Boston

It's funny to me how a restaurant experience can really set the tone of a trip at least momentarily. I went to Boston for a night last weekend with a friend from Johnson and Wales to visit a friend from home who just moved there. When it came time to pick a restaurant for dinner on Saturday night, we researched online and were excited to head out into downtown Boston . Upon arriving at the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which is where our destination lay, one of my friends said, "There are only 2 guarantees when you decide to eat in a tourist district: bad food and high prices." She was absolutely right. The food was overpriced, overcooked, and lacked originality. All of us left the restaurant cranky and flustered. My same friend also made another valid point when it comes to restaurant decision-making: "Don't ever pick a restaurant where you can make the food." While I agree to an extent, I think that what she meant to say is that you should never pick a restaurant where you can come up with the idea for the food. So much of the excitement in food comes from looking at the food pairings within dishes on a menu. As culinary students, we're always eager to find inspiration in restaurants, TV, cookbooks and whatever else we can get our hands on.

After a round of disappointment, we researched further and found a wonderful restaurant for brunch on Sunday. The menu was a Caribbean-Mexican fusion, and our taste buds were not let down. Located in Cambridge, maybe a mile from Harvard, East Coast Grill delivered a wonderfully satisfying meal. Between molasses-glazed grilled bananas and avocado omelettes, each of us sat somewhat impatiently waiting on the kitchen's next creation. Perhaps my favorite idea that I picked up from the restaurant was one of our appetizers: banana rellena. It was a roasted banana stuffed with smoked pork and topped with their house-made hot sauce which they called inner beauty.

Wow. It definitely had a kick given that the hot sauce was made with habanero peppers, but the balance of the sweetness from the banana with the smokiness of the pork was surprisingly scrumptious. I plan to experiment with roasted bananas soon so I'll let you know how it turns out.

Bartending 101

Although Bartending 101 is not the given name for the class I am now in, it sort of feels like it should be. I began Principles of Beverage Service last Wednesday which is another one of the front-of-the-house service classes required for my degree here at Johnson and Wales. The class is divided into a few segments, the first of which (for my class) was mixology. We've spent the last 3 class days learning the basics of bartending, the responsibilities of a bartender, and of course how to make drinks. We're only responsible for memorizing the ingredients and procedures for preparing 20 popular drinks, and for my practical next Wednesday I will have to prepare 12 drinks in 12 minutes and be prepared to answer questions about them upon completion.

The room is filled by 20 bar stations, and the walls are covered in mirrors which makes the room look 4 times its actual size. And the ambiance is set each day for practice when my instructor dims the lights and turns up the music (which has included everything from Nelly to Shanai Twain.) The pressure of preparing the drinks quickly enough is a little stressful but also sort of exhilerating. Don't worry though. We're not wasting bottles and bottles of liquor each day. All we get to practice with is mere colored water. You can see from the pictures that it looks pretty real though. And given that no one in my class has ever bartended before, you can only imagine the number of glasses that we've broken. I think that one guy in my class knocked a whole shelf over last week. Since yesterday was our last day in mixology, I can only hope that we're prepared for that portion of our practical next week.

America's Next Top Butcher?

If this show really did exist, I would definitely not make the cut (no pun intended.) Yesterday was the end of my nine day segment of meatcutting, and I was more than ready for it to end. Don't get me wrong. I learned a lot about meat, but butchery is not my forte. The other day, my meatcutting instructor came over to check my veal cutlets which had some holes in them. (FYI - Veal cutlets are not supposed to have holes.) He checked them and said, "It's okay. We'll just send these to the Pope. I hear he likes holy cutlets." At least he was able to make a joke out of my failure.

The class focused on the primal cuts, breakdown, and merchandising of poultry, beef, veal, lamb and pork. And we thoroughly covered every topic. I saw enough meat in the last 9 days of class to push me to the verge of becoming a vegetarian. The other day, my instructor put me in charge of the meat grinder. I processed around 150 - 200 lbs. of ground beef. That's a lot of hamburgers. And last Thursday, we covered lamb. A whole lamb. And here's the picture to prove it:

My instructor broke the lamb down into its primal cuts and then subprimal cuts so that we would have a better understanding of where each of the cuts of meat come from in the animal. The instructor performed comparable breakdowns of beef, veal, and pork over the course of the class, but we didn't start with the whole carcass. (Thank goodness!) Each day we gathered around the meatcutting tables for a breakdown demo, and it looked something like this:

Following the instructor's demo, each of us was allowed to break down one of the primal cuts or clean up a subprimal cut. On the day we covered pork, each of us broke down a pork loin from start to finish. We cut off the tenderloin and boned out the rack to yield a boneless pork roast and some baby back ribs. Here's a picture of me and my partner ready to get started:

On the last day of class, the instructor asked each of us what we would remember the most from his class, and almost everyone said they would remember either the lamb carcass or the picture below. Yes, it's a frozen pig's head. On pork day, my instructor showed us each of the primal cuts of the pig to give us an idea of how the animal fits together, and he also felt that it was necessary to show us a pig's head. I'm pretty sure it was only for effect.