Confessions of a Stagiere -- Week Seventeen

I can explain my procrastination this week. My parents were in Vancouver visiting. After a few days of parental catharsis they're now gone and I'm free to blog once more.

Either I've really earned some trust in the kitchen or the garde manger is giving me new stuff to do just to see what I'll say about it. Just kidding. Sort of. Lots of new dishes at the restaurant means lots of new tasks for me.

I have a new favourite task: making grapefruit juice. I don't have to make beet juice anymore (victory dance) because the hamachi dish has been changed to a beautiful grapefruit salt cured hamachi with grapefruit gelee, tofu puree and other delicious things. Yeah. That'll do as a description.

We can't put the grapefruit through the juicer because it makes it cloudy. So I just cut them in half and squeeze them as hard as I can over a chinois. I believe the garde manger's exact words were "use your superhuman strength to squeeze them". My reply was, "have you met me?"

Lack of superhuman strength aside, it's actually fun to squeeze the bejeezus out of grapefruits. Very theraputic. It also makes your hands feel awesome, really smooth. And they smell nice afterwards.

The tomato gelee and mascarpone roll component of the amuse bouche has been changed. Now we made a mascarpone that's set with gelatin, pour it into our eyeplates and once they're set we top them with chopped up tomato gelee.

Because the amuse bouche is so much easier to plate, I get to do more in the way of plating with the cold starters. It feels like a promotion. I take my victories wherever I can get them.

I couldn't pass up the opportunity to bring my parents to the restaurant. They'd be hearing about it all this time and they had never been to a fine dining restaurant. I was so excited to bring them there and it pretty much lived up to everything I could've thought of. The chef came out to say hello and he took one look at my mom and said "wow, you guys look exactly the same". My mother and I DO look very similar. It made me laugh because I've often thought about the fact that the older I get the more I look like her.

They certainly got a full experience. A couple of the owners -- David and Manjy Sidoo -- were sitting with a party at the table next to us. It was my parents' second trip to Vancouver and they were getting to experience quite the West Coast life.

I had a fabulous meal of the aforesaid hamachi (which I was forbidden from trying the week before because I was coming in for this meal), scallops with corn succotash (I had been dying to try this, it was fabulous), the new duck dish with daikon and cherries, the beef dish (one of my favourites that I'd never eaten in its entirety until then), finished off with cheese and a new dessert: tiramisu sundae. I think we all got sundaes because Fernando wanted "the thing you pour chocolate onto and it melts", by which he meant the sundae. My dad was full so I actually ate his too.

Part of the mignardise was a tiny carrot cake with a tiny marzipan carrots. My mom was fascinated by it. She couldn't stop talking about how small it was. Even the next day I kept hearing about it. She'll never forget that detail. So this meal definetely qualifies as one that's unforgettable. Thanks to everybody in the kitchen and the front of house for making them feel so at home and taken care of.

Confessions of a Stagiere: Week Sixteen

I've been really terrible at getting these up on time lately. My apologies.

So I didn't go last Friday because I was busy moving into my new home. Woot! Now everything's moved in and almost everything's been unpacked and put away. I can finally concentrate on food.

I did a lot of rejoicing the week before when I found out the amuse bouche had been changed. Not because I didn't like it, but because the new one is 150% easier to plate.

Old amuse: heat up pea puree (which almost always exploded on you if you heated it just a LITTLE too much), heat smoked sablefish under salamander, get heated soup (which turned brown all the time because of the chlorophyll), yell for the bacon foam, coordinate that all together and out it goes. It's not the most difficult thing in the world but man...it could be trying.

New amuse: plate tomato gelee and mascarpone roll ahead of time. Pull out of lowboy when needed. Place heirloom tomato pieces at bottom of cup, pour cold soup into it. Fill puff pastry piece with tomato jam. Done.

This will have changed significantly by the time I head back this Friday. It's a work in progress. But I love the soup. It's a really simple tomato consomme: tomato, basil, cucumber and celery put through a food processor and left to hang over a bowl overnight in a cheesecloth. It's simple and refreshing. The small pieces of tomato inside look like little jewels. Sometimes they float and sometimes they don't. The sous chef figures it has something to do with the size of the pieces. I personally love the way it looks when it floats. With the drops of basil oil dripped into it it is a visual sensation.

There were an inordinate number of people complimenting the dishes this week. Perhaps it's because there are a number of new dishes on the menu, including this absolutely mouthwatering corn and scallop dish I have yet to try. Usually people just send their compliments in with their server or occasionally come into the kitchen to say hello.

This week two guests came in that I will never forget. They were an older couple from Austin, Texas. I only know this because that's what they said. I can't quite describe how they looked, only that they were very American looking (perfectly coiffed hair, artifically whitened teeth). They said it was a "life changing meal".

The woman says, "We're from Austin Texas, where the streets are paved with guacamole".

I don't know what it was, the accent, what she said and the whole American-ness of it, but I could barely hold in the laughter after she said that.

I suppose she was trying to illustrate that there isn't a lot of fine dining in Austin. But it was hilarious to me because only Americans say things like that. This is why we have a saying in (Canadian) radio: Americans on the radio are gold. Because they'll say anything. Love them. They scooted out of the kitchen, saying they would "tell everyone" about this. God, I hope they send more Texans out this way. And if I ever go to Austin I'm bringing along a big bag of nacho chips to sop up all that guacamole.

Confessions of a Stagiere -- Week Nine

When I tell people about working at Lumiere it feels like it's been a long time since I started. But if you put all the days I worked together, it's only been nine days. So really it hasn't been that long at all.

I definetely realized that last Friday. Now that business has picked right back up, stress during prep time is back up. And I got to learn a whole new bunch of things I didn't know.

Usually there are two people working the garde manger station. There's a lot of stuff to do. Here's an example: to make the pea and morel quiche that's part of the amuse bouche, you have to peel about a litre of peas. Like, individual peas, the kind you buy frozen in the store. Yeah. Ever done that before? The cook working garde manger does this at least once a week. It takes hours. In fact, he confessed to me that in the early days he would take these peas home and do it on his days off. It would take six hours, or "three movies" as he puts it.

Anyway, last Friday turned out to be my busiest day ever because when business was slow, they pulled a cook off of garde manger. Now that things have picked back up...staffing levels have remained the same. Not surprised. I mean, the exact same stuff happens in every industry.

There was no lack of things to do: making beet juice, peeling mangoes, prepping shimiji mushrooms...and then I got the most valuable lesson of all.

Vac packing stock is the worst, worst, worst thing ever.

Flash back to those terrible infomercials with the Food Saver. Remember, you put food in these thick plastic bags and it sucks out all the air, thereby allowing you to store food for like, forever? Just like that but industrial sized. Half our stuff gets vac packed -- cuts of meat, stock, my beloved turnip carpaccio, etc. I was vac packing a bunch of stuff for the meat cook. All I had to do was stick the bags in the machine, push down the lid and the machine did the rest. Easy.

Nobody warned me about the stock bags though. How they frequently dribble out. In huge globs. All over the inside of this expensive, industrial machine. That you then have to take apart and clean.

Which of course is exactly what happened. Twice.

GAH!

So, in the middle of an already incredibly day, I had to take parts of this thing out and clean out the oily, thick lamb stock that now coated the bottom of the vac pack machine. A couple people walked by and remarked casually, "oh, did it explode?"

Thanks guys.

Last week I wrote about someone who -- for no discernable reason -- sent back half a lamb dish. Really uncalled for. This week -- a little lesson in making reservations.

It's ok to make a later reservation. I mean, ideally everyone would eat earlier so the kitchen could start clearing up and the hard working cooks could leave earlier, but hey, the restaurant is open later for a reason. Fair enough. But when you make a later reservation -- or any reservation -- for the love of god, BE ON TIME. Someone booked a late table and then proceeded to show up half an hour late and ordered a six course tasting menu. Please, please, please don't do this. It's unfair to the kitchen to have to stay extra late (and probably for just your one table) and unfair to YOU because well, who wants to be the only table at a restaurant? I like the atmosphere. It's a social contract: you make the reservation, you're on time. Don't be a douchebag.

On to more pertinent things.

It was the first day I got to serve someone on my own. One of the suppliers had forgotten a case of maitake mushrooms and had to make a delivery during service. It wasn't very busy at that time, so the chef asked the chef de partie to make up the spot prawn dish for him to try. While he was doing that the sous chef asked me if I'd like to make him up an amuse bouche.

I put it together and while I was walking over I heard the chef de partie describing in great detail the dish he was putting together. I realized I couldn't just drop off my plate without a word. I started off with "I'm not very good at explaining this kind of thing..." and explained every single thing in perfect detail. WOO! So I'm absorbing things after all. I guess you'd have to be brain dead working with this stuff week after week without putting it all together in the end. I felt a ridiculous swell of triumph and victory. Some part of my brain is accepting these new inputs. A mind shift.

Near the end of the night, the garde manger asked me, "so are you learning anything?" Yes, I replied, yes I am.

Confessions of a Stagiere -- Week Six

Normally I head into Lumiere at noon. This week I got in a bit early -- 10 am. The purpose was to learn to set up the amuse bouche station from start to finish.

By noon everyone's there, absorbed in completing their mise en place. Music's blaring, it's warm to very hot depending on where you're standing.

At 10 am, the kitchen was almost totally quiet. It was cold. Only three other people were there, working away in relative silence. Most noticeably missing was the delicious scent of food. That would come later. It was nice to come in and start the day with everyone else, rather than catching up to them.

The first thing I was supposed to learn was how to make the pea soup. Key to this, besides the actual taste, is keeping the peas as vibrantly green as possible. You achieve this by cooking them as little as possible. When it came time to cook them, I noticed the pot we were using was impossibly tiny for the massive amount of snap peas I just had to prepare.

"Is that pot going to be big enough?" I ask.
"Yeah, probably not," is the response.

Which leads to us having to use a bigger pot, with additional water being put in. That is not boiling. Meaning the peas will have to be cooking much longer than necessary. Which means they will turn an unappealing brown colour. Which leads to another cook getting a look on his face like he's just seen a particularly repulsive sexual act being performed on one of his relatives.

This is a very valuable lesson for me to absorb. Learning from other people's mistakes is just as valuable as learning from my own. And less humiliating on my part.

Luckily for everyone there is a bit of a culinary cheat, involving spinach puree. Spinach puree is the colour of Romulan/Vulcan blood. It's a beautiful, deep bright green. And it virtually has no taste. So you can put it into food you want to be greener and no one's the wiser. Well, until now anyway.

After a while the sous chef pulls me aside to make pea ravioli filling. It's a pretty simple set of ingredients: snap peas, leeks, spinach (read above), mint, shallots and fennel. Cook them (not too much) and then puree them. Then pass them through a sieve. Smooth and delicious.

I did learn how to make bacon foam for the pea soup that's part of the amuse bouche. You have to saute bacon with other delicious ingredients, boil it with milk until it splits. Then you strain and blend the milk until it comes together, then add soya lecithin, which makes it foam better.

I've noticed some of the cooks keep notebooks to write down recipes. This is a great idea that I haven't put into practice yet. I really should do that.

Slowly...I'm becoming more assertive. It's funny because in my "normal" life I have absolutely no problem with this. In fact, I'm pretty damn bossy. But when I'm in a situation where I have no authority and no knowledge I keep my mouth shut. When it came time to plating the beef dish, however, I spoke up. I pretty much told the entremetier to give me the garnish I needed, much to the amusement of everyone who was seeing me act authoritatively for the first time. When the expediter tried to take it away before I'd added it, I all but grabbed him and said, "Stop". Finished the dish. "Go".

The sous chef said to me afterwards, "Be like that all the time".

Ha. Just give it time.

On another note, I finally told my boss at CBC about what I've been up to on Fridays after she kept trying to rearrange my work schedules to work Fridays (I currently work Sunday to Thursday). She agreed to try and keep my Fridays clear. It's been very weird trying to explain to my other co-workers what I'm doing. Either they think it's great or they look at me like I'm an alien. I don't really blame them. But hey, when you can't afford to go to culinary school and you want to follow a dream...you do what you have to do.

I already can't wait for next Friday.

Confessions of a Stagiere -- Week One

From my first week at Lumiere...April 3/09.

There's nothing like the first day at a new job. You can practically taste the anxiety bubbling up like bile. It crawls up into your throat and chokes you just as you ask the question, "What would you like me to do?"

Once I get in the kitchen there is some surprise at my return but there's always something to do. I learn to start getting into a rhythm of every task: whether it's cutting up the tips of romaine lettuce into "fronds" or picking the tips of chervil.

I've always cooked and helped to prepare food since I was a kid. My mother was always big into making her own food. Whenever we would go out she would inevitably say, "I could make that myself". Money was always tight. But good food was always paramount.

I remember many days sitting in front of the television with a big bowl of snow peas to prepare. It was theraputic, snapping off the ends and taking off the fibrous edges. I always made sure to check them all over once I was finished because there's nothing more unpleasant than eating a snow pea that hasn't been cleaned properly.
There's also a lot of camaraderie while you're preparing food. You're working towards a common goal whose end result (if you did it properly) would only be a good one.

All these "mom" food moments came back as I was helping to make ravioli. Their ravioli consists of a butternut squash filling and shaping the pasta squares into pyramids with square bases...that are also slightly rounded out. I was told to take my time with them.

My mother and I never made ravioli. We made gyoza, a water and flour dough rolled out into circles and filled with a meat mixture. I was never given the responsibility of handling the dough because I was never able to do it to my mother's satisfaction. Whenever I would fill them it was never the right amount of mixture. I was also never able to successfully replicate one of my mother's gyoza. A proper gyoza should be folded in half and crimped by hand so it looks like an elaborately edged purse. Try as I might, I just couldn't get the hang of it and it would always look primitive next to hers. So my sister and I would turn them into barnyard animals and whatever else we wanted, defiantly deformed.

The restaurant had taken a hit since I'd been there last. The number of customers willing to pay top dollar for a world class meal had fallen dramatically due to the recession. It pained me to see the reservation numbers (about half of what the dining room could accomodate). But this also allowed more time for experimentation and invention.

We all got to try the latest invention -- foie gras ice cream. I could see how foie gras would lend itself to ice cream, being pretty much all fat anyway. You could just blend it in. But what would a meat flavoured ice cream taste like? We all found out. The taste was very creamy, and then the foie gras flavour hit you hard and pretty much stayed put. It was cold, sweet foie gras. I didn't really know what to make of it. It was a culinary noodle scratcher. Others seemed thrilled and thought it could've been more savoury. It was definetely one of the more unique food experiences I've ever had.

Another new item being tested was a pheasant and pear terrine. "This terrine is going to be off the hook", one cook commented. I'd never heard a terrine described this way.

I had to ask: what draws people into this very specialized, exhausting, exhilirating road to food?

One was a pre med student in Victoria before he realized he wanted to work in food. He quit school, travelled, then came back and got a job as a dishwasher. I asked him what his parents had thought. "They were horrified." He went off to culinary school and is three years into a promising career. But to this day his family isn't completely convinced. His stories about 16 hour work days has not helped.

Another was studying math and training to be a bioengineer. How does an engineer wannabe go into cooking? "I was always thinking about what I was going to have for dinner." His mother's horrified reaction did nothing to stop his plans. His response is: "I can be an engineer when I'm forty, but I can't cook when I'm forty".

I'm feeling particularly self-conscious because I'm very aware of my position as outsider/interloper. I'm a radio producer who's in the kitchen...performing small tasks...following and observing...for what? People whose curiosity has finally gotten the better of them will ask me, "what are you doing here?" Good question, I think to myself. I'll get back to you when I have an answer. For now, I just reply, "I'm here to learn". It's cryptic but most are not curious enough to inquire further.

Last time during service I stood against one corner of the kitchen trying desperately to stay out of the way and stop my hair from catching fire on the incredibly hot salamander oven above my head. This time the chef looked at me and said "you're going to take care of the amuse bouche so you'll be involved with the service". Great, I thought.

One of the garde manger cooks showed me how to plate the amuse bouche. It consisted of three parts: a crab roll cut into thick coins and placed on top a small pinch ("just what you can hold in your fingers") of spaghetti squash, a squash soup with parmesan foam and a squash quiche cut into a square with yogurt and toasted pumpkin seeds on top. It all had to be assembled at the right time. It was easy enough to organize: you could prepare the bed of spaghetti squash and arrange the quiche ahead of time because they could be served at room temperature. But you had to time the soup just right. The foam came off another station so you had to yell out, "parm foam down" so the person with the foam would know when to pass it to you. The first time I had to do this I couldn't bring myself to yell out the order. "I'll do it next time," I said. And I did. Preparing the foam is fun: you buzz it first and then scoop it off, then drop it vertically from your spoon.

It feels great to be part of this team. All of them work together seamlessly, anticipating, communicating, and watching this culinary ballet up close is a thing of beauty.

At the end of the night, I head over to the office to talk to Dale. I thank him for letting me come in and ask if I can make this a weekly arrangement for the foreseeable future. He has no problems with this, doesn't ask any questions. I leave feeling great, with more skills and revelations and promises of more to come.