Oui, Chef

Chefs Collaborative Celebrates!

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

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.

It Takes a Plan or Three

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

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?

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.