Now that we had gotten the hang of the new format, we kind of knew what to expect*. The four recipes, the extra recipe and the canapés…cool. Unfortunately, our regular Chef wasn't in class so another one of our native French Chefs filled in for him. He was a little more understandable (and devilishly handsome…it is surprisingly hard to caramelize pearl onions with Chef McDreamy looking over your shoulder) and decided to do away with the 'extra recipe' for the night. That was lucky for us, because one of our teammates was missing, meaning that we already had to make up her recipe on top of our own. I had rotated into Saucier, meaning that I would be cooking Chicken Grand Mere – a dish that we all loved in Level 2 but was now becoming gag-inducing, as we've made/eaten it a million times already. It's not especially hard, it just contains a million different components that each take a significant amount of time to cook. I got started on everything - trimming, stuffing and trussing my chicken then browning the skin in oil before throwing it in the oven. I then used the wing tips and the pan that I browned the chicken in to make the jus, adding my carrot/onion mirepoix, deglazing it with some wine and cooking it all down with chicken and veal stock. I made the pearl onions, bacon, mushrooms and potato rissoler. In the meantime, we had another quick pow wow to create our amusebouche/canapés for the night, with the choice of sweet potatoes, ginger, yellow curry powder, micro greens, red sweet peppers, quail eggs and parmesan cheese. Some made little soup shooters of ginger cream soup or sweet potato soup, others made fried quail eggs on little pieces of toast. We decided to take it another direction and made little sweet potato chips, topped it with salted pork (a.k.a. bacon….<wink>) and a beautiful red pepper/curry cream sauce. A little leaf of green parsley topped it off, and the whole thing together was delicious. The crunchy and sweet chip, the salty pork, the savory and rich bright orange curry sauce, wow…all in a tiny little bite.
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Let's talk for a moment about my extreme dislike of all things curry-related, curry-colored and curry-smelling. With the amount of Indian and Thai restaurants in New York City, I will specifically avoid a particular stretch of sidewalk so that I don't have to walk into a curry cloud. I will move my seat farther away from my husband and refuse to come within 5 feet of him four hours after he eats anything containing curry. It bothers me THAT much, although I'm sort of convinced it is purely mental. Do you remember that scene from "Along Came Polly" where Ben Stiller keeps quiet at an Indian restaurant on a first date and eats dish after dish containing curry because she ordered them, then goes home with her and has a 'mishap' in her bathroom? My life.
-resume-
Since I was the one with the curry/red pepper cream sauce idea, I had to make it. I cooked down the peppers with some shallots, got them nice and mushy then pureed everything in the blender. I gave it a shot of cream, and a huge dose of curry (hey, I have no idea how much it takes; I don't cook with this crap). I had to taste it, because that's my responsibility as a cook, and it was….good. Seriously. I am pronouncing on this public forum that I thought a curry sauce was good. It was nice and savory, and added a warm and full taste to the peppers that I wasn't initially expecting. Yellow curry isn't spicy, in the sense that hot peppers are spicy, which was the reason why my taste buds approved. I can't promise that I'll be ordering the chicken curry masala any time soon, but I was proud of my adventurousness.
The Chicken Grand Mere was fine, blah blah blah, and we did really well as a team of three. I'm more looking forward to Monday's canapé ingredients, and continuing to use our creativity. I'm also feeling it's time for a Lindsey Kitchen-Available Ingredient Cook-Off…maybe I should go pick up some kooky ingredients like pork belly and red currants…what's wrong Team Steve, getting nervous??
*Tentative. Be prepared for anything…
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