I had the good fortune a few weeks back to meet Sally Sampson, a woman I've admired for some time. Sally has worked for years as a cookbook writer, and as such, brought a number of my favorite cookbooks to market. Some of my most worn volumes were written by Sally, including Todd English's The Olives Table
No...... your eyes are not deceiving you, the title of this post is "Chocolate Tofu Pudding".
Yes.....you are visiting "Oui, Chef", the VERY last place where you would expect to see tofu at all, let alone in a dessert!
For those of you who's jaws have dropped to the floor, we'll pause here a moment for you to pull yourself together.
Feeling better now? OK, let's proceed.
A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune to join chef Jody Adams at a benefit for an organization she has been involved with for a few years now, Future Chefs. The event was fashioned as a “Tour Around the World” where Future Chefs students cooked delicious treats from eight different countries, and served them to eager partygoers at stations placed throughout the beautiful Brookline home of the event’s hosts. If I could choose one word to describe both the event, and the Future Chefs students I had the pleasure of meeting that night, it would be.....Impressive.
I'm quite proud and happy to share that "Oui, Chef" was chosen to be among the 59 Food Bloggers that contributed to the just published "Foodies of the World" cookbook. Our print copy just arrived in the mail today, and I must say that is was kinda cool to see our food and words in full-color print.
The book is beautifully designed and is chock-full of fabulous recipes from some of my favorite food bloggers. Folks like Lynda Balslev of "TasteFood", Jaden Hair of "Steamy Kitchen", Denise Woodward and Laudalino Ferreira of "Chez Us", and Beatrice Peltre of "La Tartine Gourmande", have all contributed delicious recipes to the project.
The publishers chose two posts with recipes from each blogger to incorporate into the book. There is also a brief profile of each "foodie" that details their background, as well as what inspired them to start blogging, and what motivates them to keep writing, cooking and sharing. I'm really enjoying reading up on all the other bloggers in the book and getting a sense for what informs their writing and cooking styles.
In addition to the two recipes that I contributed, "Beef Bourguignon" and "Profiteroles", there are some terrific recipes for "Farro Risotto", "Lemon and Garlic Rack of Lamb with Fresh Mint Sauce", "Chocolate and Vanilla Petits Pots de Creme", "Curry Laksa", "Gratin Dauphinois au Chorizo", and "Chocolate Rum Raisin Bread Pudding" just to name a few. There are so many I want to try, I just have to figure out where to start.....I'm thinking it just might be the bread pudding!
If you'd like to get turned on to some really great food blogs (or just have a hankerin' for a fab new cookbook), I urge you to click on the link below and buy your own copy of "Foodies of the World", I am quite certain you won't be disappointed. Happy reading and eating!
Cheers - Steve
to order a copy of Foodies of the World, click HERE
This post marks my first entry in Foodbuzz’s Project Food Blog contest. The contest is a 10 part challenge to determine the “Next Food Blog Star”, with some bloggers eliminated after each qualifying round. This post is meant to satisfy the first challenge of the competition which is for me to define for my readers “who I am” as a food blogger. Now I'm not much of a grandstander, and don't have it in me to try to SELL you on why I should be voted a "star", but I absolutely believe in the mission of my blog, and hope that the brief introduction and post below give you a good sense for what we're all about here at "Oui, Chef". You can learn more about me and Project Food Blog by clicking on the contest widget to the right of this post. Voting for the 1st round entries starts on Monday, September 20th, and I’ll be writing a follow-up post in a few days describing how you can follow the competition, and vote me through to subsequent rounds if wish. Thanks!
Those of you who have been with us for a while here at “Oui, Chef” have gotten to know what we’re all about, but for those of you new to our little site, the story behind this post provides me an excellent opportunity to share with you our raison d’être.
The idea behind “Oui, Chef” came to me after I had read an article by Jamie Oliver on his efforts to improve the school lunch programs in his native England. As I contemplated his efforts, I started spending some time thinking about what it was that I wanted to teach MY kids about food, cooking, and how to feed themselves well in an environmentally responsible way, and the seeds for “Oui, Chef” were sewn.
I started to wonder why, among all the things we work so hard to teach our kids, cooking isn’t even on most people’s radar screen. We teach them to dress themselves, clean their rooms, wash behind their ears, and say no to drugs, but how many of us really take the time to teach our kids how to cook, and how to make responsible choices about what it is they put in their bodies? Now I’m not talking about “cooking” microwave popcorn or pre-packaged mac and cheese here, I know a boat load of kids that have microwave skills light years beyond mine. I’m talking about cooking real food, understanding where this food comes from, its effect on their health, and how the way it is grown and brought to market impacts our planet.
"Oui, Chef" now exists as an extension of my efforts to teach my kids a few things about cooking, and how their food choices over time effect not only their own health, but that of our local food communities and our planet at large. By sharing some of our cooking experiences, I hope to inspire other families to start spending more time together in the kitchen, passing on established familial food traditions, and maybe starting some new ones. My desire in the end is not just to enhance my young sous chefs’ culinary skills, but to advance their level of environmental awareness, and broaden their palates as well.
Each post you’ll find here on “Oui, Chef” touches on at least one of these points, either by introducing the kids to unfamiliar cuisines, teaching them a new cooking technique, or illuminating the nutritional and environmental consequences of our food choices; but I have to admit that it is a rare one that can tag all the bases.
Every now and again however, the stars align, and fate tosses us the seeds of a post that does more than just offer the kids a chance to hone their cooking skills on a new recipe, but one that gets them to think about their connection to place, and what impact their food choices make on the planet at large......the girls enjoyed an adventure earlier this summer that did just that.
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.
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
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.
Continue reading "The Chef's Table - Peter McCarthy of EVOO Restaurant" »
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.
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?
Continue reading "Food Musings Part 1 - Cooking with Fats" »
"Oui, Chef" exists as an extension of my efforts to teach my kids a few things about cooking, and how their food choices over time effect not only their own health, but that of our local food communities and our planet at large. By sharing some of our cooking experiences, I hope to inspire other families to start spending more time together in the kitchen, passing on established familial food traditions, and starting some new ones. Read more...
