Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...

Thrilla in Massilia is undergoing structural and existential changes due to the new job and move. Access will be restricted for matters of privacy so stay tuned... tchuss!

Bidding farewell to the Mediterranean...

Walking over to Malmousque tonight was absolutely magical. It is so close to the city and yet feels like another world, with its tiny port and boats and clear turquoise waters teeming with sea life. Of course now that I’m leaving I can’t believe I didn’t spend more time there.
The boardwalk itself is its own reward, following the edge of the Mediterranean with the islands ahead, among them the Chateau d’If where the count of Monte Cristo was emprisoned. Who do I see along the way if it ain’t Jose the Colombian bartender I worked with. We started chatting and talking about kitchen staff coming and going, making me nostalgic…

In Malmousque, which I would say marks the beginning of the Calanques, the streets are tiny and steep and lead to a breathtaking water-front… as we were walking down a guy carrying an accordion showed up and started serenading us and following us to the shore, he was making up a song about Malmousque and the nice people you meet there, all the way to the edge of the water, where he finally said he came to swim, not to play his instrument! It sort of felt like a Woody Allen movie filmed in the South of France (okay mainly for the accordion). We soaked in the scenery and then went looking for another beach a bit further, right next to the Foreign Legion base, and lo and behold, another guy I knew, this time from when I first got here, and in his arms, a tiny baby! I just couldn’t believe it.
i just hate goodbyes…

Ma bouillabaisse

For my end of year/graduation lunch I asked my teacher if I could make bouillabaisse, which is Marseille’s specialty. I didn’t have a real one since I got here almost one year ago (see Sept. 16, 2010 Bouillabaisse entry) and as I am leaving very soon I thought this was the perfect opportunity to honor the city which welcomed me and was the backdrop for my professional culinary initiation. Anne, my teacher, is not herself from Marseille, as a matter of fact she is from all the way up north in Normandy, home of butter, cream and apples, among other things, so this was a first for her as well. She explained to me what a struggle it was for her to find the right variety of fishes, and even got scolded by one fish monger who told her: “What do you think, that Marseillais eat bouillabaisse everyday? You have to make a special order and I will prepare it for you.” She finally was able to find the majority of required species, though I wish I had been with her on the fish-seeking adventure.

It turns out that it is such a huge deal to make because of 1) the simmering of the soup for the depth of flavors 2) the scaling and filleting of the fish. Also I realized this is not something one can easily reproduce at home because some of these fish have humungous scales that fly all over the place when you attempt to remove them. Or maybe I am just an inexperienced fish-scaler. Either way, it’s great to have a légumerie (ie. place to wash the vegetables) in order to scale your kilos of fish. It’s also kind of fun to examine them and get really dirty so allow plenty of time for this (and picture-taking) and for a thorough shower afterwards to remove any trace of fish slime or scale. Luckily I was not alone in the kitchen – thanks to M for helping with the scaling!

There are actually three parts in bouillabaisse: the soup, which is normally served as a first course, the fish and potatoes (simmered in the soup), and the garlic-rubbed croutons served with a rusty colored garlic and saffron flavored mayonnaise-like sauce called rouille (my daughter loved the potatoes slathered in rouille). Grated cheese is also sometimes served, though in the two restaurants where I worked that served this dish, the cheese was omitted. Because some of the fish which comprise bouillabaisse are rare, it is also a relatively expensive dish which is reserved for special occasions. The ones offered for twenty or thirty euros at the tourist restaurants surrounding the Old Port are mostly cheaper versions of the real thing, which is more likely to cost at least double.

The first photo is from my first restaurant, Une Table au Sud, where chef Lionel Levy concocts a Bouillabaisse milkshake which is shocking to some ancient purists around town… the second photo is the finished product served yesterday after class.

N.B. According to the Charte de la Bouillabaisse Marseillaise, signed in 1979 by eleven restaurants, an authentic bouillabaisse needs to have at least four of the following fish: rascasse (Scorpion fish), chapon (cousin of the Scorpion fish), galinette (Gunard in English) Saint Pierre (John Dory), monkfish and conger eel. So for those of you who have been asking me to make this… good luck on finding the ingredients!

Home life

Since my last entry I left the country twice, returning last Sunday from my last trip. My daughter has been ill since then, and though she went to school on Monday (she came home for lunch for mom’s comfort food and a rest), she had to stay home on Tuesday, Wednesday, and today, Thursday (we saw her pediatrician yesterday and it’s all under control). So both of us have been home pretty much all week, and other than reading, playing, drawing and watching videos, what else is there to do at home but cook?
I thus resumed my gluten-free (GF) baking experiments, starting with a raspberry-yogurt cake courtesy of France’s darling Estelle Lefebure via Elle magazine. I would like to say that Elle a Table is a respectable food magazine in France, though many a French chef might beg to differ. It could be on par with Gourmet (R.I.P.) or Bon Appetit magazines. As for Estelle, she was a famous model in the late eighties and nineties, and was married to French heartthrob David Halliday, son of Johnny Halliday (if you’ve never heard of any of these people, never mind). The point is, France is just waking up to the concept of GF, so I pounce on any recipe that falls under this category, regardless of the author!
Estelle’s cake turned out too sweet, a bit gummy and not raspberry-ish enough. Of course I made few alterations, as any self-proclaimed cook would (don’t give me a sarcastic look, mom!), such as replacing the fructose (um I ran out of that…) with agave syrup (too sweet and caramelly in the end) and adding Xantham Gum (which was not called for). Xantham gum (XG) is used in anglo GF baking in order to replicate the texture of a finished product containing gluten. I have no idea exactly what it is or how it works (Wikipedia proved a bit too technical for me and what with my medium-to-short attention span I lost interest). It’s like cream of tartar. The Americans put it in their egg whites, and the French don’t…. so the cake was underwhelming, but with my daughter unable to keep anything down, I still ate it all up, sugar and XG and all, down to the last crumb.
Unsatisfied and unfettered by that venture, the following day, I dug deep into my kitchen closets and found coconut and chocolate. I had no choice but to bake another cake! This time I scoured the internet for a recipe, returning to the same French GF blogs, found a somewhat convincing formula, added extra GF flour and XG, and ta-da! Overcooked the damn thing.
After my two attempts I had to be realistic – the GF flour I bought sucked (it couldn’t have been about me!). How could so many yummy ingredients and so much TLC turn out so … blah? There was only one thing left for me to do, buy chestnut flour. Having ingested my quota of sugar for the rest of the month, I decided to make a “cake corse,” or Corsican bread (as in banana or zucchini bread, but savory, meaning to say soft and airy and not dense and tough as country bread or sourdough). This was my last chef’s recipe, and even he admitted that I surpassed him in making my version (I think it was the cooking time). It has brousse, a Corsican cheese resembling a light ricotta, figatelli (a Corsican sausage which I conveniently replace with bacon) and of course the chesnut flour. I have never been to Corsica but I imagine it full of beaches and hills and wild pigs and chestnut trees. Now this flour costs a prohibitive 15 euros per kilo, which is about $11 per pound at today’s exchange rate. If find this obscenely expensive, especially since as a kid I used to pick chestnuts off the ground in the forest near Paris for free, but hey, what’s a hungry GF cook to do. So here we are, day 4 at home, getting ready for greatness….

Beach life

So it’s been two weeks since my last entry. Have I been lazy? No. busy? Oui. I had visitors, then finished my internship and spent a week end celebrating one of my dearest friend’s hen week end (bachelorette, in American) in Ibiza. Tuesday was my last day at the restaurant, which was sad, but the break is also nice. Since last September I have been working through every school break! Now I can focus on the months ahead, working, honing, refining, redefining… and experimenting. What I am craving right now is Asian food, which makes sense after nine months of very French cuisine. So today I set out to make adobo, the Philippine national dish (soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, laurel, pepper corns), but when I went to the store I saw some beautiful squids and had a vision of Thai basil squid which can be easily found in NYC (alongside pretty much everything else) but not in Marseilles. I also saw this gorgeous matcha-lychee-raspberry tart on the wonderful www.zencancook.com so I was all set. The squid didn’t come out quite as I wanted but the tart was as pretty as it was fresh and delicious (I didn’t have mint so I used basil and made a gluten-free tart base).

As for my meals in Ibiza, I had a perfectly cooked sea bass at Blue Marlin, preceded by a simple but reliable grilled prawn, avocado and mango salad. My cordero (lamb) was unfortunately overcooked at KM5, though my girlfriends were raving about their beef skewers.

http://www.bluemarlinibiza.com/
http://www.km5-lounge.com/

Call me sexist…

Yesterday all our guests arrived pretty much at the same time. The chef was frantic and quickly lost his cool. For someone who’s been doing this all his life I found it surprising. More importantly, I cannot work in a small space with someone who is panicking. My friend once used the term “grace under pressure” to qualify me. At first this made me laugh, because I, of all people, get wrapped up and emotional very rapidly. I have had some heated encounters in the United Nations where I definitely lost my cool. But in the kitchen, truth be told, not even the chef can make me run, and I mean that literally. At my last restaurant, where on my last day my chef told me “elle me prend pour un con” which can loosely translate as my having an attitude problem, the same chef once gave me an order (can’t remember what) and added emphatically: “Cours!” which means “Run!” I did no such thing. First of all, it’s not allowed in a kitchen (and yes, I am selectively anal when it comes to rules – deal with it!) and secondly, there is no way on earth I am going to run because some punk in a funny hat told me so. As for why it is not allowed, it’s really a simple security rule, as one may easily slip on a parsnip peel and end up cut or burnt or worse (both).
So as I watched my new chef stress himself out, I just went on with what I know and am fond of; multi-tasking. According to research this is a feminine quality, which might be why so many chefs (mostly male, I guess) go bezerk in the kitchen. You’ve all heard the anthropological stereotype of the cavewoman nursing a baby while stirring the bison stew, warding off the saber-tooth tiger and watching the toddler all at the same time. In the workplace this can be translated as working on half a dozen applications (in my old office, these would be mostly outdated and bug-ridden) while picking up the phone or chatting with a client or colleague. In the kitchen this means preparing different foods at the same time or all at once as was the case yesterday. But really it’s also a matter of perception… the chef mentioned he was planning on putting more pressure on me so I would pick up some speed (ie. I’m too slow), while the waitress told me: “Heureusement que tu restes zen” (“Good thing you can keep your cool”)!
I didn’t mean this to sound as sexist as it does… what I wanted to say was that it takes more than proper seasoning to run a kitchen, it also takes certain qualities, some of which are typically feminine. Chef Frerard once told me of a young apprentice who could run his station like a pro with minimal training. I don’t think he meant that his sauces were yummy... but that he knew how to multi-task. As to why are there so few female chefs in the kitchen? That’s another issue altogether…

Another vegetarian alert... this is hard-core.

I think there will come a point in my culinary career when I will have to give up meat… that’s how I felt with the pigeons at Les Trois Forts and how I felt at my present job when we made pig feet terrine and veal’s head. To be completely honest I have enjoyed pig trotters in the past (hey, I’m Filipino after all), but this experience was completely disgusting. The chef gave me a dish full of boiled trotters and asked me to tear them apart and throw away the bones but keep everything including the jelly and juices and all that… so like the pigeons, I took this as a challenge, of course I could do it! Let me tell you that pigs feet are more like human hands than I thought. They were literally like soft and pudgy hands. I did my best to stop thinking of them as what they felt like and just tried to complete the task at hand (no pun intended). I remembered what my first sous-chef would say (“You are a robot!”) and tore through the flesh, the smell of death rising up my nostrils. If I remember my biology classes correctly, hands (and feet) are the parts of the body with the most bones. I can confirm this! The freakiest part was a row of bones smack in the middle of the hand, er… trotter, that resemble a row of perfectly aligned teeth. So as I tore into each hand… a row of teeth appeared. I wanted to take a photo because it was the weirdest thing ever but I couldn’t be bothered to remove my gloves to take the photo, but most of all I didn’t want the chef catching me doing that… in retrospect I really should have. All I have is a photo of the untorn trotters.

A few days later when the chef asked me to try the terrine I did… it was really gross and I didn’t finish it.
As for the veal head, I had no idea what that was, but when he reached for an actual whole head wrapped in a net and plastic with the eyes shut, that was really too much for me to bear. I couldn’t even take a picture , it was so horrific. Thank God he cooked it while I was absent… but when he sliced the head to serve it to his clients, I really thought I was going to hurl.