Fire Drills and Delicious Burgers

For the last month and a half I have been cooking dinner for my roommates every Monday night.  I love the idea of a consistent dinner time for all of the six guys to get together and just enjoy good decent food and good company.  I use a tiny kitchen in my apartment dorm room on campus which gives my cooking a nice college feel.  Now that you’ve got the back story, here’s a story that most accurately describes my cooking style so far…

The plan was a simple pre-softball game dinner complete with burgers and fries.  I had a few meetings and did not have much time to prepare or cook anything that needed a big time commitment (and most importantly we already had four pounds of ground beef).  I used an onion, a green pepper, Grill Mates Montreal Steak seasoning, and I believe some garlic powder.  I just chopped everything into tiny pieces and mashed the meat with all the other fixings.  Then came the fun part.

I was using a grill pan similar to this one for the burgers (Ok, this exact one, THANKS MOM.  But on a much worse stove top).

See what had happened was…I had to cook multiple batches of burgers and decided not to clean off the pan in between rounds.  This resulted in a huge build up of burning grease and even more smoke.  My entire dorm room filled with smoke almost immediately and we intelligently naturally opened the doors from our room to the hallway.  Almost simultaneously, the hallway was a fog scene.  I was on my fourth and last round of burgers when it really got out of hand.  I just went with it in hopes of getting lucky.  As I was finishing the last batch there was no alarm to be heard.  I shut off the stove and put the pan in the sink to cool off (without turning on the water obviously).  I was home free.  No more smoke, delicious burgers and an upcoming intramural softball game.  Life was good.

Fortunately, my friend roommate wanted to help out.  He got a rag to wave near the smoke detectors (good idea) but ended up turning on the sink without realizing the tower of smoke that was coming off the pan (bad idea).  Literally thirty seconds later the fire alarm in the room ENTIRE BUILDING was sounding.  I sprinted out like a coward and went to the said softball game.  Luckily, my roommates are much better men than me and stayed to watch the smoke clear, literally.  After the firetrucks and policemen came and went, we all shared some delicious burgers with a healthy dose of laughter for dessert.

Lessons I learned from the fire night:
–  It’s all about the final result, no matter what the costs
–  Grill pans create a lot of smoke, which isn’t conducive to indoor cooking
–  Don’t open the doors to the hallway
–  Take responsibility for my cooking (good AND bad)

The First Hurrah!

This weekend, I had the good fortune of sous chefing interning with The Skinny Beet for one of their catering events at Harvard University’s Phoenix Club (see The Social Network).  My first taste of the kitchen was nothing short of incredible.  Richard and Katie are the chefs and owners of the brand new catering/personal chef company.  They are not only amazing at what they do in the kitchen, but I guess they are kinda funny too.  There were three dishes that needed to be cooked for Saturday night’s meal.  Here is a run down of the menu (without all the gooey adjectives for now):

Potato Leek Soup with Pancetta

Brisket over Polenta

Pumpkin Bread Pudding

Most of my talent time was spent on the soup because I showed up after the brisket was already braising in the oven and I don’t do dessert just yet.  I started by peeling about ten pounds of potatoes and helped chop them into smaller chunks.  Richard diced up the leeks and a little bit of celery to be sautéed before adding the potato chunks and just enough water to cover the potatoes in the enormous pot.  After a couple hours in the simmering pot, we turned the heat off and used possibly most likely the best kitchen appliance ever invented, called an Immersion (shout out to Arrupe) Blender.

After puréeing everything together, we quickly made a paprika oil that was really just added for the presentation and flash fried some fresh sage that tasted subtly terrific.  Add in the pancetta that was already prepared by the time I arrived and the first course was ready.

I really did not have much of a hand in any of the other two dishes but you can see that I wasn’t really needed.

Key lessons I learned from my first real world kitchen experience:
– Recipes are not necessary, creativity is encouraged
– Basic cutting skills
– When in doubt, add salt and/or butter
– Working in a hot kitchen all day WILL punish your body, even if it does not seem that way at the moment.
– Doing what you love really can make everything worth it.

I learned so much in just one night with The Skinny Beet and I am so grateful and excited for the chance to continue learning from such talented and pleasant chefs.  I will continue posting my current cooking experiences and if when I don’t have something current to write about, I will catch you guys up on my successes and failures in the past 4 months (aka the extent of my cooking experience).

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for the shout out! Such artsy pictures.

The Skinny Beet

While we have clients spread out over the city, one of our oldest and most favorites has always been the boys at The Phoenix Club. If you’ve seen The Social Network(and if you haven’t, shame on you) it’s the exclusive club that Eduardo pledges and ultimately becomes a member of. I started cooking for them in 2007, and Katie joined in on the fun in 2010. I’ve always enjoyed cooking for the guys when they are undergrads, and then watching them come back and visit for the alumni dinners.  The dinners are always fun for us to plan, they love their “meat and potatoes” so keeping it exciting and trying to come up with something new for them on a monthly basis is part of the challenge. For their Fall dinner, we knew we wanted something seasonal and hearty (those boys can eat!). After some careful menu planning…

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