How motivated/energetic are you to cook well at home on your off time? I dated a chef (his word) for a while, and he never ever wanted to cook once he was home from work. Lived on take-out or cold cereal, mostly.
Why do they stand that way?
There is a certain distinctive kind of hunched over, shoulders rounded forward, face too close to the plate stance that I see a lot of TV cooks / chefs use, particularly (but not exclusively) when they are sprinkling some finishing touch onto a plate. Emeril is a classic example.
A couple months ago I watched a little bit of a new cooking cooking show, don’t remember the name or if it is still on – it was one of those shows where people are competing at cooking and Gordon Ramsay and a couple other guys are humiliating them … anyway, after a couple of people making a poor showing of themselves, a guy comes out who very noticeably exhibits The Stance and Ramsay says “He looks like a chef. He moves like a chef.” I assume he was talking about what I’m asking about, not some other fine point that my inexpert eye didn’t see.
So what’s the story on that posture peculiar to professional cooks? Why don’t they sprinkle their parsley while standing up straight?
I don’t know about AutumnLeaves, but I generally have no desire to do anything with food whatsoever. This doesn’t bode well, though – there’s only so many times you can eat cold cereal – so what I do on my day off is to make a couple of dishes that keep well, like pasta with sauce or a casserole or bake up a batch of chicken. We live on that during the week. Weekends we either get takeout or visit the in-laws, who always invariably feed us 
Sometimes the bench – aka the surface on which you work – is too low for your height, so in order to see what you’re doing, you’ve got to hunch yourself over. You keep doing that, and eventually you’ll develop the hunch. In my experience it tends to happen more to those who are taller than average.
I’m short and nearsighted, so I also tend to hunch over while working on something. I also have to stand on tip-toe if I’m decorating a cake because the height of the cake on the turntable is almost always too tall for me.
Mine got missed.
An honest question, I consider myself on the top of the food chain and I’m fairly adventurous when it comes to trying out foods. Is there something I should just stay away from?
So what movies can you think of that got this stuff right? Mainly food-oriented movies (was Big Night any good from that POV), or others as well?
My friend Dan, the 50+ cook (and head of the Culinary Arts department at a local college) still cooks for friends. Once a month or so, we’ll go to his place for a meal and all kick in for the ingredients. It will be whatever is at it’s peak - one meal was lobsters and mussels, another was the best damn prime rib I’ve ever had.
I shot some video of him carving ice trying to get a gig on a TV show, but nothing came of it. Probably because he’s not a screaming jerk.
Well, there is the cliche “Don’t order the fish special on Monday.” It comes from the situation of ordering fish for friday and the week end, and having more then you expected left over. This means that we will “push” the fish dishes to move through that older stuff so we don’t have to throw it away. Of course, fish doesn’t just spoil suddenly on its third or fourth day, but it can turn faster with out careful handling and storage.
I don’t think there is anything specific that you shouldn’t order. Personally, I don’t like octopus, because it is rubber. Not “rubbery” like an over cooked scallop or calamari, it is like chewing on a bicycle tire. Also, fiddle-head ferns. They smell like rotten lettuce when they are fresh.
When I was working in professional kitchens, I loved eating the guilty pleasures I remembered from my youth: chicken casseroles, baked spaghetti, etc. Anything I could throw together in 10 minutes and eat on for several meals.
I’m wary of anything that sounds like a stew or casserole, especially early in the week. What happens more often than not is the kitchen trying to clear everything so there’s room for the new order coming in the following day. One of the restaurants I worked at sometimes had a “seafood casserole” as a special. That’s exactly what it was – all the leftover fish/shellfish from the weekend binded with a cream sauce. It tasted fine, but knowing it was the leftovers, it also made me feel a bit skeevy eating it.
Me? I don’t like octopus either 
I’m also not a fan of offal.
I didn’t really miss it so much as I don’t really have an answer. Nearly any place I’ve worked, excess product gets turned into staff meal. If you did go to a place that has a casserole type dish served on a Monday, yeah, it’s probably not the freshest dish. But other than that, it comes down to personal preference and I would never be able to say there’s a certain type of thing you should stay away from. Why would you think this is the case?
On my days off, I buy a few heads of lettuce for my partner and me, with lots of veggies, and we live off big salads for a few days. I buy eggs and bread for him, and he’ll have scrambled eggs and toast in the morning. For ourselves, that’s as exciting as we get on our days off. I don’t have the motivation to cook anything big, and I love salad and green stuff. Crave it non-stop when all I do is look at pastry all day. If we have company, we’ll definitely put together a lovely meal, and it’s actually really enjoyable just the two of us in the kitchen, putting together food for a few other people.
There is a tattoria close to where I live, they have a octopus stew that isn’t chewy at all, melts in your mouth, comes with some fresh Buffalo mozz! Bene!!
Only thing I don’t order is something easy that I can make at home.
I have a question regarding these hot water baths. Where you poach the protien after it had been vacuumed packed. I don’t get it. I watched a couple cooking shows (Top Chef Master’s, The Next Iron Chef and Masterchef Austrailia) they wanted to change the texture of the protien…why??
Sous-vide (the water bath/vacuum pack technique) doesn’t really change the texture of the protein as much as retain it, especially when you’re talking about delicate proteins like fish and seafood.
Water baths designed for sous-viding are very, very accurate, down to at least half a degree. That means that when you cook something in them, you have very precise control over the temperature, as the food can’t get hotter than the temperature of the water. High heat is what can turn a really nice piece of fish into a dried out tasteless sponge; when you control the temperature perfectly, you get fish that is delicate, not mushy nor dry, and has a lovely flavor.
Many cuts of meat turn out really great via sous-vide. Imagine a steak, perfectly medium rare throughout, none of the “bull’s-eye” effect, where the outside is cooked much more than the inside. Even something as humdrum as a chicken breast comes out flavorful, juicy, and delicious when cooked sous-vide.
There’s a whole thread on sous-vide here if you want to learn more.
I don’t understand the disdain (and long hours with low pay!) associated with the pastry chef position. I’ve worked in many restaurants where a highly skilled chef loathed, loathed having to do anything involving helping out the pastry chef. If the pastry chef didn’t get in early enough and was still finishing up when the chef and cooks arrived to get their mise en place and prep going for that night’s service, the pastry chef was viewed as a nuisance and “in the way”.
I’ve come across some pastry chefs in my time that were highly skilled, amazingly artistic and very passionate about their work, yet to hear the rest of the line cooks and chefs tell it, they are one notch on the totem pole below or above the new guy working garde manger.
In fact, my SIL is a hugely talented pastry chef at one of the nicer restaurants in the Cincinnati area, The Palace.
Here: http://www.palacecincinnati.com/culinaryteam_pastry.aspx
Here: http://www.palacecincinnati.com/menus_dessert.aspx
My 40th birthday cake she made for me (can you guess what NFL team I root for?):
Can you tell I’m shamelessly plugging her work?
Quoted for truth, Ina and Giada shows are so soothing to listen to and watch. Alton is over the top, drives me insane sometimes, ahem… I also like Anne Burrell, Secrets of a Restaurant Chef, now she cooks! Another is Sunny Anderson of Cooking for Real -
Rachel Ray is alright too, a little rough around the edges, but hey that’s how she rolls! 
Home cook here who only spent a couple years in a restaurant, but I like Cook’s Illustrated/America’s Test Kitchen for sensible cooking directions. I was using one of their recipes last night and the onions were cooked first, and only after was the garlic added. Their recipes also do a good job of explaining why you do things in certain ways.
Sandra Lee bugged me for the longest time. The tables that look like a craft store puked on them, the kitchen that gets a color-scheme makeover each episode (down to the color of the KitchenAid stand mixer that I’ve only seen her use once), the weird food shortcuts. So much emphasis in saving time and effort in cooking, and yet so much more time is spent buying craft supplies and decorating the hell out kf the dinner table, to the point where you suspect that a world-class meal could have been prepped in that time period. But I think I get it now. It’s a cooking show for those who hate cooking, and want to dazzle at celebration mealtimes. The inclusion of a fruity alcoholic drink recipe with most menus may help the theory. It’s also helped me understand the show more; I can get hating to cook, though I don’t (I may sometimes be too lazy or tired to want to do it), and so this show is aimed at getting through putting out a special meal with less fuss, then doing some decorating, which can be seen as more fun, and will make an impression on guests.
Yay! Advice! I just became the cafe manager at a small arts-based non-profit, and I’m trying to figure out the best methods for improving the food/equipment in a converted storage closet on a shoestring budget without alienating the ahem less-than-adventurous local palate. Without any previous professional kitchen experience. It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, to say the least.
The woman I’ve taken over for…well, she had little to no interest in or knowledge of cooking. Everything except the chicken salad comes to us ready to heat/bake and serve courtesy the fine folks at US Foodservice. The baked goods/desserts I have under control–I do a lot of baking, and I know what can and can’t be done cost-effectively with the time, tools, and space on hand. It’s the savory cooking that’s got me a little flummoxed, not in terms of what I want to do, but in terms of how best to accomplish it.
Things like making stock for homemade soups, when I’m only there for 6 hours a day. Hell, things like finding satisfactory (and satisfactorily cheap) stock pieces. Do food service companies sell such things, or am I stuck scrounging what I can find at the local IGA? We need things like a decent saucepan and a whisk, but the options in the US Food catalog are overwhelming, and I don’t know enough about buying kitchen equipment to know if there’s any real difference between the pricier stuff.
Any help or advice or head-patting and reassurance would be fantastic.
Cool, thanks. I never thought about the Monday casserole, but I don’t eat out much on Monday’s either.
CrazyCatLady, can you tell us what you have in your kitchen, and what types of things you sell? I’ll address your specific points as best I can.
Stocks. You can make a big batch of stock, and then freeze it in small containers. This means that you put in some extra time on stock making day, but the pay off is better soups. Don’t be affraid to still use base in addition to your stock. Chicken base adds alot of background to a soup in small quantities. Just don’t go nuts.
You are most likely going to buy bones for stock in 25 - 40 pound cases if you want a realistic price. You will need a $500 stock pot to fit all that into in one batch, but you can use multiple pots, or make multiple batches. This is where the term mise en place becomes important. Think about your work flow, order of operations, and what equipment you will need.
Equipment. Find a local auction company. You can buy used equipment and small wares at a huge discount over the new expensive stuff. And this works out well in the long run, because that new, expensive stuff is pricey because it is built to last a long time. You can get away with using cheap small wares that you buy from Walmart or Target, but don’t expect it to last very long.
New Equipment. USFoodservice appears to only offer Vollrath and NextDayGourmet sauce pans for high prices. However, a local-to-me equipment supplier offers lesser known brands for far lower prices. For example, lets say I want a 4 qt stainless steel pot. I am seeing $70, and $126 options from USFood. From my local supplier, I see $23, $27, and $31 options. I could get 3 pots from my local guy for what I would pay for one pot from USFood.
Ready to Eat Food. If you want to run a scratch kitchen, its going to take some work to develop recipes and procedures. The pay off is worth it! Start small with what you know how to do already. Experiment with your daily specials, and keep the things that turn out well. Lets say you buy meatloaf for a meatloaf sandwich. I see USFood has meatloaf “patties” for around $3/lb, or whole meatloafs for about $2.60/lb. They also have ground beef for $1.62/lb, which means making it yourself would be cheaper (though, don’t forget to factor in pre-cooked vs cooked weight) and better, since you get to control what goes into it.
…
I’d love to offer more advice if you are willing to show us your menu, tell us what equipment you have, and suggest what sells and what doesn’t. I need something to do while I recover from wisdom tooth extraction!