It's All About Family

For those of you who have never worked in restaurants, the fantastic benefit of being a waiter working for beans/whoring for tips, or a cook working for beans/whoring for your chef, is that you get to eat for free. Unless you work in a chain (Sorry, Carl).

Oh and a quick aside, at Blu Sushi Lounge we scavenge your food. Because sushi is usually served in bite sized pieces, any food left on a plate is generally untouched and free game. I don't know if it's because we're all really poor at Blu, but if we see guests slowing down with plenty of food on the plate, we are hoping you say "No, we won't take it home." That shit gets hawked down immediately. It's kind of unprofessional, but some of us will drop what we're doing, sneak back to the kitchen and scavenge the goodies as quickly as possible and get back to work. Sushi is an expensive and luxurious cuisine, alright? We like to enjoy it too.

Behold the wonder that is the family meal. Formally I guess it's a staff meal or an employee meal, but really restaurant staffers usually form close bonds so the term "family meal" is very appropriate. It's usually comprised of scraps and can be sub-par. A wise restaurant owner will not spend too much on their employees, it is the kitchen's responsibility to turn what would be waste in to food. But a delicious family meal really does wonders for morale, and is greatly appreciated by poor restaurant workers. Whenever Sergio, the pastry chef, has to make family meal he makes three trays of thin crust pizza with some fantastic toppings. Mozzarella cheese over a garlic-ricotta sauce, fontina cheese over spinach, sausage and tomato sauce, smoked mozzarella over grilled squash/zucchini and a tomato/jalapeno sauce. My favorite day of the week.

Every week at Va Pensiero when the schedule comes out the chef will kind of randomly highlight names for every day of the week. Those highlighted will make the family meal for that day. I noticed that so far I've been selected to make family meal every Sunday. I then noticed that that is the chef's day off. I guess he has no interest or faith in my ability to make a decent meal. Then I thought about it some more and realized that although I am developing very specific kitchen skills, my ability to create a whole meal is somewhat untested.

My fellow Mexican cooks also share the same opinion as Le Chef. The first week I was supposed to make family meal they went ahead and made a meal without me. They joked about it, assuming I didn't have the balls to make something. I was pretty hurt, I had devoted my whole train ride to thinking what we could use and what I could make. We eat a ton of pasta with tomato-based sauces, so I was going to play it safe in that direction, but still! C'mon! Give me a shot!

The next week wasn't much better. It was a super busy Sunday and I kind of forgot family meal needs to be pretty punctual at 4:30 PM. Our sous chef reminds me at about 4:05 and he's like, "Eric! Did you start family meal?" At which point I nearly shit my pants. SHIT-FUCK-DAMN! I run to the walk-in, grab onions, red bell peppers, mushrooms, garlic, and tomato remnants and start roughly chopping everything in sight. At the very least I impress people with my vastly improved knife skills. It was a decent meal.

During the week I also am occasionally responsible for making the salads that go along with the meal. The person working the cold station has to take whatever raw vegetables that are turning south in terms of freshness and make a decent salad out of them. I never paid attention to how Maestro makes the dressings for these salads, but they're usually quite decent and based on some sort of fruit. I take a page out of The French Laundry Cookbook and make Thomas Keller's standard family meal salad dressing.

Shallots
Sherry vinegar
1 egg yolk
1 clove of garlic
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

You throw it in a blender and emulsify it slowly with the oil, by drizzling it in during the process. The finished product is creamy and off-white, which I was not expecting at all. This is unlike any salad dressing I've come across (to be fair I'm very accustomed to Hidden Valley Ranch and maybe a balsamic vinaigrette). But the taste is quite good! A nice acidic note to counter the creaminess of the egg yolk/oil, and the gentle onion perfume of the shallots with the sharpness of garlic to accent it. Pretty tasty! Perhaps a bit too much garlic, but otherwise solid all around. I throw a bag of mixed greens in a bowl, toss in a handful of arugula, julienne some Granny Smith apples, red onion and empty out the dregs from a can of pistachios for some textural contrast. Hey that's a pretty good salad! I know I'm using exclamation points a lot, but seriously! I'm proud of myself! But I make the mistake of perhaps adding a bit too much dressing, allowing the greens to get a little soggy as opposed to crisp and fresh.

Alright so salads go pretty well, but any monkey with a bowl and some reasonably fresh vegetables can make a salad. How about a real family meal? Well here we are, Sunday the 20th. The wonderful thing about cooking family meal on a Sunday is that there are a plethora of ingredients to use. It's the end of our week and there's plenty of leftovers to go around. Unused chickens, leftover pork belly from an appetizer we didn't sell as much of as we had hoped, some cuts of pork and beef, and any vegetables are fair game because we get fresh ones on Tuesday. The Mexicans again snicker and offer assistance, not thinking I can pull this off. Well ... challenge accepted, you buttholes. (That's right I said buttholes .. 3rd grade, what up)

I go in to the walk-in and notice a big box of chicken wings leftover from butchering. The light goes off in my head. Ding! Perhaps my favorite thing in the world are buffalo wings. I need some starch too so I decide to make a pasta alongside it. This isn't going to be the most cohesive meal, but it will be tasty, damn it. I make another childhood favorite, pasta alfredo.

Making hot wing sauce from scratch is trickier, so I use Frank's Red Hot as a base. I know, I know I'm a cop out, whatever. Still these turned out friggin' great.

Frank's Red Hot Sauce
Ketchup (Heinz baby, represent Rob)
Splash of Tabasco
Splash of Valentina (a Mexican hot sauce .. we go through like one bottle a week)
Squeeze of lime juice
Melted butter with a touch of honey whisked in
Garlic paste (You mince cloves of garlic extremely fine, and then using kosher salt as an abrasive you mash it in to a fine paste)

I cook the wings at low temperature first and then blast them hot in the convection oven to crisp the skin. Ideally I would deep-fry those bad boys, but alas we don't have a fryer.

And then for my linguini Alfredo. We happen to have taken our linguini dish off the menu, so that pasta is fair game. We get all our parmigiano-reggiano from a ginormous wheel (we toss pasta in it tableside), so when we take the wheel apart we are left with the waxy rinds. I grate all the rinds to get every scrap of cheese, and add some pecorino as well. I make a blond roux (equal parts butter and flour) and start whisking in milk, effectively what's called a bechamel sauce. The roux is a thickener and I start whisking in the cheese. Now I have a thick, white, cheesey sauce. Essentially alfredo sauce. I saute julienned red bell peppers, mushrooms (shitakes and criminis leftover from our mushroom tagliatelle dish), onion and garlic (yeah I use it a lot). Toss everything together, hit it with some chopped parsley, and voila! Pasta!

All the food is put out and I look at what we have. It's a veritable feast. Luis has heated up some leftover pork tenderloin and made a 12-egg omelet (which he flipped very successfully in a pan... it was awesome). Mr. Cruz, the manager, has brought in a pepperoni pizza he got for free somewhere and Maestro has made a salad with leftover gorgonzola cheese for the dressing. This is one hell of a fatty meal. Then Chuy tells me he's kind of lactose intolerant, Luis tells me he just ate pasta at Bravo!, his other restaurant that he works at, so he's eating the omelet with Chuy. It just so happens our only two American waiters are working, so they go for pizza and salad, the girl staying away from my creamy, fatty pasta. And Mr. Cruz generally opts for a tomato salad or some bread usually, not interested in our family meal. So the pasta goes largely untouched. Then they tell me I need to go home because a 4-top and a 5-top have canceled, and they no longer need me. Thanks a lot guys. See you on Wednesday. ... Buttholes.

Those wings were fucking delicious though.

EP #6

PS - Thank you Eva and Paul for pointing out one of my errors. Buttholes.