First Day in the Kitchen

First Day in the Kitchen

It was about time.  Anja and I had gotten the semi-permanent version of our first menu in place, so it was up to me to show that the Chef really could cook these things.  We chose a Monday, but it would have had to have been a Monday as it's the only day the restaurant is closed.  I didn't want to be stumbling around asking a bunch of stupid questions about where things were in front of the current staff, at least one of whom I would be working with.

Thus far, before being able to spend this day in the kitchen I had made it through moving out and all its attendant craziness; a killer cold that I contacted three days before I left Oregon but didn't really get to fully appreciate until I started getting on airplanes, one that lasted ten days;  a day and a half of traveling, a hurricane and serious flooding, and a completely debilitating stomach virus that caused me to lose several (probably not really needed) pounds.  So I was damn well ready to make the most of whatever time I had in my new kitchen, thank you very much.

We have decided, popular demand not withstanding, to make a few alterations to what is unquestionably a menu the locals, my soon-to-be regulars, have come to see as a constant in their lives.  Each time I meet someone new, (or someone who "kind of " remembers me) I get asked to please, please, please not change this, that, or another item on the menu.  Unfortunately if I am to honor each and every request no changes will be made at all and that's not what brought me here.  So let's figure out how to turn on the oven.

The kitchen is larger and better equipped than a few I have worked here in Costa Rica, although much of the equipment, the gas grill and flattop grill for example, have gone unused by the current kitchen staff and are in need of heavy attention. In addition to those two vital pieces of equipment there are also ten burners, a deep fat fryer, and two operable ovens.  There's plenty of counter space, but sadly, no refrigeration on the cooking line itself so unless things are out of the refrigerators and well-iced, a lot of walking needs to be done to reach the necessary items to be cooked.  Every time.

These are all things that will soon be dealt with but we were there to cook.  We had chosen four, maybe five items on which to do trial runs and once I kind of figured out where things were it was time to get down to it.  When Anja had picked me up from the airport hotel a couple of weeks ago we had swung by a funky Asian market for ingredients and I was eager to get into those.  I had picked up a gorgeous organic chicken at that Saturday's feria in Uvita, as well as beets, kale, quinoa, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds.

I cut up the chicken just to get to the thighs, which I boned, skinned, and pounded out a bit to get them nice and flat, but not too thin.  I wrapped up the other parts and set about making a Korean marinade that I had come up with when I was working up on Mt. Hood.  It's got a lot of the things you might expect in it, ginger and garlic, soy, raw sugar, sesame seeds and oil, vinegar, and, of course, the main ingredient, Gochujang.  Gochujang is a powerful paste distilled from fermented chiles and red beans and I love it.  Into the marinade went those nicely pounded thighs.  The cooking would come later and be done, “a la minute”, or as we say in the kitchen, “on the fly”.  The other part of this dish would be a warm cabbage slaw, something I hadn’t made yet, but sounded good to me, so I sliced cabbage and onions, and ran a carrot over the mandoline into thin strips.

Roasted vegetables would be major component of the new falafel dish (and if you sense a vegetable orientation, your senses would be spot-on), along with lentils.  Both of them would be pre-cooked and then tossed in a lemon-herb vinaigrette style dressing and would serve as a platform for the cooked falafel.  I cubed onion, zucchini, eggplant, peppers and halved peeled garlic and tossed them with olive oil, salt, and pepper.  Into the oven they went for roasting at somewhere between (I don’t know my non-centigrade oven temps yet) 350-400 degrees.  I wanted them still firm but with a bit of color from the roasting.  For the lentils I sautéed diced carrots, onions, and garlic, added the lentils and water and slowly brought them up to a boil.  I wanted them cooked, but still a bit firm, certainly not mushy.

Next up was the Dragon Bowl, a vegetarian, and this case vegan as well, dish from my days upon Mt. Hood at Mt. Hood Medadows Ski Resort.  My rendition of it there been my best selling vegetarian dish ever so why wouldn’t I trot it out again?  The main ingredients are simple enough, cooked quinoa, shredded kale, medium slices of roasted chiles (jalapeno, and mild red) and onions, and some kind of nut or seed in a semi-spicy vegetarian Thai curry.  To get ready for it I cooked off the quinoa so it was nice and fluffy, tore the kale into bite sized pieces, and cut the peppers and onions into strips.  The sauce is simple--coconut milk heated with ginger, cilantro, miso, and Thai yellow curry paste.  A 20 minute simmer is all that's required for the flavors to come together and while they did I tossed the peppers and onions in light cooking oil and roasted them in the oven.  This is another dish that will be cooked at the last minute, taking only 4-5 minutes in the pan.

Anja had spied a salad she liked in a cookbook we are enjoying that employs thin cut planks of jicama but since we have no jicama here we decided to try both yucca and chayote.  Yucca is a fibrous root vegetable, local to our area, and it proved to be all wrong--too fibrous and not at all good tasting raw.  It also turns out that eating raw yucca can be bad for you, as it contains hydrogen cyanide precursors.  Good thing it didn't work.   It was also a good thing that our local chayote squash, peeled and sliced into planks on the mandoline were nicely crunchy and just mild enough for our purposes.

 The salad we had seen was served on a pool of a minted emulsion sauce, but our efforts didn't give us what we wanted.  The sauce kept separating and it was back to the drawing board.  Anja's next effort, with basil rather than mint held together pretty nicely and tasted damn good.  In my mind it was a keeper. The other components of this salad were something red, berries (maybe pomegranate?) in the original, but roasted beet cut into small dice and soaked in red wine vinegar for our purposes; orange segments, and again, because we had them, roasted sunflower seeds for crunch.

All of this sounds as if it came together in scant moments, but with the working in a new kitchen (for me), the experimentation, the new ideas, plus a trip to the store it took over four hours for all of this to get ready to cook.  Once we had the deep fryer up and running the falafel came together easily and it was just as I had imagined it.  Separately I dressed the cooked chilled lentils and roasted vegetables in a simple lemon-herb-oil mix and set them on the left and right hand side of the plate.  A nice sprig of watercress went at the top and I drizzled that with the dressing for good measure.  I quartered the hot crisp falafel and set it on the top as casually cool as I could manage and drizzled it with a simple minted yogurt.  I liked it.  Anja liked it.  Her son Felipe like it.  Bingo.

Next up was the Dragon Bowl and it was a simple bang, bang, bang.  Into a hot saute pan went a tiny bit of cooking oil, some chopped garlic and ginger, and the torn moistened kale.  Sputter spit went the pan and I tossed the kale to coat it with the oil and and then dashed in some vegetable stock to help it  steam and wilt slightly.  On top of that went a small handful of the roasted chiles and onions.  I spooned in about a cup of cooked quinoa and retossed the pan so that everything was nicely mixed.  It was a simple process to add a cup or so of the yellow curry sauce and I turned the heat down to let it all simmer together.  I pull down a large wide soup bowl and using tongs lifted the mass of greens  veggies, and quinoa into the bowl and gently poured the curry sauce around it.  Crunchy toasted sunflower seeds went on top along with a mixture of chopped mint and basil.  Yes.  Again, we liked it.  A lot.

It was time to cook the marinated chicken and into a hot hot pan it went.  Part of the process with this dish is to caramelize the marinade on the outside of the chicken, forming a tasty crust.  Ideally I would cook this on a charbroiler or on a hot griddle, but a pan is what we had and it did what it was supposed to do.  While the chicken was cooking I heated chicken stock in another pan and added the thin strips of carrot.  I let that come to a boil and added the onions and cabbage.  I gave it a good toss and added white vinegar and pineapple juice to the pan.  I wanted the cabbage to wilt and be coated with a sweetened yet tart flavor.   When the cabbage softened it went on the plate and the two pieces of chicken went on either side with some cilantro over the top.

This was the first not fully realized dish but it would be an easy fix.  The chicken was good, crisp on the outside and moist in the middle but salty from too much soy.  No problem The cabbage was too tart, the plate seemed incomplete--it needed something else to bring it together.  It was decided that the legendary green rice would make the plate fuller and that less vinegar and more pineapple would be better.  It was agreed that the cabbage should wilt just a bit more.  And I decided that I want to put pieces of caramelized pineapple over the top of the chicken.   Like I said, easy fix.

Last was the salad and while Anja was harsh on herself and her creation, her son Felipe and I both raved about it.  The basil crema had been pooled on the plate, the planks of chayote were laid around and on it in a casually arranged fashion, the oranges were dropped in here and there as were the jewels of vinegared beets.  Anja tucked some sprigs of cress in and around the chayote and dotted the plate with toasted sunflower seeds.  Mis amigos, this one was a winner--crunchy, sweet, tart, creamy, all the things you like on one plate.  Yes, the red wine vinegar was a bit harsh for the beets but not overly so, balsamic will be better, but everything else on the plate worked.  I could tell that because Felipe used his fork to scrape every last bit off the plate.  The proof is in the eating.

Not bad for the first time in the kitchen and the first tries at these dishes.  There are some good tweaks, minor tweaks we can make, but I think we were all pleased with the results.  Now, of course, the test will be convincing those people who just can't bear for the menu to change.  I have faith, however, that we can and will slowly bring them around.  They might just like something new.