I’d say we spent at least an hour picking his brains on methods, equipment, ingredients, food, and anything else we could think of. He was just super about it all. Also gave us recipes for all of these goodies:

– Banana Nut Bread
– Pumpkin Bread
– Cranberry Orange Scones
– Coconut Scones
– Cinnamon Walnut Scones
– Buttermilk Biscuits
– Cinnamon Raisin Biscuits
– NC Sweet Potato & Country Ham Biscuits

For lunch I headed down to Coastal Provisions for a great ham & swiss sandwich and some rosemary roasted potatoes and had a great little lunch on the beach.

Dinner was over at the Lifesaving Station restaurant and it was fantastic. Had the shrimp, corn & crab chowder which was just wonderful. Went with the special, which I have to figure out how to make on my own – pan seared silky snapper, served over thin sliced roasted potatoes and squash in a chardonnay sauce, with tabasco butter on top. It was just perfect. The butter gave it just a bit of a kick without being at all overwhelming and it just hit the spot. The sauce is fairly similar to one I make already, this was just a little thicker, and I think had more butter than I usually have in mine. Definitely have to give it a shot at some point.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend, and I’m now resisting the urge to rip out my electric cooktop and finally replace it w/a gas range. :)

Originally posted at Cafe Chat Noir on 4/30, so if it looks familiar, that’s why.

So Saturday morning I got up and headed over to the kitchen at the Left Bank restaurant. If you ever have the chance to muck around in a commercial/pro kitchen – do it. Gas ranges! Convection ovens! Prep bowls and spatulas as far as the eye can see! Tasting spoons! (I no longer feel like a freak for the fact that I routinely go through half a dozen spoons in the course of cooking something.) Seriously, I was in heaven the minute I walked in.

Chef Christine put the menu together based on what’s in season (or coming into season very soon) and we had an absolutely fantastic lunch as a result. The two main items were rockfish and soft-shelled crabs. She pulls the crabs out and they’re in a metal dish and iced down. She takes off the ice and is talking about something when someone says, “Um, are the crabs…moving?” Yup – still alive! Which makes perfect sense, but it was just wasn’t something anyone expected.

The kitchen was pretty decent sized, but there were 12 of us and the Chef, so we were a little cramped to start with, but quickly got to the point where we were working around each other very well. It was easy to be able to keep an eye out and see what was going on in other parts of the kitchen, so even if you were working on one thing, it was not a problem to see how something else was being made at the same time. Oh, and good for grabbing spoons and tasting things as we went along, too.

Basically everyone paired off and grabbed a recipe and went to town. Jo (my partner) and I started with cleaning the crabs – no one else really wanted to do it, I think because of the “still kicking” part – I got over the entire “meeting my lunch before I eat it” problem in about a minute… Pull the tab, clean the gills, cut off the face, next!

Once we got done w/cleaning the crabs, we passed them off to another pair for dredging and sauteing as they were already doing the sauce for them as well. We discovered that no one had taken on dessert yet, so that would be all us. It was a variation on strawberry shortcake – a orange-strawberry compote on orange poppyseed biscuits.

The chef had gone ahead and made the biscuits beforehand for time’s sake, which was very helpful. :) I looked at the recipe and realized this definitely couldn’t be a “prep as you go” thing given the cooking times and the order and timing of everything going in. Off to the racks in the back for prep bowls! I am a total mice in place* kinda gal anyway so the whole prep & staging before actual cooking comes naturally to me, and I honestly think it makes it easier when you actually start cooking anyway. I will say that I think it is definitely more difficult to try and prepare the same dish with another person vs. doing it on your own – especially if you’ve only met the person 15 minutes beforehand and have no idea what their kitchen work style is like. Fortunately it worked fine and no saucepans were thrown at each other in the course of making dessert.

Something I realized after the fact was that while I was having an absolute blast, I was also in complete “work mode” – we had to feed 12 people dessert, we had a great recipe, excellent ingredients and absolutely no reason whatsoever that this shouldn’t kick ass and dammit, it would. Totally in the zone. Chop, zest, juice, stop and think and look around and make sure the answer isn’t right in front of me before bothering Chef with a question, get everything staged in the order to be used, make sure I’m thinking a couple steps ahead so as not to forget anything, and most important, don’t do anything that would make Chef think I am a complete fuckup. Mind you, this was in no way any kind of a boot camp class or anything like that, but I still was in work mode anyway…and was loving it.

So, Jo got going on cutting up a ton of strawberries, while I fought with the oranges. (And won.) Chef did show me a much faster way to section them, which was a godsend, because while I do know how to do it, I just don’t have the mad skillz to do it quickly. Well, I didn’t before this weekend. Then it was cook, add something, stir, cook, make sure it’s not burning, stir, cook, add something, cook, done! Off to the racks in the back again to find the right container to put it in an ice bath, since there was no way it was going to cool down fast enough on it’s own. While we were waiting for it to get to a useable temperature, it was time for the whipped cream. Snag the mixer, cream, sugar and vanilla. Or, not… Check the prep table where Christine had put out the ingredients we’d be using, checked under the table, looked around the rest of the kitchen – no dice. Snagged Christine and asked where it was hidden – I was SO sure it was probably right in front of me the whole time, but turns out it hadn’t come over from the other kitchen. So, we skipped the vanilla in the whipped cream with no adverse effects, and I took care of that while Jo did the garnishes for it. After what seemed like forever trying to get the cream to soft peak stage, we finally got to put everything together. Have to say, it looked awesome when we got it all together.

By some awesome miracle (well, thanks to the excellent direction of Chef Christine), everything came out wonderfully and at the same time. We had enough food for a small army and it was all spectacular:

– Herb crusted rockfish. Awesome.
– Soft shelled crabs dredged in cornmeal and sauteed and served on a roasted corn sauce that was just to die for.
– Oven dried tomatoes – again, what a difference very fresh tomatoes make.
– Bacon cabbage slaw – the recipe we have can be made w/ white wine vinegar or champagne – we went w/the white wine vinegar. I think I’d go w/the champagne when I make it, because it was a touch vinegary to my taste, but still really tasty.
– Cream of asparagus soup – another super dish.
– Chilled asparagus salad with strawberry vinagrette and vanilla strawberries – can you tell asparagus and strawberries are in season? Also, just fantastic.
– Orange-Strawberry shortcake. Given that I had the recipe, cooked the stuff and put it all together, I knew exactly what it was supposed to taste like, and it tasted exactly the way it should, but it was still kind of overly sweet to me. But, everyone else devoured it, so it’s all good.

While we had our lunch, the sommelier, Lynette Sumner, gave us 4 different wines and went over pairing wine with food. This gal seriously knows her stuff – and if she wasn’t so incredibly nice, she’d be very intimidating. After about 5 minutes, I realized the most intelligent thing I could say about wine was, “I like red wine!”

Everything was just spectacular and everyone had a terrific time. I ended up getting a sandwich from Tommy’s Market for dinner, cause there was absolutely no way on earth I could finish another full meal after lunch.

Originally posted at Cafe Chat Noir on 4/30, so if it looks familiar, that’s why.

Friday night I arrived and they had a nice little reception upstairs at The Lifesaving Station restaurant. I figured it was just going to be a little meet & greet kind of thing, but no, it was better! Wine and hors d’oeuvres – and then Christine showed us how to make all the goodies we’d gotten to eat AND had recipes for all of them to take home. All of these were absolutely wonderful and easy as all get out to make, but look and taste fairly impressive. What we had:

- Sanderling Crab Dip – this is what they serve in the restaurant. This recipe is particularly good as far as I’m concerned because there is none of this adding artichokes or any other silliness – just lots of crab goodness.

- Roasted Red Pepper Hummus served on Belgian Endive – insanely easy and absolutely blows away anything I’ve ever bought prepared, ever. The presentation on the Belgian Endive looks great, and adds a great crispness to it.

- Smoked Salmon Canapés – Just your basic smoked salmon w/jazzed up cream cheese in pinwheels. Half on crackers, and the other half on cuke slices. I was really surprised at how good the ones on the cukes were – it wasn’t a combination I would have thought of (one of my biggest weaknesses w/food is being able to envision new combinations,) but I really liked it.

- Bruschetta w/the following toppings:
– Black Olive Tapenade – I’ve had this before and could kind of take it or leave it, but this was out of this world. Not sure if it’s the dry cured olives, the fact that it was fresh or what, but I could have eaten this with a spoon.
– Diced tomatoes with Garlic & Herbs – All I can say is this shows how much of a HUGE difference really nice, fresh, not-ripened-on-a-truck tomatoes make. SO good.
– Herbed goat cheese – this is in my list of recipes, but I’m pretty sure this either wasn’t in with what we ate, or I somehow missed it, but it looks good and I’ll be giving that a go at some point as well.

So, we got ourselves all good and noshed up to get things kicked off. Headed over to the Swan Bar in the restaurant and discovered that they have lost the recipe for Keoki coffee that I left them the last time I had drinks there (14 years ago…), so they now have that again, and I’ve got a new friend in the bartender, Jason.

Originally posted at Cafe Chat Noir on 4/30, so if it looks familiar, that’s why.