Need happy customers?

“Herewith is a modest list of dos and don’ts for servers at the seafood restaurant I am building. Veteran waiters, moonlighting actresses, libertarians and baristas will no doubt protest some or most of what follows.

1. Do not let anyone enter the restaurant without a warm greeting.

2. Do not make a singleton feel bad. Do not say, “Are you waiting for someone?” Ask for a reservation. Ask if he or she would like to sit at the bar.

3. Never refuse to seat three guests because a fourth has not yet arrived.

4. If a table is not ready within a reasonable length of time, offer a free drink and/or amuse-bouche. The guests may be tired and hungry and thirsty, and they did everything right.

Read them all here.

Cream sauces

A friend asked for this process after I made a chipotle cream sauce, and I’m happy to share it.  Send me your sauce and soup questions this month … I need the practice. (Big test Thursday.)

This is not so much a recipe as a procedure for a quick sauce. Put chopped onion and garlic in a sauce pot (not a sauté pan) with butter over low heat. Throw some salt on. The idea is to sweat the onion – to carmelize without browning. The salt takes up moisture and helps prevent browning. If you’re unsure about quantity, try an ounce of each. Cook until the onions soften … the aroma will call you.

Crank the heat up to about medium/med hi and add some appropriate booze to the pan to deglaze (for chipotle, I used Tequila) … just enough to cover the ingredients. Reduce the amount of liquid by half to concentrate the flavors and burn off the alcohol.

Add your main flavor ingredients and get them warm. Add some heavy cream … with these amounts, probably an ounce or so. Whisk it in so the sauce hangs together, 30 to 40 seconds, and pull it off the heat. Serve.

You can make any sort of cream sauce just by thinking about ingredients that like each other. (Tomato and basil and Chianti, for instance.) I used a chipotle in adobo and maybe a quarter of a lime, and chopped both fine.

To recap: Sweat the onion and garlic, deglaze, add flavors, add cream, serve.

More knives

It’s hard to stress knives too much. However you think of them – interesting, mundane, expensive – they are the engine of the kitchen. Not much food goes into the pot without knifework.

Tomatoes

Because of D’s bookselling business, we spend Saturdays scouring yard sales, auctions and flea markets. While she’s finding the real finds, I look through the cookbooks and then wander through the household items — specifically, kitchen junk that people buy, use once and then put out for yard sales.

Like this:

Oh yeah.  Five bucks at a yard sale in New Cumberland. I bought it with tomatoes in mind. Last year, I made a lot of tomato puree with a food mill. It was labor-intensive. The Victorino was a definite upgrade, so we bought a half-bushel of tomato seconds at Paulus Orchards and went to work.

Here’s what it looked like in our kitchen. Turn the crank and a screw pushes the tomatoes against a screen, down the chute and into the bowl. On the side, the seeds and skin go into another bowl. Pretty slick.

This is D prepping the whole tomatoes … I’m on the other side slicing (8ths) for the funnel, and feeding and cranking, and after that …

they go on the stove. I reduced the puree by half. Last winter, I had sauce that was watery and I had to add tomato paste to get to a reasonably thick pasta sauce in a reasonable time.  This winter, we’ll see.

Knives

You don’t need a “full set” of knives. Especially, you don’t need a Henckles or Wusthof set. Especially from the Home Shopping Network. What you do need is a good chef’s knife, at least $50, forged and made of high carbon stainless steel. Plus a boning knife. Then you’re good. You can do 90% of what you have to do in a professional kitchen with these two knives. The rest is garnish.

With knife skills as with most things, there is school and there is work. There is classic julienne and production julienne … and when Chef wants you to fill a six-inch hotel with mixed bell peppers julienne, classic would take you freaking hours. Not fun. So here’s the start of Chef Jim’s knife explainer.

Balance Scale

Sometimes when people ask about culinary school, they’re like, “Jeez, I wish I could do that.”  So I’m going to shoot some videos this year and give you a look at Chef Jim’s demos.

This is a balance scale demonstration. It’s a delicate instrument used in professional bakeshops, and interesting to work with. Two things about weighing:

– Flour has to be weighed, not measured, because different batches are compressed to different degrees. My partner Amy and I found a 20 percent difference between scooped flour and sifted flour. Now, imagine a sack of flour that’s been thrown around boxcars and delivery vans a dozen times since it left Wisconsin. Really dense. So screw Fanny Farmer — weigh it, don’t measure it. If your recipe calls for measured flour, get a better recipe.

– A pint’s a pound the world around, as the Brits say. Water, milk, eggs and butter are the only four culinary substances that weigh the same as they measure. So do whatever’s easier.

Change

This week I re-started culinary school. Set the alarm for 5:30, woke up with cafe au lait, ate oatmeal, jumped into rush hour and ran into Chef Jim’s smiling bald head right on time. He is a good, funny, tough little guy with a shitload of experience for his 30ish age: CIA, Houston, Los Angeles, Manhattan.

There are about 16 people in the class, most have more experience than me. No obvious assholes, might possibly fall into a good work-together mambo. No matter what bullshit cut-throat antics there are on Hell’s Kitchen, in a real kitchen you work with and help everyone around you or you … get … a … bad … rep, and you’re screwed.

Three weeks of knife skills ahead, followed by three weeks of soup. Might shoot some video.

We talked about different styles this week, including molecular gastronomy. Here is the all-star, Ferran Adria, at the world’s best restaurant, El Bulli. In a wordier verison here.

Slow Food @ Owl Valley

A promise of Gazpacho Shooters under the Hackberry tree fetched us to Owl Valley farm last night, thanks to Laura of Punk Rock Gardens and her husband Sean. Our friends Christine and Holly made for a genial party of six — so long as we kept the conversation away from the dying newspaper industry. (We all have some sort of P-N connection.)

The evening was a progressive dinner through native woodland put on by Slow Food York. Called a Full Moon Walk, it turned out to be a sweet ramble through Judy and Richard Bono’s place on the Kreutz Creek, east of York. Since buying the six acres 20 years ago,  the Bonos have weeded out invasive species and encouraged spectacular local growth. (Full story and great photos here.)

We began by getting lost, and then … well, here’s Dee:

“We saw a sign to MoonWalk Parking and a man sitting beside it on a tractor. He directed us to neighbor’s side yard across the road from him. We stopped to talk to Richard, who is the owner. Then we began the walk in, past a gorgeous restored farmhouse and grounds. I couldn’t see any other houses for the trees, but I did hear the creek.

“The path meandered up to the first food station. Each spot had long tables with white tablecloths and ice buckets with bottles of wine and food with colorful plates, napkins, cups. I had cucumber lemonade to drink. It was delicious but a little disconcerting to chew your drink!

Channels and The Burg

The February issue of The Burg is on racks around town today, and it has some very good feature writing. It also has my piece on Channels Food Rescue.

I got interested in Channels while I was working in the Hilton kitchen because there were so many guys whose last known address was jail.  The Kitchen School at Channels is specifically for recently released prisoners and for the homeless, offering them a way back into the  work world.

When I went to do interviews for the story, I found out the whole project was moving into a warehouse up on Sixth Street, near WHP, and the school was on hold while they build a new kitchen. So I did an umbrella story about all the food rescue projects Channels has going on, including the new culinary classes Chef Beth Jackson runs at Harrisburg High.

From left, Janel Morton, Johanna Solomon and Alicia Miller are doing prep work at Harrisburg's Career Academy

Working Through the Channels

By PAT CARROLL

Kitchen work is so labor-intensive most of us avoid it. So the idea of taking in people who haven’t worked for years – the poor, the homeless, recent graduates of the state prison system – and teaching them the ways of professional chefs is something only a pretty quirky food bank would do.

That’s Channels.

“Basically it’s a 2-year education in culinary arts in 12 weeks, 8:30 to 5:30, Monday to Friday,” said Channels executive chef Michael DeMarco. “Three months of schooling is very difficult for some of them. A lot of the students haven’t been in school in 20 years. They’re in their 40s so they haven’t used their basic adding, subtracting or reading.  It’s a challenge to get them up to speed again on just the simplest things.”

Challenge is what this organization does well. Channels Food Rescue has been on the road less traveled for 20 years, serving just four counties with an intensity that sparkles beside the dull public image of food banks.

“A lot of times when you think of hunger relief you think of canned goods or things that are prepackaged,” said Channels’ new executive director Frances Seeger. “You don’t think of giving people produce and helping them learn about nutritional value.”

While the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank handles 28 counties and the bulk of prepared product distribution, Channels concentrates on the Harrisburg metro area and the hard work of food rescue. Jean Beatty of New Cumberland founded the non-profit to go into hotel and institutional kitchens and pick up leftovers, then deliver them to soup kitchens and homeless shelters.

Beatty retired at the end of 2008, leaving a legacy of programs beyond food rescue.

– Plant a Row for the Hungry garnered 1,418 pounds of fresh produce from local gardeners over the growing season last year, and delivered it to more than 60 shelters and soup kitchens in Dauphin, Cumberland, Perry and York counties.

– Kids Café feeds 600 poor children daily after school, and during the summer it offers breakfast, lunch and dinner.

– Food for the Future is a new partnership with Harrisburg School District, in which Channels is developing the curriculum, writing lesson plans and promoting the fundamentals of knife skills, kitchen safety and recipe development.

And, as Chef Beth Jackson says, Food for the Future means at least one good meal a day for the culinary students. She runs the kitchen classes at Harrisburg Career and Technology Academy. “When I came here there was no kitchen, it was just an empty room,” she said. “I had two little stoves in the back that they called culinary arts.”

Now she teaches two classes and runs a small café at the William Penn campus of Harrisburg High.

The kids work in groups, all making part of the same dish. “That way, they’re not all doing the same thing and I don’t have 18 kids saying ‘Chef …Chef … Chef … Chef…’ And we can compare, too. What’s the difference, what tastes better?”

She just hit her one-year mark at Career & Tech, and likes the intensity. “It’s definitely different, teaching. I’m getting it. I’m a chef, but this is very challenging. I’m going to Penn State at the same time to get my teaching degree.”

Voiage Moore slices chicken in Chef Jackson's class

Just hi

Consumed by Food: Like the Continuum Transfunctioner, its mystery is exceeded only by its power.

Hey, I’m not reliable. Lately I’ve been writing for money and it kinda crowds out writing for fun. I’ll be back.

Meantime, here’s my requisite Facebook 25 things.

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because a) I am nosy and b) it’s fun. Fun is good.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

1. I like winter more than summer.

2. I write to find out what I think. People who don’t write think it’s a linear process, like you start at the beginning and go to the end. It’s not, it’s a lot of back and forth, fixing and sliding and moving words around. In the process, I almost always have an Aha Moment – that’s what I mean!

3. I can’t type. That’s helped me, actually. I go slowly anyway at the keyboard, because I say the words in my head as I type. I like words to fit together in harmony, with stresses that have power and transitions shifting noiselessly.

4. My wife has always been beautiful. When we go to her mother’s house in Indiana, I’m startled by the pictures of this hearty little girl, heartbreaking teenage chick, gorgeous college sorority girl. A couple months ago, we left the newspaper where we worked and old photos came out of the file cabinets of Dee as a young professional. Wow.

5. I like the NFL, but I like rugby more: no helmets, no pads, no stopping play every 30 seconds to call a meeting about what to do next. Everybody gets to handle the ball. Nobody gets to whine about a ref’s decision. It’s more of a game.

6. Cooking overtook journalism as my main interest about 10 years ago. I like the physicality as much as the mental challenge of turning a bag of groceries into dinner. And I like to learn, which is where culinary has the edge … there is so much to know. Thanks to TV, journalism has become all about what the “average reader” feels and wants, not what the editor knows to be news.

7. I miss sailing. When we owned a sailboat, we went down to the Bay as many weekends as we could. We drove down Friday night and got up at 4 a.m. on Monday to get back to work on time. We crewed on racing boats, we sailed with friends, we ran aground a lot and had not nearly enough vodka tonics sitting in the cockpit on moonlit nights.

8. My daughter called up eight years ago and said “Dad, I’m pregnant.” I had no idea we’d come to have two grandkids and a son-in-law. I would not have worried so much if I had known how well Megan would handle herself, what a good guy she would marry, and what wonderful children she’d have, and we’d have to enjoy.

9. My ex, Karen Carroll, comes to our house for Thanksgiving dinner every year with Megan, Nate, Conor and Kaci. We have been friends for a long time.

10. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. We have it on the Saturday after, originally because Megan (a nurse) and I (a reporter) often worked the holiday, now so the kids get to see all their grandparents at their different houses. On the official holiday, Dee and I go for dinner at the Hilton.

11. About 20 years ago, I conned my wife into rowing on the Susquehanna River. She was intimidated by the shell – 26′ long, 12″ wide, no initial stability – but encouraged by the fact that her awkward husband did it. Me, I just liked flying across the water in so elegant a craft. We raced our double for several summers. On a lake in northern Pennsylvania we were matched against a couple of college rowing coaches in a crushing rainstorm. We swamped just before the finish and had to be hauled out by the water rescue guys, who were great except they tried to pull me into the boat at the stern, where the outboard was. Going.

12. I don’t care for once-in-a-lifetime experiences. If it’s so great, I know I’m gonna want to repeat it.

13. Expensive things put me off. (See # 12.) I like good cigars, red wine and dark, dark chocolate but have no interest in “the best,” except for the best cheap stuff — Van Winkle’s Special Reserve Bourbon, for instance, or Chilean Cabernet. On Friday evenings at the weekly philosophy seminar held at RAE’s Tobacco, my friend George from the State Library will often offer me a wee glass of Lagavulin Single Malt aged in sherry casks. I don’t turn it down. I know he’ll still like me next week.

14. I have too much stuff. I’m fixing that, but it’s a struggle.

15. Last year, I interned in the kitchen at the Hilton Harrisburg and blogged about it at ConsumedByFood.wordpress.com. It was a hell of a lot of fun. I miss it. Hard, hot, relentless work reveals a lot about the people who do it. Even the managers did actual work, a new thing in my employment experience.

16. Some days at the Hilton I wondered what my life would be like if I’d chosen cooking instead of journalism, and worked in restaurants. But I saw myself standing in front of a grill one day thinking, “I wonder if I could have been a writer …”

Now I use my blog (http://tinyurl.com/5a3rw6) as a cooking journal, and if it interests other people, okay. The thing is I let it go for weeks at a time, then get enthusiastic about blogging again. Something tells me to make up my mind and do it or don’t, but then I say “Why?”

17. Women are my favorite people.

18. I love opera. When we lived in the city we used to rent operas on video at Blockbuster and have Sunday morning Opera Breakfasts – eggs and pancakes and bacon and coffee and fruit. I am an absolute sucker for Italian opera. Dee liked to play the Traviata banquet music on the piano. The great and beautiful conductor Victoria Bond challenged me to be in Harrisburg Opera’s production of Tosca – as a spear-carrier – and it was a hoot. Got a good column out of it, too.

19. Entropy, abandonment and neglect have a weird, powerful attraction for me. Old barns, vacant shopping centers, seven used cars on an abandoned sales lot can really get me. Bleak-R-Us. Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth turned out to be big faves, once I put aside my early fascination with Chagall.

20. Until spinning, I never liked exercise classes. I did a spinning class for a feature story, went back the next week and did it again, and then I stumbled into the best class ever at noon at the downtown Y. Ever. It is still really hard, but it’s with a roomful of occasional friends and an instructor who lifts people up, way past their perceived limits of exertion. I’d never work this hard on my own.

21. Hmmm. Friends. About 10 years ago, it occurred to me that I had all the friends I’d ever have. I’m not social by nature, I don’t have any small talk and I’m not fond of people who do. One day I happened to walk into the cigar store in Strawberry Square and got into a conversation with a woman named Joan, who was behind the counter. She was smart and serious and funny. Her husband Al turned out to be all that and a war hero, and an advocate for handicapped people. Through them I entered the Friday night gathering at RAE’s, which reminds me a lot of my wife’s Army reunion group, BALTA. Ya never know.

22. Two things I waited until retirement to try are golf and fly fishing – to me, old guy stuff. The cigar store crew dragged me onto the golf course two years ago. I liked it. Bought clubs on eBay last year. I’ve got two writing gigs set up so I have money to feed my golf addiction, should I develop one. We’ll see what happens.

23. Paris is my favorite city. Bonjouring the corner newsstand guy in the morning, jamming into a busy bistro for a prix fixe lunch, standing in line at a bakery at sunset for a dinner baguette – I like it. Second favorite: New Orleans.

24. Not working has given us the time to take our large goofy dog to the park a lot. He is a Lab/Newfie mix, black, and his name is Rugby. He doesn’t like other dogs, but he did sorta fall in love with a three-legged mutt on the beach at Duck last month. We take Rugby to Pinchot and walk a trail that takes us about 50 minutes when it’s pleasant weather but 75 minutes the other day on the ice. (Note to winter walkers: YakTrax http://tinyurl.com/62fh3a)

25. After 17 years of Catholic school, I lost all interest and belief in The Church. A decade later, I met my first Buddha. His name was Barker, a minister who became a reporter. Yeah, funny name. Funny guy. Later I met Dave, an old farmer turned minister, and Mary, a reporter who became a nurse to fly into bleak, dangerous civilizations and help sick people. All my Buddhas help people as a way of life. I have about a dozen now. They don’t hand out religious tracts or solicit donations for their new cathedral or say, “You can sit down and eat dinner here, homeless guy, if you pray with us.” They just help.

Although I have affection for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Martina Navratilova and Lance Armstrong, it is the Buddhas who became my heroes. They live the immortal words of Bill and Ted: “Be excellent to each other!”