My Culinary Endeavors

New England Day

Langdon Froker — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:04:00 GMT

Yesterday was New England food, which consisted of Boston Baked beans, home made brown bread and a lobster bake with clams, crab, and sausage. Everything was delicious. Chef Tomm of ( cheftomm.com/ ) showed us a new way of making the lobster.

We learned that when you throw them in the water alive, they get stressed out, understandably, and release chemicals that can make it taste off. So he elected for us to make an incision in between his front claws and scrape along the bottom of the shell. This severs his nerve, and is apparently more humane.

Cheff Tomm has been cooking for over 25 years in various Michelin restaurants around the world, as well living in New England, and I taught him a new trick. I was pretty happy with myself. When i was a kid we used to put the lobsters to sleep. (No one in class believed i could do this, so i showed them, and proved them wrong) You rest him on his head and and rub his back. After about a minute all of the blood rushes to his head and sure enough knocks him out. I felt that if he was asleep when i stabbed him in the head it wouldn't hurt him as much. I don't know if that helped at all. But was fun none the less. And the food was amazing.

One of my favorite days so far. Heres some pictures.

Sorry, low light + crappy iphone camera = fuzzy pictures.

Sushi Night

Langdon Froker — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:50:00 GMT

It was Japanese night last night. I didn't eat dinner in anticipation because we made 2 of each for 5 different types of rolls. I was stuffed and still had lots to bring home. We made Philadelphia rolls, California rolls, spicy tuna rolls (my favorite), shrimp tempura rolls, Rainbow Rolls, along with a couple tuna and shrimp sashimi, and shrimp and vegetable tempura. It was lots of fun, and delicious.

Also on Tuesday, I did my presentation for Japanese cuisine and cooked a Yaki-Udon dish which is a soy sauce based, chicken stir fry with udon noodles and cabbage, in front of the class. Heres the recipe.

Yaki udon :

udon noodles

2oz chicken breast (thin sliced)

2 leaves cabbage (coarsely)

1/2 pk bean sprout

2 Tbp vegetable oil

1 Tbsp sake

Sauce:

1 and 1/2 Tbsp soy sauce,

1 and 1/2 Tbsp mirin,

1 teaspoon sugar (flavor to taste)

Garnish with sliced green onions

Direction: Pre-Cook the udon to soften.

In a sauce pan with medium heat put vegetable oil and chicken strips in until nearly done.

Add the cabbage and stir fry until tender

Take the chicken and cabbage

In the same frying pan and add oil and udon noodles and stir fry

Add the chicken and cabbage back and add the bean sprout stir fry with sauce and mix well

And thats it! Super easy and really tasty

Pot stickers, generals chicken and crab-cream cheese wonton

Langdon Froker — Wed, 13 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

So much food today! For day two of "Regional Cuisines of Asia", and we made 7 different recipes; generals chicken, beef and broccoli, prawns with white sauce, fried rice, pot stickers and cheese wontons! But I'm just gonna talk about a couple of my favorites.

Pot Stickers

These were fun to make.

Ingredients

18 pot sticker wrappers
6 oz ground pork
1 t fine chopped gnger
1/2T Dark soy
1/2T light soy
1/2T salt
1/4 t pepper
1 1/2 T chopped green onions
1 t Sesame oil
1/2 t sugar
1 T cold chicken stock

For cooking

1 T oil
1/2 C chicken stock (or water)

First, we combined all the stuffing ingredients in a large bowl. Next we put a small amount into the center of the rapper, brushed the edge of one half with water. We folded the dough in half and then you crimp it with you fingers. Its a little tough at first but we had to make enough for our class as well as over 100 for a banquet they were doing so we got pretty god at it.

For cooking, heat a large saute pan with a little oil. Place dumpling flat side down, lower heat and cook for about two minutes, or until lightly browned. Then we added the chicken stock, covered the pan and let them steam for about 5-8 mins. uncover and continue to cook for another 2 mins. Remember, these aren't the frozen precooked ones you get from the grocery store so you have to cook them all the way through. But they were worth it. We served these with some pork fried rice and spring rolls.

Cheese Wontons!

Even after doing the six dishes we had to do for the night, we still had a little time left over, so a classmate and I decided to try and experiment with cream cheese wontons. I love these things when I order them so we were hoping to re create them. Thats one of the things I love about the school, if youve done what you needed to do, they encourage you to experiment and try stuff out that I normally would not be able to do. This is one example. These were pretty easy.

Ingredients

Wonton wrappers

Cream cheese

Green onions

Crab (we used shrimp cause we didn't have crab, couldn't really tell the difference)

Salt

All we did was mix the ingredients, press the wontons together, however you like, we did it a number of different ways, deep fry, and enjoy.

Thanks for reading, thats all for now.

About me

Langdon Froker — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:57:00 GMT

Hey

This is Langdon. I'm an aspiring chef living in the bay area (at the moment). I'm currently attending The Professional Culinary Institute training to become a chef. I've decided to start sharing what I'm working on every week including recipes, pictures, maybe eventually video. We'll see where this goes. Thanks for reading.

Welcome

Langdon Froker — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:05:58 GMT

Welcome to my blog. Please check back soon for new entries.