Still Here

I know it has been an exceptionally long time since my last post. Somewhere in the Golden Rules of Blogging (that doesn’t really exist, I just made it up), it says not to mention it when you have not posted to your blog in a long time, not to apologize or give excuses. Here, though, I think I have good reason to break that rule because I have been a neglectful blogger due to a positive change in my life that I would like to share. In early February, I started not only a new job, but I ventured down a new career path. It has been an adjustment and I’ve been busy. Also, until recently, I simply haven’t been in the blogging mindset. This job change is actually a career that I considered seriously while I was in university, but, for various reasons, abandoned and went to culinary school instead. The career I speak of is editing and it is something I have been drawn to for a long time. Right now, I am an editor for subtitles for theatrical movie releases. I work on creating and editing subtitles for English movies so that they can be translated into other languages to screen the film in non-English speaking places. And I love it. For the first time in my life, I am really excited about my job and I plan on keeping it for as long as they’ll let me.

I still love to cook, to learn about food and cooking, and to write about it all, but through various experiences, I have learned that I do not enjoy working in food service. It has taken trying out a number of different food-related jobs for me to realize that the type of cooking I love to do, the type that I get excited about and love to talk about, is the cooking I do at home, in my own kitchen, where I am in charge and where there is no pressure for speed or perfection. So, for the time being at least, I am going to hang up my white coat to be a home cook while my professional life will be a whole different ball game.

And now, on to more important things: food! Last weekend, I was feeling experimental so I decided to make tamale pie, which I not only had never cooked before, but I had never eaten before, either. Apparently, though, it’s an American classic, and I heard many people talk about it while I was living in the US. I decided that it was about time I gave it a go.

For those of you who, like me, have remained woefully ignorant of the exciting world of tamale pie, it is really exactly what it sounds like. It’s sort of like a Mexican-American version of shepherd’s pie: the filling consists of meat, peppers, and whatever else you might stuff or top a tamale with, and the topping is a sort of cornbread, similar to the breading in tamales (only, not really, since it gets baked, not steamed). It sounded pretty good to me, so I started scouring the Internet for the best-reviewed tamale pie recipe I could find.

As someone who has never had tamale pie before, I am not exactly very knowledgeable on the subject, but I think I found a winner with the recipe I used from Epicurious. The author is Molly Stevens, which is a good sign. She wrote the James Beard Foundation award-winning All About Braising: the Art of Uncomplicated Cooking, so the braised pork filling in this pie is exquisite.

The steps for making the filling are like most braises, but with a few unique aspects. As usual, we start by browning the meat.

Next, we sweat onions and minced jalapeno. Then, cumin, coriander, and oregano are stirred in.

After deglazing with chicken stock, the braise gets started. Into the pot goes salsa verde and that begins the process for the first thirty minutes. Then, we add roasted peppers and (I like this part) pureed corn.

 As you might imagine, this makes for a very thick, chunky kind of stew. There are a lot of flavours in there, and they have plenty of time to develop as the pork braises for the next hour and a quarter.

The topping, as I said, is basically cornbread. Once the filling is done, it gets transferred into a cast iron skillet, cheese is added, and the batter gets dropped on top. Bake for a half hour or so, and dinner is ready.

This dish is not going to win any beauty contests, but it is delicious enough for that to be unimportant. The pork filling is rich and has a nice kick that is well balanced by the cornbread. A dollop of sour cream is a nice addition, too, so put some out at the table.

The recipe link is below, and I only made one minor change when I cooked it. I couldn’t find poblano chilies at any of the stores near me; so instead, I used three medium green bell peppers and a jalapeno in their place. This worked well: poblanos are very mild chilies, so the green peppers plus a little heat from the jalapeno were good replacements.

I hope you’ll give it a try and enjoy it. And stay tuned, because I’m not going anywhere.

Pork and Poblano Tamale Pie

My New Kitchen

Well, I haven’t done much cooking in the past few weeks, but I think I have a pretty good excuse for that. After the craziness of packing and leaving Washington, Andrew and I spent a week with my parents, during which we enjoyed my Mom’s wonderful cooking, and now we’re in our new apartment at last. This, of course, means that we are currently dealing with the craziness of unpacking, an at times seemingly insurmountable task (there’s nothing like moving to make you sit back and wonder, How did I ever get so much stuff?), so cooking still has not occurred. My kitchen is basically set up, though, and I think it’s worth talking a little about that.

First of all, we love this new apartment. It’s in an old building with lots of character—beautiful, dark wood doors, ornate moulding around the light fixtures, a clawfoot bathtub—, and it’s all in excellent condition. It’s a little bigger than our last place, and it’s divided in such a way that makes it seem much bigger. I love the kitchen as well, but it is significantly smaller than the kitchen in our last apartment. Now, you might ask, wouldn’t someone who cooks as much as I do have a hard time with a small kitchen? Well, we’ll see what I say once I actually start attempting to produce meals out of this room, but for the moment, I’m feeling pretty good about the situation.

While this kitchen is small, it is not short on storage space. You can see in the pictures that cupboards line the walls, both above and below the counters. These manage to contain plenty, but the real jewel of this little kitchen lies behind that door that you can see at the end of the room in the above picture. Now, behold what’s inside.

I have a pantry! This means that non-refrigerated food items do not have to take up space in the cupboards, because I have a whole closet for them. It’s a little colder in there as well, which is excellent for keeping foods fresher. I’m also using the upper shelves to store some extra items that didn’t fit in the cupboards, and the floor to store my kitchen electrics (food processor, blender, etc.).

The kitchen has been recently renovated, so it looks fresh and clean. Check out the frosted glass cabinets we have on one side of the room.

I like the effect of the lights reflecting off of the dishes in the cupboard. And look inside:

Looks kind of cool, doesn’t it? The appliances are also fairly new and in excellent condition. The oven has a ceramic top, which will be a change. The big advantage of these is that they’re very easy to clean—no digging around under electric elements, or scrubbing around the claws of a gas stove. It also looks pretty sleek.

Now, for the main disadvantage of this kitchen: workspace. There is very little of it. See the little square of counter in this picture?

That’s basically the only area I have to work in. In my last kitchen, I had a huge island to work on, so this will be a change, but one I feel confident I can adjust to. After all, think of all the great food blogs that come out of small city kitchens. The bloggers of Smitten Kitchen, TheJulie/Julia Project, and The Amateur Gourmet, have all spoken at one time or another about their less-than-ideal kitchens, but they all make it work, and they’re some of the best. So if these bloggers can do what they do out of their kitchens, I certainly can too!

Bring Your Appetite Comes to Montreal

The end of November is a time of transitions: the final leaves are falling from the trees, the air is getting colder, and winter approaches, as does a new year. This November is time for a major transition for Andrew and me. To say that the last month has been busy would be an understatement. “Chaotic” also fails to capture all of the insanity that the past few weeks have entailed. I’ll settle with saying it’s been chaotically busy, and it isn’t over yet. The reason is that after over three fantastic and enriching years in Seattle, Andrew and I have moved back to Montreal. We have loved living in a different country, on a different side of the continent, in a place that is breathtakingly beautiful, full of lovely people, and, of course, rife with great restaurants and great food. Montreal is home to us, though, and we’re thrilled to be back here again.

The final days leading up to moving day always feel a bit surreal. The rooms that you had grown accustomed to looking a certain way, filled with your furniture and your belongings, are slowly emptying out, while boxes start to cover the floors and stack up against the walls. You go get yourself a glass of water, then remember that you packed the glasses an hour ago; you look at the bare walls of your living room and know that they’re different, but you can’t quite picture how they looked before. Your home is no longer your home, and even when you know where you’ll be living next, you can’t see yet in your mind what it will look like once you’ve properly moved in. It’s all very exciting, but at the same time, you feel a little lost, a little unsteady. You look forward to being back on solid ground.

I’ve found that this particular move has felt especially surreal. Andrew and I knew when we moved to the States that we would eventually be coming back to our home country, and hardly a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about coming back to Canada. After three years in the U.S., though, it is now taking a while for the fact to sink in that we are leaving Washington. It’s a bittersweet feeling: as homesick as I’ve often felt while I’ve been away, I’ve loved this part of the world, and I’ve made some amazing friends who I will miss dearly. At the same time, I’ve been yearning to be back in my favourite city in the world, back closer to my family, and closer to my oldest friends for a long time, so I’m ecstatic to realize that it is happening at last.

This big change in my life will mean some changes for this blog as well. I’ll still post about the food I cook, and though it will be from a different kitchen, that will be more or less the same. I hope to post more about my culinary life outside of my kitchen as well, though. We will be living in NDG, a neighbourhood in Montreal that is positively teeming with great food, from many different ethnicities. I want to post about the “fruiterie” around the corner, the amazing pizza place a few blocks away, and the food co-op down the street. I want to talk about the fantastic culinary experiences that Montreal has to offer, from bagels to poutine, and from Schwartz’s to Joe Beef. If you live in this city, I want to give you ideas for places to eat and shop; if you’ve never been to Montreal, I want to introduce you to how delicious this city can be.

Today is our first day back in Montreal, and the city is welcoming us with a blanket of fluffy white snow. It’s supposed to melt tomorrow, which is fine with me, but for now, I’m admiring it as I sit writing this at my parents’ dining room table. In a little over a week, Andrew and I will move into our new apartment and start to truly settle back into this place that for me, feels more like home than any other place in the world. Readers, bienvenue à Montréal. I think you’ll like it here.

A Competition, an Internship, and a Graduation

I’ve left you sitting on the edges of your seats, I know. Tales of my pre-competition preparations and jitters were a promise to reveal what became of it all, a promise that you might think I have broken. I haven’t, though: I have lots to tell. The past two months have been eventful for me.

First, the competition: great success, or embarrassing failure? Neither, really. I would describe the experience as a great personal success, although I did not place in the competition. To be honest, I was just happy I finished. Those three hours of cooking were more challenging than I had imagined, mainly because of what the mystery boxes contained. As you know, I practiced for this competition, but I wasn’t prepared for this:

-A live Dungeness crab
-A whole, bone-in lamb shoulder
-Two quail
-1 lb. sweetbreads
-A fennel bulb
-1 lb. Yukon gold potatoes

As you can see, there is no chicken on that list. You also might notice that there are not four or five ingredients: there are six … and four of them are proteins. Keep in mind that we were only to make three courses using these ingredients, and one of those courses was dessert. They’re not simple proteins, either. Two of them, some would argue, take more than three hours of cooking to prepare properly (the lamb shoulder and the sweetbreads), but I suppose that was just part of the challenge. I had never worked with sweetbreads before, and only had a vague idea of how to prepare them. It turned out, I wasn’t the only one—the competitor who came in first was the only one who really knew what to do with them. The black box was full of curve balls, to say the least, but we each made the most of it. I made a composed salad of crab, quail, and tomato for my appetizer, seared lamb au jus, with fennel and Yukon gold purée and braised sweetbreads for my main, and individual berry tarts with a berry reduction for dessert.

Curve balls or no, I am glad that I competed. I am proud of myself for finishing, and for having three complete courses to present on time at the end of the three hours. If I had to do the competition again, I would do some things differently, but that was the point of taking the plunge and doing this: to learn. I learned about time-management, sweetbreads and butchering lamb shoulder. I also learned more about what judges are looking for in culinary competitions, and what is important to them, and what is not.

In other news, I completed my culinary school internship. I was lucky enough to get to work at one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle, Chef Holly Smith’s Café Juanita. The restaurant features Northern Italian cuisine and uses almost entirely local, organic, and seasonal product. Interning there was my first venture into being in a fine dining restaurant’s kitchen, and it was an eye-opening experience. Holly is obsessively committed to quality; each item that leaves her kitchen must meet her high standards. Thanks to this, she has an excellent, award-winning, nationally recognized restaurant.

As an intern, I was on the bottom of the totem pole. I worked four days a week, ten or more hours a day, doing basic prep: stemming thyme, dicing turnips, cleaning greens, shelling crab, and so on. I got to do a few more interesting things, like making some of the basic sauces and curing guanciale and pancetta, but the highlight of the stage was from observing and talking to people. I learned a lot just from watching the line during service, asking questions, and trying to soak in as much information as possible. I was only there for about a month, but it was a month I won’t soon forget.

And, oh, yeah, I finished culinary school. I am now finally, officially, a culinary school graduate, ready to venture out into the big, scary world. Yay! It’s a good feeling to be done. What I will do next is still up for debate, but I hope good things are to come. The future looks delicious.

Back and Better Than Ever

My dear friends, my fellow food-lovers,

It has been a long time. I won’t try to deny it. It’s been about six months. Now, I could ramble on about a busy schedule, a lot of changes, and no time at all, but you probably aren’t interested in that. What you might be interested to hear is that the real reason I haven’t been around lately is because for a while, it seemed like I had lost my food-blogging footing.

I still was, and still am, doing a lot of cooking, but chronicling it in pictures and words and posting it for all to see was starting to feel a little pointless. I wasn’t enjoying it anymore because I had no real goal in mind, nothing really of worth to share, other than “Hey, this recipe is really good!” I needed more of a purpose. I needed a point of view. Of course, I’ve had a point of view on food and cooking all along, but I haven’t really been sharing it.

In the six months that I haven’t been blogging about food, I have had two major food-related experiences: I have been through two quarters of culinary school, and I have had my first job in a restaurant kitchen. These experiences have certainly broadened my knowledge and improved my abilities. They have also helped me to develop and strengthen that culinary point of view that I am hoping to talk about more here on Bring Your Appetite. I feel like I have more to share now than I did before, and I am eager to do so.

So, to help me to keep on track and to help you to get an idea of what this blog is all about (from now on), I would like to put forth some goals I have in mind for Bring Your Appetite, a mission statement of sorts:

I will write each post with the intention of sharing something specific: an idea, a bit of information, a theory, or an opinion. I might share something concrete, like things you should know about making your own stock, or something more contemplative, like why we so often associate food with important memories. It might be something controversial, like my thoughts on veganism, or something more black-and-white, like the traditional cuisine of a particular culture. Whatever the subject, I will approach writing each post with the intention of sharing something that I think will be of interest to whomever might be reading this, something that I believe is truly worth sharing.

I hope that isn’t too vague. I’m still figuring this out myself. All I know is that I want to continue this blog, and I want it to be a better reflection not only of what I know about food, but also what I think about food, and what I am interested in talking about on the subject of food. I would love for this food-centric monologue to become more of a dialogue, so readers, if you have something to say, please jump in and say it. I want to hear if you agree; I want to hear if you disagree.

There is one thing that certainly has not changed since I started this blog a little less than a year ago: you mustn’t forget to Bring Your Appetite.

Love,

Jessica

THIS JUST IN: Exciting Updates at Bring Your Appetite!

First of all, because I think I forgot to say it in my last post, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

All right, that’s done. Now, for some exciting new developments here at Bring Your Appetite! Are you trembling in anticipation?! Aren’t things more exciting when an exclamation mark is put at the end of every sentence?! Sorry. I’ll stop now.

First, I got a new camera!
Andrew did good and got me a Christmas gift that I was definitely in need of! It’s a Pentax Optio A40 and has features like 3x optical zoom and 12 megapixels. This should mean a vast improvement in photo quality on this blog. At least, I hope so. I’m a cook, people, not a photographer, so I do my best! Seriously, though, this camera takes much nicer pictures, even by someone as non-photography savvy as me. Everyone say, “Thanks, Andrew!”

Second, check out the awesome apron my Dad made for me:
Isn’t it cool? I love it. And I’ve been meaning to get an apron as I’m a pretty messy cook and tend to get food all over the place, including on myself when I’m at work. Now I not only have an apron, I have a special customized one that is sure to make me an even better cook. Right? Right. Everyone say, “Thanks, Dad!”

Finally, check this out:
Now, you may be thinking, so? What the heck is the Chef City Grill, where is Lake Washington Technical College, and why should I care? WELL. Chef City Grill is the restaurant run by the culinary arts students at Lake Washington Technical College, which is located in Kirkland, Washington (close to Seattle), and you should care because that is where I have started attending the culinary arts program. Yep, yours truly is officially a culinary student, soon to pass officially into the exciting, scary world of professional cooking. In terms of how this relates to the blog, some of that remains to be seen, but it will certainly have an impact. First of all, while I will continue to write about my at-home culinary adventures, I am certain that I will also be sharing some of my experiences in the culinary program with you. Secondly, and regrettably, I am quite certain that being a full-time student will cut into my blogging time. So, I’ll do my very best to continue to post about three times a week, but some weeks, that may be impossible. But I wanted to let you all know because even if there is a slow week here at Bring Your Appetite, it doesn’t mean I’ve laid my blogging pen to rest. It just means that I am having a crazy week at school, and I will soon return to tell you all about it. Everyone say, “Thanks, Lake Washington Technical College!”

So that’s what’s new and exciting in my life. What’s new with you?