Rainy Day Soup

If April showers bring May flowers, May is looking in fine shape right now. Today, Sunday, is my day off and I was looking forward to a gorgeous day like we've been having all week when I was cooped up in the restaurant. Not to be.

In anticipation of nice weather, this morning I put on shorts and a golf shirt, but quickly went for a pullover to ward off the damp and chill. I almost want a fire. Despite the rain's intrusion on my day off, the sound of it dancing on the tin roof as I sit here and type is very calming and relaxing—or is that the glass of wine at work? I have just poured a glass of fantastic Linden Hardscrabble Chardonnay 2005. Jim, if you're reading this, thank you for this Meursault clone made right here in Virginia.

As soon as I went for the pullover this morning thinking of a fire, I knew it was a soup day. Do you love soup? I do. There is something so comforting about soup. Truly, I know why you customers come in to the restaurant and ask for soup at dinner, even though it is not on the menu. I just wish you'd buy it when I take the effort to put it on the menu.

I had to go down to the restaurant this morning to get about three hours of work out of the way before my wife and kids return from grandma's. While I was there, the call of soup was so strong that I braved the pouring rain to stop in next door to Frédéric's café for a bowl of his mother's puréed vegetable soup.

And once back at the restaurant, I liberated a leek, some baby carrots, some roasted cipollini onions, a few less than presentable asparagus, an already peeled parsnip (now why was that in the cooler?), a couple celery stalks, some diced tomatoes, a potato, some garlic, a bunch of really wilted green onions, a bit each of thyme, basil, oregano, and sage, a big handful of parsley, and half a loaf of rustic olive bread. I wish I had some fresh bird egg beans or borlotti!

These things will accompany the chicken carcass that I cooked last weekend and that the kids have picked over all week. I'll toast the olive bread and place a slice in the bottom of a soup bowl, ladle the soup over, drizzle on a little really good olive oil, and shave on some Pecorino Romano.

Here's my basic procedure for chicken vegetable soup.

Make stock from chicken, leek leaves, green onions, bay leaf, parsley, ends of celery, and tough ends of asparagus.

Strain and defat stock; return to pot at simmer and slowly reduce.

When cool, pick the meat from the chicken and reserve.

Add the long cooking vegetables to the stock: potatoes, celery, onions, parsnips, tomatoes, etc.

Add the meat, herbs, garlic, shallots, and short cooking vegetables such as baby carrots to the stock.

Season. Enjoy.

Red Snapper

I am amazed by how popular our whole roasted snapper has been this past week. We sold out each night that we offered them.

While our snappers are red in color and customers call them Red Snapper, they are not true Red Snapper, Lutjanus campechanus, a highly prized and heavily sought fish found over rocky areas and reefs on both coasts of the US and in the Gulf of Mexico. Sadly, true Red Snapper is consistently overfished, so we do not offer it on the menu here.

When we buy snapper for our menu, we specify B-liners or Vermilion Snapper, Rhomboplites aurorubens, an abundant snapper whose fishery seems to be fairly well managed, at least as far as I can tell sitting here in the restaurant.

While we are consciously trying to sell B-liners because they don't appear to be overfished, other unscrupulous companies sell B-liners as true Red Snapper. This is simple profiteering—selling a less valuable species as a more valuable species.

Another contributing factor is that some fisherman call any snapper with red skin a Red Snapper. Such species include Vermilion Snapper, Lane Snapper, Mutton Snapper, and Silk Snapper.

Once such fish gets to retail as fillets, it is very difficult to determine what species is on offer, DNA studies aside. This is another reason I only buy whole fish.

How's Your Day Gone?

The following telephone conversation between a young lady and me this afternoon pretty well summarizes my day:

Her: "I'd like to book a table for dinner tonight for a birthday. And I have a special request."

Me: "Sure, what's the special request?"

Her: "Do you do special desserts for birthdays?"

Me: "Yes we do from time to time. What did you have in mind?"

Her: "Can you do a peanut butter pie?"

Me: "Unfortunately, I don't have any peanut butter."

Her: "Oh."

Me: "We have some really nice desserts on our dessert list or perhaps we could make you something else?" [Yeah, like my 52-seat restaurant has a fully staffed pastry department standing around waiting to turn out confections with two-hour notice for those customers who fail to plan ahead.]

Her: "I don't know."

Me: "What time did you want to book the table?"

Her: "I'm going to call around for peanut butter pie."

Me: "Good luck with that."

Do You Have a Food Allergy?

If you have a food allergy, when you go out to eat, please make that known to your server before you order your meal. Don't do what a young man did today.

He ordered our lunch ravioli special, filled with ricotta and organic pesto (made from both pine nuts and walnuts), and then refused the dish when it got to the table because it was garnished with pine nuts, stating that he had a nut allergy.

What if he hadn't seen the pine nuts and had eaten the ravioli?

What if he ordered a salad that contained no nuts, but the cook who assembled the salad tossed it in a bowl in which he just tossed a salad containing nuts?

What if the cook seared his tuna on the same flat-top grill on which he just cooked an order of hazelnut-crusted mahimahi?

What if the cook sliced his chicken with a knife that he just used to crush walnuts for a salad?

What if?

Why play roulette? And moreover, why do it in my restaurant?

Surry Sausage

In one of my exceedingly rare moments of liberty from the restaurant, I was able to play a round of golf this afternoon. If you play, you know there's lots of time for contemplation while waiting for the agonizingly slow players ahead of you.

While waiting to hit my shots, I was running through my mental checklists for tomorrow, including the prep lists for two magazine photo shoots. It was on the golf course that it dawned on me that in an amazing coincidence, both editors asked that I prepare dishes containing Surry Sausage, a smoked pork sausage from the S. Wallace Edwards Company in Surry, VA.

Customers love this sausage. I love this sausage. When I do demos in public using this sausage, people try to buy all the sausage that I have brought for the demo! It is that good. There's more information on these sausages in my January 2008 newsletter.

You'll be happy to know that even though I have to buy a minimum of 20 pounds at a time, you can buy smaller retail packages directly from Edwards at www.virginiatraditions.com. You want either item number 89, a 5-pound package, or item number 100, two 2-pound gift packages. These sausages freeze very well.

Sell, Menu, Sell!

Let's face it. We restaurateurs are in business to sell food and our primary sales tool is our menu. All of us have had experiences with really great dishes that did not sell. In fact, Food Arts has a regular column called "Hits and Flops" in which chefs and pastry chefs discuss dishes that are wild successes and really great dishes that just wouldn't move.

I buy items in very small quantities and I change my menu daily, replacing the items that sell out with new ones, so I rarely have situations where dishes just don't move.

But I encountered just such a situation this week. A customer requested that we put a chicken dish on the menu for his group of 22 people. We rarely ever have chicken on the menu for the simple reason that it's what most people eat at home, and they are not coming to One Block West to eat what they eat at home. Or at least that's my rationalization for not putting an ingredient that I find extremely boring on the menu.

But, when I do put chicken on the menu (folks, I will not verb a noun and say "when I menu chicken"), say a roasted poussin or a tagine of chicken with olives and preserved lemons, it flies off the menu. A lot of customers perceive chicken as a safe option when faced with a menu that includes bison, wild boar, ostrich, squab, and sashimi. And I think that's what my customer was looking for: something safe for his guests.

Knowing that, I recreated a dish that I had in a private home in Burgundy: a freshly killed chicken stewed in white Burgundy with fresh herbs and vegetables from the garden behind the house, finished with some heavy cream. The grandmother that prepared this dish was justifiably proud of it. It was pure, simple, fresh, and clearly of the moment.

I gussied the dish up a bit for restaurant service. I braised bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs* in Chardonnay with leeks and a bouquet garni, then skinned and defatted the chicken when done. From the stock, I made a thyme-infused cream sauce. I poached tournéed baby carrots and haricots verts separately and roasted cipollini onions. At service, I reheated the chicken in the cream sauce and added the perfectly cooked vegetables at the last second to warm through. All the components were carefully plated in a large bowl, napped with the sauce, and garnished with fresh thyme. In short, it was a gorgeous, elegant, and tasty dish.

*Yes, I said thighs, which have all the flavor in the chicken. Don't get me started on boneless, skinless chicken breasts—the Wonder® Bread of the chicken world. That's a topic for a rant and this post is not a rant.

In honor of the grandmother whose name I have forgotten, I named the dish quite simply enough Poulet Grandmère and it appeared on the menu thus:

Poulet Grandmère
Chicken Stewed in White Wine; Served with Baby Vegetables in an Herb Cream Sauce

The result: we sold none of the 20 portions I prepared. Of the 50-plus entrées ordered that night, zero were chicken. As I mentioned above, we never strike out with chicken. After dinner service, I went back to my desk to ponder this.

I came to two conclusions. First, people were likely put off by the French name of the dish. I'm guessing that they wouldn't venture to pronounce* it or they read only the bold type and didn't understand that poulet is chicken. Second, if they read the description, they may have been put off by "stewed," thinking it too homey a dish for fine dining.

*How do you learn to pronounce things if you don't try? When faced with a menu item I cannot pronounce (Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, etc.), I ask my server. Then one of two things happens. The server says, "I don't have a clue!" and we all have a great laugh. Or, the server and I go back and forth until I get the pronunciation down. Either way, the pronunciation does not stop me from ordering.

Sitting at my desk, I made two changes to the menu for the next night, thus:

Chicken with Baby Vegetables
Chicken Slow-Cooked in White Wine; Served with Baby Vegetables in an Herb Cream Sauce

And the result? Fourteen portions sold. And you thought that all we chefs have to do is worry about cooking!

Morels

Looking out the dining room window around noon, I saw a friend walking across the parking lot with a shopping bag in his hand. This time of year, that means only one thing: morels! We buy a lot of morels at the front door. What we cannot use, we sell to other restaurants or to produce companies.

I'm really happy today because although I have received a couple of phone calls over the last couple of days asking if we were buying, these are the first morels that I have in hand. Yesterday's 80+ temperature no doubt helped things along and these morels were just picked this morning.

These in the photo are local black morels (Morchella elata), very small in size. The big blondes (M. deliciosa) will come later. There were several large black ones in this batch, but they disappeared!

My aunt and uncle made a rare foray to the big city from their house in Wild Wonderful, West By God (West Virginia for you non-locals) and happened to be sitting in the dining room when the morels arrived. I stuffed the two biggest morels with crab meat, dipped them in egg wash and then in flour, fried them, and sent them to the fam. The remaining large morels accompanied them home. My aunt is a great cook and I know that they will have an outstanding dinner.

The remaining small ones are going on tonight's special board. Our season here will last two to three weeks, weather depending. We'll switch to morels from our forager in Oregon once the local supply dwindles, just to extend our season. The ones we get from the west coast are most often what they call grey morels. These are actually just a color variant of the common or yellow morel (M. esculenta).

To clean morels, brush off any dirt and cut off any part of the stem that is tough. Slice the big ones open and make sure that they're clean inside. Although I have seen people wash morels in water, I'm not a fan. I think it hurts the texture.

The season is upon us. Eat up!