Hot out there today, and since I’ve not been able to bring myself to turn on the A/C yet, dinner called for something cool. Milkshake? That would work, but there is no ice cream in the icebox, and well, I did that one day last week… Chicken salad is a summer fav of mine, but it would take a while and heat up the kitchen. Oh, and I don’t have any chicken on hand. :)

Salad bar it is. Cool, fast, real food, won’t heat up the kitchen and for some folks – healthy. For me, well, it starts healthy – but then I keep adding more things to it. I’ve always been a fan of the salad bars when they started showing up in the markets – the variety and the ability to get small amounts of ingredients is great, especially if you’re single and there’s no way you’re going to use up all the various ingredients in time if you bought them separately.

Start with some spinach and romaine lettuce. Shredded carrots – lots and LOTS of shredded carrots. Radishes, sunflower seeds, a bit of shredded mozzarella cheese and croutons. Then slathered in some creamy caesear dressing – that’s where I think the healthy part goes out the window. But it hits the spot every time and in my head, offsets Sunday’s bacon cheeseburger. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to look as good as it tastes, but that’s the hazard of tossing it all once the dressing is on. Small price to pay.

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.