A Moveable Feast

A very special customer

This Tuesday very special customers came to eat in the restaurant : Chef Sebastien, my teacher from Ferrandi, and his wife. I was really excited, and very honored too. I briefed the waiters and the chef before, and so they let me hand out the menu and make the recommendations. When there was a quiet moment during the service I called Sebastien into the kitchen, so that he could get a better impression of my work environment. It was a very special moment for me, and I somehow had the impression that Sebastien was also thrilled to see the "fruits of his effort". I had many flashbacks of all the difficulties and doubts during my year at Ferrandi about my capacities, and suddenly I am there, Sebastien is eating in the restaurant that pays me to cook. Wow. That was great !

The waiters kept teasing me during the whole service, as I had announced before that I was going to pay . So each time they came into the kitchen, they "announced" me another expensive wine or spirit Sebastien had ordered, which of course turned out not to be true. But they also said "ton ami a l'air tres sympathique ! Il est restaurateur ?" (your friend is very nice ! Is he a restaurant owner ?)

My restaurant chef told me that he thinks all cuisine teachers are stupid, because they are not able to teach anything. Thank got in the meantime I developed the capacity to ignore those kind of comments, and just don't react anymore to such silly statements. What would I be without chef Sebastien's education and encouragement today !!!

(I had my camera the whole evening in my pockets, but was so excited that I completely forgot to take a picture of Sebastien in the restaurant).

Bucatini alle vongole

With my new 3-day weekends I have found again the energy to cook at home. Believe me, standing 12 hours per day during 5 days in a professional kitchen leaves no desire to even look into your own kitchen. The "crisis" helps as well to make me think twice before going out and pay unreasonable Parisian prices for food that I can cook now on my own. If everybody thinks like me though the restaurant business will not prosper...

Today I had a craving for pasta alle vongole and instead of spending half a day's cook's salary in one of St. Germain's Italian restaurants, I decided to cook it for myself. I was excited about the result, and the fact that it tasted better than in any Italian restaurant that I have ever eaten this dish confirms to me that I am probably not totally without talent in my new profession, and there is a chance that I will have customers that might like what I do.

 

While it is simple and fast to make, I believe the secret to make it outstanding lies in the cooking time of the pasta, in balanced seasoning (don't be scared to use a little chili) and very good olive oil.

Cook either bucatini or linguini or spaghetti 3 minutes less than the recommended cooking time. Heat chopped garlic and some chili flakes and ground pepper in olive oil, add the well washed and rinced clams and/or cockles (I bought palourdes and coques at the market), then white wine and a little butter. Cover the pan for a couple of minutes, until all clams are open. Keep the clams aside and reduce the cooking liquid. Add the pasta and the clams again until the pasta are al dente. At the end just add the chopped parsley. Too easy, isn't it ?

Alive and cooking...

Sorry for having not posted for so long. Got a bit lazy... But now it has reached a point where I got too many mails and calls from people who wonder how I am, whether I got depressed and how my life and career is going. So I guess I will continue to blog, although it might be a little less frequent than in the past.

For some people blogging is a form of psychotheray, and I guess it has been the case for me some times as well. So take it as a good sign when there are not many posts ;) Since the return from vacation, my life has only taken positive developments. Three people have left the restaurant, among them two I didn't really like, and the guy who scared me, and was verbally very aggressive with me was eventually fired. So I am now the 2nd most experienced in the brigade, and I can feel a real difference. Since September I like going to work actually ! I am no longer the slowest, I know what to do when, and I suddenly feel competent, and for the first time it is no longer weired to me to say that I am a cook. I am so proud of myself, that I stayed, now I earn all the benefit of my patience and occasional suffering. And following my request my work contract has been changed to a 4 day work week, so I have now Thursday, Friday and Saturday off.

The plan is to use the free time to start spending more time on my project, learn more skills that are required to run a restaurant, for example tomorrow, on my official day off, I will start working in the "front of the house", meaning start to learn about service.

I also use the increased time off to get back part of the life that I had before, and not just live to cook for someone else. So I started taking Saxophone lessons again, I go to a Pilates studio (thanks to Kate's inspiration), go swimming again regularly, and maybe because of all of this positive changes and new energy there is even some romance coming back into my life, well only potentially. At the moment still requires eating a lot of Crepes, but that is a different story, probably for a different blog ;)