Food Musings

Paris

July 18, 2010 By Steve Dunn 18 Comments

(photo credit: my significantly better-half)

We're back…..have you missed us?

No?

What do you mean you didn't even know we were gone……

You make me sad.

For those of you who HAVE been wondering why we've had so few posts over the past weeks, the answer is that we've been doing a little traveling, and while we were able to pre-schedule a few posts to publish in our absence, they haven't been hitting the site with our normal frequency. In fact, I was in such a hurry to get the last few done, that I actually popped them in the queue while sitting at JFK, waiting for a flight with the boys as we jetted off for our annual "he-man" getaway at the end of the school year.

A day after returning home with them, my wife, the girls and I were on a plane to Paris (am I a lucky bugger, or what?).

Oui, Chef's One Year Anniversary!

June 13, 2010 By Steve Dunn 26 Comments

Only on this day are the kids "all-thumbs"!

It's hard for me to believe that a year has already past since writing my first post back in June of 2009. Wow…..where does the time go?

No recipe to share today (boo), but rather a few words of thanks, and a moment for both reflecting on the year that was, and for looking forward to what lies ahead for those of us in the "Oui, Chef" kitchen.

First, a from the bottom of my heart THANK YOU for everyone who has visited our site and been a part, whether large of small, of our first year on-line. We feel blessed to have grown such a wonderful and enthusiastic readership, and are thrilled with the growing group of regulars that somehow always find the time to check out our latest posts, and make a point to cheer us along at every step. Your encouragement, warmth, and passion for what we do means a great deal to all of us here, and provides us great incentive to keep "Oui, Chef" moving forward, striving to discover more tasty food, and fun lessons to share with you all.

Jody Adams’ Halibut Braised in Ginger-Lemongrass Broth

May 10, 2010 By Steve Dunn 15 Comments

In celebration of Jody Adams’ decisive first and second round victories in Bravo Network’s latest “Top Chef Masters” competition, I thought we’d cook a dish today from her terrific cookbook (co-authored by her husband, Ken Rivard), In the Hands of A Chef: Cooking with Jody Adams of Rialto Restaurant. This dish is a bit of a departure from Jody’s typically mediterranean offerings, but as a nod to asian-fusion style cooking in the style of a “bourride” (a Provencal fish stew), it is a real winner. I’ve taken a few liberties with the dish only to use up a few ingredients I had in my fridge that I thought would work well here, but the soul of this light and delicious dish is all Jody.

Jamie Oliver’s Chicken Korma

April 22, 2010 By Steve Dunn 14 Comments

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again….I’m a big fan of Jaime Oliver. I like his food philosophy, I like his recipes, I like his no-nonsense approach to getting things done in the kitchen, I like the message he’s bringing to the world, and the campaign he’s built to not only get families eating healthier food, but to get better food into the schools for our kids.People ask me all the time, “if you could be any chef on the planet who would it be?”. As you might guess, the normal superstar suspects all come to mind….. let’s see there’s Robuchon, Keller, Ducasse, Vongerichten, Boulud, Ripert, Blumenthal, and Adria, just to name a few. But to be honest, if I could click my heals together today and change myself into any chef currently working, I’d want to be Oliver. I mean, it would be very cool to be any of the aforementioned chefs, working at the very peak of gastronomy, but I don’t think there is any chef working so hard to bring better food and cooking skills to average families and kids than Oliver, and how cool and important is that!

Holy Scrap!

February 24, 2010 By Steve Dunn 19 Comments

Let me start with a great big THANK YOU to the lovely Devaki, author of the terrific food blog "Weave a Thousand Flavors" for tagging me for this, the much coveted "Honest Scrap" award. For those of you in the dark as to the significance of the Honest Scrap (as indeed I was just a few short hours ago), it is an award passed among fellow bloggers in recognition of brilliant or inspiring blog design and content (I'm not entirely convinced that Devaki was clear on this requirement before passing the award along to me and my little band of kitchen slaves…..oh well, it's our now….YIPPEE!).

As there is no such thing as a free lunch, there are a few responsibilities that convey with this award, namely I must:

1. Say Thank You and give a link to the presenter of the award (check….see above)

2. Share "10 Honest Things" about myself (here is where the Holy Scrap! sentiment comes into play)

3. Present this award to 7 others whose blogs I find brilliant in content and/or design, or those who have encouraged me (given how many great blogs I regularly enjoy, this shouldn't be too hard)

4. Tell those 7 people that they have been awarded HONEST SCRAP and inform them of these guidelines.

Chefs Collaborative Celebrates!

October 20, 2009 By Steve Dunn 1 Comment

My wife and I had a blast Sunday night at the Chefs Collaborative's "Seasonal Celebration" held at The Regatta Bar in Cambridge. I have been a member of the Collaborative for a couple of years now, and never miss an opportunity to join with member chefs and farmers as they work together to create magical food from our local, sustainable bounty.

Chefs Collaborative works with chefs, farmers and the greater food community to celebrate local foods and foster a more sustainable food supply. Through their actions, they encourage their members to embrace seasonality, preserve diversity and traditional practices, and support local economies. By providing member chefs with the tools necessary to make sustainable purchasing decisions, and then connecting these chefs with local, sustainable food producers, the Collaborative does a great deal to advance the health of local food economies nationwide.

Sunday's event was special in that it celebrated our region's RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) Grow-out, in which twenty-eight farmers and thirty-five chefs in Boston, MA; Portsmouth, NH and Providence, RI, participated this year. Each farmer grew some of the sixteen varieties of regionally significant, heirloom vegetables chosen for the project. Seeds were donated to the project by Seed Savers Exchange, Fedco Seeds, and Old Sturbridge Village. Farmers “grew out” these seeds and participating chefs bought the produce, and featured them on their menus.

Friends and supporters of the Collaborative packed the room on Sunday, and were treated to dozens of creative dishes, all featuring local "heirloom" RAFT produce. There was a delicious Boston Marrow Squash Flan from Chef Richard Garcia and his team at Tastings Wine Bar and Bistro, and a fabulous Smoked Taylor Bay Scallop with Caramelized Onion Risotto, all topped with a fresh Pickled Pumpkin Salad from Peter McCarthy and the gang at EVOO.

This year's event allowed the chefs to set up their cooking stations along the perimeter of the main room so that they could meet and greet the guests, and answer questions we all had about the treats they had produced, a definite improvement over last year's event, where the poor fellas (and ladies) were all locked in the kitchen, well out of reach of their fans. Quel dommage!

For all of you committed to eating locally grown, sustainably produced food, and would like to help facilitate the bringing together of like minded chefs and farmers, I encourage you to check-out and support my friends at Chefs Collaborative. It is a terrific organization doing great work for local food communities across the country.

Cheers – Steve

The Chef's Table – Peter McCarthy of EVOO Restaurant

October 2, 2009 By Steve Dunn 4 Comments

I am excited to be writing today's post, because it marks the first installment of a new feature that I am calling “The Chef’s Table”. In it, I will profile a real honest to goodness chef (not just someone who plays one on TV, like me) who is also a parent. I’ll ask my guest to not only opine on their food philosophy, but also on how they bring that thinking home, and what important food lessons they hope to pass on to their kids.

I recently had a chance to chat with Peter McCarthy, the award winning chef/owner of EVOO Restaurant in Somerville, MA.. EVOO, an acronym for Extra Virgin Olive Oil, serves eclectic, New American cuisine, and was named best Eclectic restaurant in Boston in the 2007/2008 Zagat Guide!

Peter graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in November, 1987 where he was voted "Most Likely to Succeed" by his graduating class. Just out of CIA, Peter began working at the Bostonian Hotel, where he worked his way through the ranks and was promoted to Executive Chef in 1993, a post once held at various times by Jasper White, Lydia Shire, and Tony Ambrose….talk about big shoes to fill. During his tenure, the restaurant received numerous awards and much acclaim, including a 1995 vote by the readers of Conde Nast Traveler magazine as one of the Top Fifty Restaurants in America. In 1997, the James Beard Awards selected Peter as one of "America's Great Hotel Chefs." In 1997, he left the Bostonian to pursue his dream of opening his own restaurant. Peter and his wife Colleen opened EVOO ten months later. In September, 2004, they opened their second restaurant, the very popular, Arlington-based Za, which offers an EVOO spin on pizza and salad.

A Final Feast

August 2, 2009 By Steve Dunn 1 Comment

With all the focus we have had lately on teaching the kids how to cook their favorite meals, it was no surprise that we fell into a lengthy dinner table discussion the other night about the idea of a “Last Supper”. I know, it sounds a bit morose, to talk with your children of life just before death, so perhaps you would want to change it up a bit should you decide to engage your own family in a chat about the subject. If your kids are very young, or you anticipate that they would be sensitive to the topic, could always make it a “If you were stuck alone on a desert island, and could only eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be?” kind of thing. If, however, your kids are like mine, and don’t seem the slight bit phased by the fact that what you are asking, is for them to tell you what they would choose to eat as their last meal before they DIED, then by all means, stick with the “Last Supper” format. Either way, I guarantee it will be an interesting conversation, one that may surprise you in many ways.

Our conversation was also partly prompted by my recently revisiting a book I received as a gift from my wife last year entitled, My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals / Portraits, Interviews, and Recipes . It is a work, that as the title suggests, profiles 50 famous chefs as they answer the question, “if you could choose one final meal to eat before leaving this life, what would it be?" The book’s author, Melanie Dunea, does a great job not only documenting the details of the meals, but also who the chefs would want to have cook them, where they would want to be when they sat down to enjoy them, and perhaps most importantly, with whom they would wish to share their final meal in life.

It Takes a Plan or Three

July 12, 2009 By Steve Dunn 2 Comments

For me, the most challenging aspect of cooking with the kids is the planning required to make it happen in a way that allows us to actually enjoy our time together, rather than have our sessions resemble a particularly nasty episode of “Hell’s Kitchen”. I am comfortable enough in the kitchen that the “teaching” part of our time together is not normally where we’re challenged. Our struggle rather, is managing the family cooking calendar to allow each of the kids the opportunity to cook every week, while being sensitive to everyone’s increasingly busy personal schedules. I know I’m not alone in this. In fact, I was catching up with an old friend last week, and she told me that her biggest challenge in cooking for her family is that she generally doesn’t even think about dinner until 6:00 each evening. At that point, there is little to do but grab a pre-cooked meal at the market, or call out for delivery. Advance planning is a big part of being successful as a home cook, and absolutely critical to getting your kids to engage with you in the kitchen.

I am finding that there are really three aspects of planning required to successfully cook with your kids. The first has to do with just being prepared to cook at home, period. If you are in the habit of eating out, or ordering take-out frequently, and therefor unaccustomed to planning for home cooked meal prep, then your first challenge will be to set aside a time every few days to look forward in your week, dream up some dinner menus, build a shopping list, and get to the market. When I lived in France, this was a daily routine for me (as it is for many of the French), and I would do daily grocery shopping for my family each evening when walking home from school. I would pass a butcher, fishmonger, baker, cheese merchant, a produce stall, and finally, a fab little wine shop, all on my way home each day. Being a total food nut, this daily commute was a little piece of heaven for me, and is one of the things I miss most about living in France. Here, I find that planning meals for a three day block of time works best for me. I never go to the market without buying goods for three evenings worth of dinners. Anything less and it feels like I’m at the market all the time, anything more and the freshness of my ingredients suffer. The only thing I’m not comfortable holding for a few days is seafood, which I always use on the day of purchase.

Food Musings Part 1 – Cooking with Fats

June 21, 2009 By Steve Dunn Leave a Comment

As you have no-doubt surmised from my pizza and cookie posts, "Oui, Chef" is not a site with a focus on low fat, or no-fat cooking. I am decidedly an (almost) everything in moderation kind of guy, and believe that a well balanced diet, and a reasonably active lifestyle, should allow most of us to not stress so much about every calorie or fat gram we consume. As such, you will not hear me preach about how you should eliminate a long list of “unhealthy” foods from your diet, but rather how you should include as much of your rich, local bounty as possible in your cooking, while still working to achieve a healthy nutritional balance in what you eat. For me the most important thing in my cooking, and in what I am trying to teach my kids, is that we cook and eat “whole”, or real foods, not foods that are imitation, highly processed, or pre-prepared. When we can buy these goods from local and sustainable sources, we do. We eat more fish and poultry than red meat, lots of vegetables and fruits, and include as many whoIe grains in our diet as we can.

The fats I use in cooking are natural, not concocted in a lab somewhere. They are used judiciously, but not exactly sparingly, and I would encourage you to do the same. I am an absolute believer in the old maxim, fat = flavor, and find most fat free dishes almost unpalatable. Fat is an important contributor to the mouth feel and texture of food, and is why eating a well marbled piece of Kobe beef from Japan can be a transcendent experience, while eating a boneless, skinless chicken breast is more akin to kissing your sister (not that I have, mind you, I’m just sayin’). Fat is also a conveyor of a food’s flavors, transporting them to each corner of your mouth and helping them to linger there. This is a good thing. I mean, if you’ve gone to the trouble of cooking a nice meal, don’t you want to be able to savor it for a while?

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