Sunday, January 31, 2010

Construction again!

Last weekend we scrunched up all the stuff in the kitchen to make room for the construction that will occur over the next 10 days, getting ready for the opening of the Dessert Bar. That means soon I get to engage in one of my favorite activities, kitchen organization! Right now the kitchen is a little tight, though, since one whole side is plasticked off:



So far this round of renovations has been much more fun than the original build-out for Generous Servings. The Apres side of the building is mostly empty during the construction, so here is the "before" picture:



We have already snuck in at night with some of our new lights and decorations and held them up in the room so we can imagine how it's going to look. Jill and Travis and I are really happy with the preliminary look: what has been purely imaginary for months now is starting to take real shape, and we like it.

While we're waiting on the construction, we have been doing a lot of shopping (and everything is in my garage again), including a trip to the restaurant supply store, in which Jill found these great hats:


Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Our Third Cook for a Cause Day

On Sunday we celebrated our second anniversary with our third Cook for a Cause Day, a 12-hour cook-a-thon with dozens of volunteer cooks helping to make food to donate to The Carpenter's Cupboard food bank. We made shepherd's pie and deep dish sausage pizzas, both of which turned out great! (I even enjoyed some leftovers for lunch today, which is pretty amazing since I spent 14 hours cooking those dishes yesterday, which is enough to turn me off to most foods for at least a month.)

Thanks to everyone's hard work and generous donations, we were able to donate 520 pounds of food, which will provide a hearty and tasty meal for over 800 hungry people. We had a great time celebrating our second anniversary with so many friends, and it's nice to be able to give something to members of our community who are struggling to give their families the kind of great food that we get to eat every day.

Here are some pictures from the day:


One thing we've learned is that the earliest shift is UNSTOPPABLE when it comes to prepping for the rest of the day. It's 8 am, a time that I usually try to sleep through, and these people are ready to chop mountains of carrots. Just give them knives and get out of the way.


Some happy pizza chefs adding the homemade pizza sauce to our deep-dish pizzas. We made a great crust too!

Mashed potatoes are so funny! Seriously, the mashed potatoes on top of our shepherd's pies were fantastic.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Christmas in January...I guess that's just called tardiness

The last few days have been insane! The phone has been ringing non-stop, except for the two times that the construction workers down the street hit our phone line and knocked it out. I've been meeting with wine distributors to try to find some great wines for Après, although it's turning out to be really tricky to find dessert wines, because most distributors don't carry many of them. One of the strange things about getting a liquor license is that after you have one, you aren't allowed to buy alcohol from a retail store anymore, instead you have to buy it from a middleman called a distributor. Call me cynical, but I suspect that the state is making some money off this arrangement. The problem is, each distributor sells specific wines, so you can't just pick out a bunch of wines and make one phone call to get them. You have to look up which distributor sells each of the wines, apply for credit terms with them, negotiate pricing, etc. For a place that wants to have a small but ecclectic wine list, this system is a pain in the aspic.

In addition to being on the phone almost every minute, we've been receiving deliveries multiple times a day (often from the same FedEx guy, which is confusing to me). We've got new equipment, plates, decorations, tables, gadgets, and silverware coming in from all over the place. That part has been fun. A few days ago we received our mini-grills that will be used for the Make-Your-Own S'Mores, and we tested them out:



We decided maybe the flame was a little too high in this test...



Monday, January 18, 2010

Recipe testing for new dessert bar--it's a tough life...

Our new dessert cafe, called the Après Dessert Bar at Generous Servings, is opening in a month, and we've been testing recipes like crazy. It's been surprisingly difficult in some cases. For example, I found an interesting recipe for bitter orange crème caramel that I decided to try. Crème caramel is the same thing as flan: a baked custard with a caramelized sugar sauce on the bottom, which is turned out of the ramekin when it's served. It's a very simple, classic dessert, with only four ingredients: eggs, milk, sugar, and vanilla. The trick is to get the texture right, because eggs curdle if they're heated too vigorously, so it's necessary to bake the custards at a low temperature and in a water bath to protect the eggs from the heat. You also have to know when to take it out of the oven, since the custard will keep cooking after it's removed, so you have to be confident and take it out when it's still very loose. I've made crème caramel lots of times, and my only problem has been that I think it's kind of boring, but I figured this bitter orange version might be more interesting. I boiled down some orange juice and added it to a basic crème caramel recipe, put the custards in a low oven, and came back to check them an hour later. What I saw was enough to permanently traumatize me. The custards were completely runny, totally curdled, had lost a lot of their volume to evaporation, and had a disgusting orange liquid floating around, like a bottle of milk that rolled under your seat and was left in your car for two weeks in the summer. They were the ugliest thing I have ever made.

I blamed the recipe, and went back to my recipe for plain crème caramel from cooking school. Same problems. I tried some other published recipes, and made some tweaks to the oven temperature, but I could barely produce anything edible, much less presentable. It turns out that it's really hard to make crème caramel at high altitude, although I have never heard anyone mention that (which might cast some doubt on my abilities, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it). I did a lot of research and only found a few minor notes about altitude issues, but I guess maybe crème caramel is enough of a dinosaur recipe that most people just don't try it any more, so no one is talking about how it is a complete disaster at high altitude.

After witnessing about ten failed attempts, Jill had the idea of contacting someone we know who went to cooking school in Boulder, and we got a high altitude recipe from him, which turned out to be a completely different recipe. It's not even technically crème caramel, but more of a hybrid between crème caramel and crème brûlée (which is a richer custard made with egg yolks and cream, instead of whole eggs and milk). The egg yolks help it set a lot faster (before it completely evaporates), and the baking temperatures and times are totally different. After making that recipe with minor variations at least eight times (even the caramel part doesn't work right up here, so I had to invent my own caramel recipe), I am happy to report that I can make a really good crème caramel. In the process of working on it, I've come to have a much greater appreciation for this dessert--it still wouldn't be my first choice at a restaurant, but it does have a certain purist appeal. I even tried making it with a real vanilla bean and we didn't like it as much as the version made with vanilla extract, so I decided not to tamper with the flavoring at all, and let the texture do the talking.

Another recipe that was really tricky was homemade graham crackers, which we need for our Make-Your-Own S'Mores dessert. It turns out that it's hard to capture the essence of a graham cracker, and it's probably harder at high altitude, although I never tried at sea level, so I can't compare. A few months ago I went to dinner at a fancy restaurant that has a well-known pastry chef, and I got a dessert that had a not-good homemade graham cracker in it, so I feel even more triumphant now that I've figured it out. If anyone from Rioja would like to contact me, I'd be happy to share my recipe, even though you didn't even respond to my application to be an assistant pastry chef for you when I first moved out here and needed a temporary job. No hard feelings, but my graham crackers are better than yours.

Other recipes have been much more cooperative, and for the past few weeks we've been focusing on garnishes and plating. Travis and I have been scouring magazines for presentation ideas, and we got a bulletin board to put up pictures and brainstorm for future recipes. There are notes like "USE CARDAMOM!" and "avocado in dessert?", plus lots of pages torn from my extensive cooking magazine collection. It's fun to have all our creative juices flowing, and we can't wait to unveil the results of our efforts next month!

Friday, January 1, 2010

The 2009 gingerbread house


Happy 2010! I finally have some pictures of our gingerbread house to post. I decided to make a gingerbread Victorian house, modeled after a real house that's just a few blocks from Generous Servings. Here's a photoessay of the construction:

First I made a small cardboard model, then a scale model that I could disassemble and use as templates to cut the gingerbread slabs.



I cut holes in the wall pieces for windows and filled them with crushed Lifesavers, then put them back in the oven to melt the candy and make "stained glass". After the gingerbread pieces were cut out, I left them out to harden for a few days.

I made the curved parts of the house out of pastillage, a sugar and gelatin dough that can be cut and shaped and then dries hard enough to support a fair amount of weight. This picture shows a cut-out of one wall piece. The large pieces for the towers were molded around Quaker Oats containers, big tin cans, and a styrofoam bell I found at a craft store.




I glued all the pieces together, in stages, with royal icing. I left the walls for a few days to make sure they were sturdy enough to hold up the roof and decorations.



About ten days after I started, we were ready to decorate. Most of the decoration was finished in one long night. I am proud of the utilization of candy on this house--I personally believe that it's a cop-out to decorate a gingerbread house completely in royal icing. The part that took the longest was the coffee bean roof tiling. Jill and I worked on that for many hours. There's always one boring part of this type of project, which you get about 10% done with and realize you never should have started, and the coffee bean roof was that part. The chimney is made of Boston baked beans candy, which is one of those candies you would never notice unless you were standing in the candy aisle scrutinizing every variety for building material potential. The people at the grocery store must have thought I had very eclectic taste in candy.




And here are some pictures of the final creation:



This isn't as good a picture, but it shows my favorite feature of the house, the weathervane.


The door mat has an authentic "fuzzy" texture because it's the inside face of one of those weird spongy sandwich cookies (also used on the top and bottom of each window). I couldn't fit "Welcome", so it just says "Hello".