Oui, Chef

Steak Frites with Sauce Bérnaise

OK, I know what you’re thinking....”sauce bérnaise” sounds way too scary, fussy, and time consuming for you to EVER contemplate cooking, let alone with your kids.  I get it, and I used to think that too, until I was taught how to make it while at Le Cordon Bleu.  The fact is, sauce bérnaise is really quite simple to make, hardly takes any time at all, and is such a perfect complement to grilled steak, that once you’ve made it, you’re going to weep like a baby thinking about how every steak you have ever made in the past was just a shadow of what it could have been had you only known how to craft the magical bérnaise.  

Really, I’m not kidding.

Now, this is not a meal that I recommend you reach for every week (as much as you might want to), because between the fries and the bérnaise it is a real artery menace.  But, once you get some confidence with the sauce , and get your timing down for the fries, it is a meal that is totally doable on a weeknight, and mastering a classic French sauce is a great confidence builder for a novice cook. 

Food Musings Part 1 - Cooking with Fats

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?

M Cookies

Imagine my surprise (and delight) as I slipped into the kitchen a few mornings ago and found my youngest step-daughter curled up in a comfy chair with a fist full of post-it tags in her right hand, and an open cookbook on her lap.  I asked her what she was up to, and she told me that she was “just looking for some fun stuff to cook.”

God be praised.

As I walked closer I could see that she hadn’t picked up one of the few “kid” oriented cookbooks that I had on the shelf, but rather the quite fabulous Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme .

Holy crap!

She had a wide grin on her face and that all too familiar glazed look in her eyes, which I recognized immediately as a sign of someone who had just been exposed to a healthy dose of really good food porn.  She quickly shoved the book in my face and rapidly started to flip the pages to show me all the recipes she wanted to try; the Triple Chocolate and Meringue Ice Cream Puffs, the Gâteau Saint-Honoré, and the Plaisir Sucré were her favorites....oh my.  To be sure, these are some of the more elaborate and complicated confections in the whole book. 

Merde!

As challenging as her choices were (especially for a 10 year old), I gotta say that I like the way she thinks.  She is definitely a ”go BIG, or go home” kinda girl.  No fussing about with a beginner’s cookbook for her, no sir.  If she was going to learn how to bake, then she wanted to have the world’s premiere pastry chef showing her the way.......ummm, that would be Pierre, not me.

Vanilla - Spice Granola

6:30 AM.....Grunt, groan, sigh....the fridge door opens, a cursory glance at the contents apparently yields nothing interesting.  The ritual is repeated next at the freezer, and then at the breadbox before the inevitable question is tossed my way. 

"Hey dad, what's for breakfast?" 

I'm not even sure why I bother to answer, because regardless of what I say, the only response I ever get in return is; "Is that all?"  "We never have anything good for breakfast anymore!"  Repeat this dialogue (if you want to call it that) four more times, once for each of my kids stumbling into the kitchen, and you have a pretty accurate depiction of my morning routine lately.  I suspect that the deterioration in the morning 'tude is just part of their end-of-the-school-year restlessness, but it seems an opportune time to add a new player to the breakfast rotation in any event.  Something that is nutritious, easy to make, can do double duty as an afternoon snack, and most importantly, will get my kids off my @#$  about not having anything good to eat for breakfast.  The choice is simple, delicious and obvious.

Granola.

Slip this word into a chat you are having with anyone over the age of 30, and the image in their mind’s eye is liable to be this; granola, the breakfast of choice for birkenstock and tie-dye wearing tree-hugger hippies weaving hemp plant-hangers while listening to The Grateful Dead.  You know, munchy fodder for “crunchy-granola” types.

Mention granola to a group of kids sitting around the breakfast table, and you’re likely to illicit a sea of sour faces and the following dialogue; “keep that nasty bowl of tree bark and weeds far away from me, just the smell of it is making my eyes itch....I must be allergic."

Such a bad rap for what CAN be a delicious and nutritious staple of healthy eating.  Of course, the poor rep is not entirely undeserved.  Most pre-made granola on the market today falls into two broad categories, it either does taste like a bowl of bark mulch and pebbles, or it has been so highly processed and “sugared” in order to appeal to the bulk of our mass market cereal eaters, that it should not even be considered a cousin, eight times removed, of real granola.

There are some terrific artisanal granolas on the market these days, but at a cost of $10-15 for a 16 oz. bag, even our hemp-weaving hippie friends (who have been known to spend great sums for weedy things sold in bags) choke at the cost.

Pizza

Yeast farts.  

Yeah, yeast farts.  That’s how I hooked ‘em.  

It will come as no surprise to most parents reading this post, that when I asked my kids for a volunteer to assist me in our first cooking lesson, you would have thought that I had asked one of them to join me in the kitchen to get an arm amputated.  I must say that I found their general lack of enthusiasm for what I had hoped to be a pretty fun and easy launch to our "Oui, Chef" experience, a little disheartening.  It seemed that I needed a hook to capture their imaginations and get them engaged. I'm not ashamed to tell you that dishing some potty-talk and extolling the virtues of yeast farts as a means of leavening dough seemed to work quite nicely, thank you.  Just these two words got my kids so enthralled with the idea of making their own homemade pizza dough, that any hesitation they felt about their first cooking lesson with dad, fairly quickly dissipated. 

To be honest, the boys seemed a tad more intrigued than the girls by the idea of the little yeasts consuming sugars from the dough and “farting” out carbon dioxide gas, thus causing the dough to rise.  I could see their slightly twisted minds picturing the whole scene, the yeasts all rolling around inside the dough, turning toward each other, slapping high-fives, dropping their shorts and letting ‘em rip.

FART...... “oh that was sweet man, ball’s in your court”

FART......”gasp..... your killing me dude.  Hey can anyone find a window in this place, I’m dying in here!”

I am just a bigger version of them....I totally get this line of thinking.

The girl’s take on the topic was a bit more questioning, and was accompanied by a look of mock horror.  “You’re kidding right.... that’s just plain gross.”

The Birth of a Oui, Chef

The idea behind Oui, Chef came to me about a year ago while I was out on a run.  I had recently read articles by both Alice Waters and Jamie Oliver about their work in trying to improve the school lunch programs here in the States, and in Jamie’s native England.  I had also just been approached by a teacher from a local school who knew of my culinary training and wanted to talk to me about doing some cooking classes for his elementary students.  It sounded like a fun opportunity, so I started to think about what I would want to convey to the kids about food and cooking in the relatively short time-span of a school-day class.

I knew for sure that I wanted it to be a hands-on lesson with the kids, for fear that a demonstration or straight lecture about food would likely render me the target of a pea-shooter attack....I needed the kids engaged and busy having fun.  I was making good progress on plans for a number of sessions focused on cooking some Mexican dishes (the kids were studying Mexico and S. America at the time) when I started to think about how little time I actually spent teaching my own kids how to navigate their way through our own kitchen.  Here I was, a well trained cook, spending a bunch of hours designing a cooking class curriculum (of sorts) for a local school, when I hadn’t taught my own kids, who I cooked for daily, how to make more than a top-notch PB&J.  Such a bad boy.