with me when I locked my car, locking the car key inside. Thanks to the awesome surfer woman with AAA!

Longboarding

Joel Tudor interview on longboarding and why it's not shortboarding

Watched the surfers on a major swell today at Topanga. Shortboarders bore me. The sexy ones were the three longboarders who were killing it with five toes over and powerful turns.

Surfed today

That is all.

Oatmeal phobia

I had this impression that plain oatmeal tastes like ass with a hint of cardboard. I don't know where I got this impression. I don't actually remember ever eating oatmeal, but maybe I was just suppressing a memory which lingers as just an impression.

So, being an adventurous sort of foodie, I decided to try oatmeal this morning. I am happy to report that I was wrong, it actually tastes more like cardboard with a hint of ass. I decided it would help to dress it up... salt (lots of it), butter, and a fried egg on top. I broke the yolk with my spoon and had myself some egg-flavored oatmeal. No cardboard or ass.

Now I feel healthy because I ate oatmeal.

I surf / I don't surf

I think this is a lull.

My weekend commitment to "paddle no matter what" went by the wayside after about two weekends. One weekend had no surf, and I paddled. One weekend had some small fun surf and I had some small fun waves, and I paddled. This weekend was a swell and the yahoos were out. Close-outs did not look fun to paddle over or out of at home break and hunting down non-crowded points on the first Los Angeles weekend swell in two months did not sound like a fun way to spend the morning.

So I don't surf.