The Culinary Tales Week 33: Beyond Borders
International Class can only be described as BRUTAL.
The in-class work was a handful, to say the least, but we also had DAILY homework. They weren’t hard at all; mostly one-paragraph essays with simple questions meant to further our understanding of food (in this case, exotic food). Not one to shirk homework, I did every single one. Every. Goddamned. Day.
While the homework was simple enough, Thursdays were always LA Times food section reports, where we pick any story from that week and do a report on it. I actually liked the exercise because it forced me to read the paper and keep up with the latest food news and trends.
Our Friday assignments were to turn in a three-to-five-page glossary of items from that week’s particular region or discipline; the “words” were given to us beforehand, we just had to fill in definitions. Ingredients made up 90% of the list and the rest were either equipment or methods.
However, in an effort to keep a steady stream of sadism going (on the part of our chefs) Chef Evil had to insist that every homework assignment be typed; didn’t matter if you slaved away for days on ten pages of handwritten glossary. You’d get it back, with a demand to type it up AND getting a point or two taken off for being late.
And then there were the occasional platter/plate designs we had to turn in with the chef’s insistence that they be color-coded to tell apart the entree from the starch, sauce and veg. SERIOUSLY??? It’s not that crayons were expensive (I practically lived at Target and the 99-cent store through this whole ordeal), but it was the inanity and pointlessness of these “exercises.”
Mondays became my favorite day of the week because it was always the most laid back. We only concentrated on prepping ingredients for the rest of the week, no individual challenges or buffets to worry about. We picked whatever we wanted to do from a list of things that needed to be done. If the easiest of the tasks was available, I snatched it up. When they weren’t, I picked the ones that I had never done so as to actually learn something.
During this week, we produced dishes from the United Kingdom, Russia, the Middle East and India.
We were individually responsible for the UK dishes, making cockaleekie soup, shepherd’s pie and Beef Wellington.
Russia Night was a group project: we made koulebiaka, borscht, oxtail soup, blini, pojarski and eggplant/mushroom caviar. I teamed up with Teddy Bear and Dancing Queen to work on the koulebiaka; it’s basically layers of rice, mushroom duxelle and salmon wrapped in pastry.
Of course, we got an earful from Chef Evil as Teddy Bear did a piss-poor job of fabricating the fish. I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal because it would be wrapped up, after all. Chef made him do it over. I took care of the mushroom duxelle and the dill veloute for a side sauce, and wished I got the chance to do the fabrication. Timing issues aside, I was pretty damn good with the knife.
We molded the koulebiaka into the shape of a fish, and despite baking it just a tad much (there was a little too much color on the pastry wrapper), it turned out to be quite excellent.
Koulebiaka, with a side of string beans and dill veloute sauce
A look inside the koulebiaka: layers of salmon, rice, mushroom duxelle and egg
Middle East Night was a restaurant-fire challenge and we made cacik, tomato noodle soup, dolmathes, humus, baba ghannooj shishkebabs, kofta and lamb moussaka. I didn’t sign up for any of these on time, so I was tasked with making dessert. I made phyllo-wrapped dates drizzled with honey and nuts. It was simple yet well-appreciated dish.
India Night was served buffet style and we put out mysore rasam (lentil broth), samosas, papadum with chutneys, tandoori chicken, chana masala (chickpeas in tamarind sauce), matar paneer, gobhi matar, pulao, naan and mulligatawny (which I made.) I also prepped the paneer (cheese) earlier in the week, which was surprisingly easy to make.
Making cheese calls for boiling milk and then adding lemon juice, stirring gently until the curds separate from the whey. Then you pour the curds into layers of cheesecloth and tie it up to “drain” overnight. The secret to this process is to use fresh lemons; pre-made lemon juice will not work.
And if this wasn’t all stressful enough, I got to deal with one more drama of my own. I had to move. Most of my friends are intelligent, reasonable people. But if there was one person who should have understood the stress that I was in, it should have been my roommate, who was still in bed when I left for the day and sound asleep by the time I came home from a long, strenuous day.
My roommate turned out to be an asshole, an anal retentive freak who taped a cleaning schedule to the kitchen cabinet. Each person was on tap to do a “deep-clean” every other week, and a light clean every other week. I just didn’t have the time, and he took every opportunity to tell our mutual friends how messy and disorganized I was.
Eventually, he said if I paid him more rent, he would do my share of the cleaning. So I paid him more rent but the bitching didn’t stop. Eventually, I had enough and told him I was moving out. On the day I gave my notice, I found two listings for loft rentals in Downtown L.A.
I had wanted to move out months earlier but just didn’t have the time to look into it. But fate, or luck, was obviously on my side and I found a loft that, while still priced scandalously high, I could reasonably afford. And it came with an in-unit washer and dryer, which was just perfect because my uniforms and towels had to be washed on a weekly basis. The last thing I needed was to fit in laundromat trips on my one day off.
I miraculously managed to fit in apartment viewing, application filling, deposit writing, key picking-up and packing into my already insane schedule. Since I didn’t have time to unpack much when I moved just eight months earlier, I was living mostly out of boxes anyway and half of the packing work was already done.
I would continue to live out of boxes for a few more months until my mother mercifully helped me put my apartment in order. (It came with a rooftop pool, jaccuzzi and gym… which I finally got to enjoy a few more months later.)
The rooftop view from my new downtown loft.
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2 Responses to “The Culinary Tales Week 33: Beyond Borders”
I lived downtown for a little over a year, and really enjoyed it. Would still be there if I didn’t work on the west side. The commute got old.
That koulebiaka looks pretty awesome.
The worst thing was getting the Westsiders to come over! They never want to go East of the 405!