Tag: food

Chefs Dinner – Pigs Ears & Speck Pasta

Every now and again my chefs and I treat our selves with a meal before service. Usually it’s left over stuff that would normally hit the bins from specials that might not have performed too well or change of menu and we’re left with ingredients we can’t incorporate into the new menu.

This particular occasion, we had pigs ears.  I love pig ears, you can do so many things with them.  I like them really crispy on the outside and the cartelidge in the middle adds to that texture.  Crispy fried pig ears, tossed in salt served with a chili, soy and vinegar dipping sauce –  priceless!

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Salsa Verde

It is such an amazingly versatile sauce.  One of the first sauce I learned in a kitchen were salsas.  Not much skill needed here but the skill you learn here is how to balance flavours. In this case acidity.  You don’t want this to be over powering in acidity, just enough sharpness to get the palate “excited”.  You should be able to taste all the ingredients in the salad of what ever it is you are using the salsa verde for.

Salsa verde comes in many versions.  This version is some what close to the Italian version but there other “green sauces” like chimichurri in Argentina and sauce verte in France.

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Spaghetti Alle Vongole

I love easy and tasty recipes.  People always ask me “so, do you cook at home?”.  I do, I love cooking at home, in fact I get a lot of joy cooking for myself.  I don’t have difficult customers or ungrateful people to deal with.  I can be free in my kitchen and with that freedom comes clarity.  I know exactly what I want, I can see how I can cook it and I prepare the dish with great ease because I get to play, I get to cook what ever “I” want.

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Chocolate Fondant

Photo by Jun Pang

When I was in Oxford, England I worked in a restaurant run and owned by Raymond Blanc, great French born chef cooking traditional French cuisine in England.  I learnt a lot at this place.  It taught me to be calm under pressure (eventually).  It taught me that to survive in such a high pressure kitchen, you must be organised, determined, resilient  and passionate.  The culture in this kitchen was nothing I had ever been a part of before or now.  It was an intense little place with such huge turn over of numbers on a daily basis, the pressure for perfection and the pressure of not letting your chef down or your team mates was huge.  The camaraderie was also amazing.  We were a tight team that seemed to function like a well oiled machine and with very little words being said to each other.  We worked hard together and played hard together.  I learnt so much about my trade in Oxford, about my self and of course, cooking.

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Washington DC

Washington DC

Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought of going to Washington DC.  I thought of many other places to visit in America, like for me, San Francisco for the food scene, Napa Valley for the wine, New Orleans for some good ol’ fashioned Southern food and Chicago for the restaurant scene and to see Chicago Bulls play in their home court but I am so glad I went to the Capitol City.

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Cajun Spice Mix

American food!!  I can’t stop thinking about it having just come back from the U.S.  I love this lavish, comfort food.  The thought of American diners just gets the mouth watering.  Southern fried chicken, hot dogs, fries with melted cheese, clam chowders and you can’t forget hamburgers.  When I was in Washington I had some of the finest Buffalo Wings in a little typical American diner which was almost 60 years old.  I swear I could have just sat there and ate those little morsels all night and don’t get me started on the pork ribs, bloody amazing!

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Avocado and Tomato Salsa

So many versions of salsas out there and I must say that there are some pretty good ones.  I use salsas like a sauce, a healthy version of a sauce.  Usually, a salsa will have tomatoes and red onions, all finely chopped into fine cubes and finished with herbs and a citrus of some kind or vinegars.  Like anything, every one has a version, there is no right or wrong way to make salsas.

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Cafe de Paris Butter

Compound butters are probably one of the first things we learn at trade school. Simply put, it is butter with flavourings.  It’s used much like a sauce for many dishes like on roasted vegetables or to toss through freshly blanched beans, on roasted fish, cut into small discs and stuffed in between the skin and flesh of chickens ready for roasting for moisture and flavour and traditionally,it is used on grilled meats, mainly as a sauce or in corporation with a jus to monte the jus with more flavour.

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A memorable breakfast….

I had a very good friend who cooked me this dish one morning for breakfast.  It doesn’t happen often but what a way to wake up, to the smell of a cooked breakfast.  I’m lucky that she was a talented chef, I was expecting a fried egg but I was surprised with such an amazing and yet easy dish.  The beauty of this dish is that she used ingredients that were in the fridge.  Apart from a few other bits like chorizo, every thing else was left over ingredients that needed to be used up and it didn’t take long to prepare or cook, literally minutes.  Served straight out of the pan it also saved on cleaning time, ingenious because if you can save on cleaning time and come up with an amazing meal, then you’re all right in my books!!

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