What the hell is a breast of veal? Breasts come from squab, ducks, chickens, and plastic surgeons, commonly. The average chap doesn’t often think of the breast of a baby cow, but Thomas Keller is no average person, I’m coming to find out. It turns out veal does have a breast, and it’s a pretty hefty thing indeed. I chose to make this recipe for my awesometastic toddler Bentley Danger’s 2^nd birthday, occurring on the intriguingly-auspicious 08.09.10. Why Linda, don’t you think he would have been happy with tater tots and easy cheese? Mayhaps, but I’m doing my best to cultivate a little urban gourmand, so I see no better occasion to make a multi-day feast than on the anniversary of Bentley’s birth. It is also a reminder of how far we’ve come in the last two years. Two years ago I was laid up in a hospital bed after 72 hours of 2-week overdue labor that included a crash cart scare and eventually being completely put to sleep for the birth of Bentley due to unforeseen complications. Everything is dandy now and I chalk it up to the little monster not being quite ready to enter the big, bright world, nevertheless it wasn’t the greatest few days. That is in stark contrast to our life now. Bentley is an aspiring sous chef, assisting me in the kitchen with all the dexterity he can muster. He has a surprising attention to detail (at least when it comes to licking the ice cream-churning beaters).

In lieu of a big party this year, we decided to keep his fete to family, since it was on a Monday. The reveler tally totaled 13 adults and four little ones, so I thumbed through The French Laundry looking for something that would feed a small crowd. It turns out the veal breast was what TK served the original crew of TFL a week before it opened, thus it’s a very meaningful recipe to him. I figured it would be an ideal dish to commemorate a momentous day, and so set out to gather my ingredients. TK suggests asking the butcher for a Bobby veal breast which is smaller than a regular breast, but I was unable to locate one. Just locating a veal breast itself proved challenging. Turns out we are not big veal eaters in this country, and least of all as strange a cut as a breast. No matter though, I planned to double his original recipe anyway since I had a larger crowd, so the butcher and I figured about half a regular-sized veal breast would do the trick. The whole breast weighed in at 20 lbs, of which I took 10.

The breast has ribs running up its length. The butcher compared it to pork spare ribs. I also came to find out it is full of cartilage and fat, which I suppose make it tender and delicious after a low and slow braise, but nothing turns you off of eating more than pulling a 10” long cord of cartilage out of a freshly-cooked piece of meat. The node-like tendrils looked like something out of a sci-fi film: half animate, half spare computer part. I wanted to share a picture but I couldn’t bring myself to ruin the magic of the final dish (it was definitely magical). About the time I was done braising and I was separating the rib rack from the meat, I started to seriously doubt this dish. There was a ton of fat, sinew, bone, cartilage, and all manner of odd thing interspersed between the flesh of the breast. How on earth would it ever taste good, and how could I serve my guests something so strange?

The next step calls for doubling the breast upon itself and weighting it so that it compresses together to form a solid, thin mass. I did this overnight, and the next day when I pulled the breast out to cut it into rounds for serving, the genius of the dish was apparent. The cutter wouldn’t cut through the fat, so it was easy to separate it at that time from the meat, and in the end I would up with perfect circles of meat the texture of tuna in a salad Nicoise with the flavor profile of well-braised veal. Every time I cook a TK recipe I go through a touch-and-go period where I firmly believe the dish won’t come together. Each instance so far, he’s proven me wrong. The steps are actually so clear and concise that any doubt and second-guessing is really a product of my own mind. I feel comfortable enough in the kitchen that I trust myself, but I guess I’m learning that I have to trust someone else too, if I respect them enough to cook from their book.

The grueling detail-focus in this recipe is maddening. For instance, he specifies shapes for the various vegetables that top the meat; the beets must be Parisienne balls, the carrots are 1” turned (whittled into miniature footballs), the celery are 1×1/4 batons, and the turnips are fluted ovals. If there is a soul among you who can scoop Parisienne balls from a raw beet, speak now! I wound up sous viding my beets, then perfectly cubing them- I think they were plenty beautiful. I spent roughly an hour chopping up a few vegetables for the dish. Had it been a creation from my own head, the same vegetables would have taken me 15 minutes and looked good enough to be served at a restaurant. Good enough is not TK’s style. They must be the best. My knife skills improved considerably in that hour.

The waste present in most of TK’s recipes is a little staggering as well. In order to get perfect batons, balls and ovals, roughly 50% of the vegetable in question is peeled or pared away. In a commercial kitchen this would not be a problem, I wager, since stocks and sauces welcome the addition of wanton veggies. In my own kitchen I find myself scrambling to come up with clever ways to serve the unwanted bits, thus I make one recipe from TFL then eat remarkably unphotogenic (though usually delicious) meals for two days afterward. I have witnessed this phenomenon with vegetables, but also bones, duck breast, fish scraps, polenta remnants, et cetera. It’s something to be aware of, and I consider it a good and bad thing. It’s god in that it forces me to think outside the box to come up with alternative uses for the imperfect scraps. It’s bad because I imagine people across the country tackling the daunting recipes in TK’s books yet being busy enough in their lives that they simply boot the waste into the compost bin. I wish he would have addressed this issue by stating what he actually personally does with all the excess instead of the occasional “can be frozen for future use.” Future use in what? Let’s keep the food revolution going with inspired ideas for scrap foods. Maybe I’ll write that book. Hmmm, Goin’ Gourmet with TFL’s Tatters?

Last week I wrote about how TK inspired in me a love for strainers, chinois’, China caps, and the like. This week it’s got to be my round cutters of all sizes. He’s got me thinking I can make anything pretty by simply plopping it into a little round form. It really did the trick for this dish, however. Braised meat dishes tend to be among the most heart-warmingly delectable around, but they also tend toward unsightliness on the plate. A slop of stew, a smattering of spaetzle, and you are left with a full belly in front of a skid-marked plate. By packing the strands of meat into a round, pan-frying them, then serving them on equally circular cakes of polenta, the mess is virtually eliminated. It’s a fine thing indeed when the beauty of the plate matches the beauty in your belly, and this dish achieves that rare balance.

Bentley gave the dish the ultimate seal of approval when he unceremoniously (read: beseechingly, with sticky hands grabbing at the platter) requested a second veal breast round along with more polenta. He ate so much dinner he wasn’t overly obsessed with the chocolate/peanut/cajeta cups I made him for dessert, although they did end up all over his face during the manic unwrapping of gifts portion of the evening.

I’m probably somehow cheating by systematically selecting the more appealing-sounding recipes to prepare first from The French Laundry. It would be more equivocal if I just started on page one and worked my way through to page 326, but I’m going to allow myself a little flexibility.  It’s not like I’m making the deliberately easy-seeming recipes. It’s just that usually, if given the choice amongst all the fish, fowl, and four-legged beasts, I can’t help but gravitate toward duck. That may be because we had ducks growing up on the little half-ark my father, channeling his inner-god complex, created for us.

I say half-ark because mostly we had one of everything, so we would have been SOL in truly apocalyptic times.  One cow (Slobber, my bff), one horse (Smokey, my nemesis), one stork (a tale for another time), one sheep, and so on, you get the picture. Which is why it was a little odd that we had two ducks. They were the unchallenged rulers of the realm. They had the dogs, cowering in fear every time they so much as wobbled by on their webby, stumpy feet. I was a brazen little girl, insisting on mowing the lawn with my shirt off just because I had seen my dad do it a hundred times. I rode our horse bareback and explored the far-reaches of our acreage on solo missions armed only with a pair of threadbare shorts and an active imagination. This is to say, I didn’t scare easily. But I was amongst the plebian denizens frightened to the core of those scheming ducks. If I would round a corner and happen unawares upon the ducks, they would come at me clucking and pecking at my heels until I left them to their malicious devices.

Fast-forward nearly thirty years- maybe I subconsciously like to eat duck because I feel like I’m somehow getting back at those two saboteurs of my happy-go-lucky childhood. I certainly don’t hate ducks in their live state; I think they’re striking and on the smarter side as far as fowl goes.  I do, however, prefer them on the plate if they’re going to be within five feet of me.  Which is why I jumped at the chance to make Keller’s duck roulade. It’s basically flattened duck breasts wrapped in blanched chard leaves cooked at 190° in a water bath for 8 minutes.  Sounds simple enough, no? So I thought I would measure the total time spent making the dish. It starts with a “quick sauce” of duck bones and anyone who has made one of the quick sauces from The French Laundry knows that they are anything but quick.  I figured since I needed to make the sauce from duck bones it would be more economical to buy a whole duck for the affair. I’d use the breasts for the roulade, the carcass for the sauce, and reserve the legs for a confit preparation along with the fat I could render from the bird.  It turned out to be a wise choice, however I felt a little like Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York going all meat-cleaver on my duck carcass.  There was duck blood sputtering all over the kitchen and I was really happy Bentley Danger was tucked safely in his crib for a nap, because who wants their two-year-old to liken them to Bill the Butcher?

I’ve broken down plenty of fowl carcasses in my life, but never quite so meticulously as with this duck. It was imperative that my breasts remain as large and intact as possible in order to maximize them for the roulade, so I took great care extracting them from the frame (upon rereading the previous sentence, I suppose one might read it with dirtier thoughts than I intended. Oops!). Keller wants the remaining bones 2” long in order to extract as much possible flavor for the quick stock, so I had to somehow cleave very carefully. I don’t know about you, but it is all but impossible for me to bring a cleaver down on anything and not close my eyes as its making contact. Not sure if it’s some cobweb in my mind from a horror flick gone awry, or just a natural instinct, but I’d be curious if it’s the same for you. I wonder if it’s the same thing as trying to sneeze with your eyes open, perhaps.

About the time I was carefully extracting my luscious breasts, I started fantasizing about who I would have to dinner along with Thomas Keller. It’s a far-flung goal of mine to cook for him, but who best to fill the remaining seats? I decided to go ahead and put together a dream-team of my all-time-favorite living idols, cooking and otherwise. So that’s Thomas Keller, Jeffrey Steingarten (there would have to be an amuse bouche of grubs or beetles or something to satisfy him), Christopher Walken, and David Lebovitz.  I could waltz with Walken, test my latest gelato on Lebovitz, quake in my boots for what Steingarten would say of the meal, and bask in the sheer genius of Keller all night long.  I actually think it would be a well-blended set, and I don’t think they’ve all been in the same room at once before, so I would give them something to bond over. I would LOVE to hear your ultimate dinner party if you’d care to share in the comments. Make sure they’re living folks- that way there’s a remote chance it will actually happen!

After the starting the sauce, I got down to trimming up the duck breasts so they’d fit symmetrically within the chard leaves. It was a sad sight trimming off all the perfectly good meat, but I’ve reserved it for another use, so all is well with the world. Rolling the breasts in the leaves was trickier than it sounded, but in the end I got perfect little roll-ups that rested in the refrigerator while the sous vide machine heated up to temperature. Keller actually calls for immersing the roulades wrapped in plastic into a pot of water kept at 190°, but I have a sous vide machine, so why not use it?

Meanwhile I got a chance to play with the chemical properties of corn by extracting corn water from the cob, then heating it and watching it quickly thicken from the natural cornstarch present. The creamy corn that is a part of this recipe is a relatively simple vegetable dish that I will repeat often since it was beyond pleasurable.  The morel topper made with what eventually became duck sauce, however, is what pushed me over the edge to try this dish. Morels are nearing the end of their season here in Washington, and they are my favorite mushroom by far. This is perhaps the best showcase of their meaty, woodsy qualities I’ve prepared this season. From top to bottom, this dish is a MUST-TRY if you are even remotely a Keller-phile such as myself. Nothing is overly-daunting, and the ratio of accomplishment to time spent is quite high for a recipe from The French Laundry.

Thomas Keller. It is a name that strikes fear, admiration, lust, and gustatory bliss into the hearts of many. Nearly everyone in America and surely all the food-crazed souls on the planet know of this guy. He is the crème de la crème. His French Laundry catapulted him to fame, but his arduous and meticulous journey to that gem is what I respect the most about the man. I rarely cook from cookbooks, but I view his as coffee table tomes in the best possible way. (I actually read my coffee table tomes- that’s maybe an important note.) I don’t fully comprehend why he felt the need to put together Ad Hoc, but other than that, his weighty books are the anchor to my whimsical heart. The voice of twine-wrapped reason behind my chicken wings, the chinois strainer to my chicken-head stocks.  I’ve been feeling a little down lately about matters de cuisine.  I think everyone experiences these peaks and valleys, but I’m in a low one right now. It’s odd, being in the height of produce season and all; I should be basking in the bounty. But I’m not. Instead I’m basking in a rare (because white) glass of Sauvingon Blanc, reflecting on how I got to this place in my culinary perspective.

I guess you could say I’ve had some great successes since I started intensely scrutinizing, cataloguing, and photographing every plate that graces my table.  Among other things, I had the pleasure of enjoying an all-expenses-paid journey to the Gansevoort Hotel in NYC’s Meatpacking district to have fun decorating cakes with Kelly Ripa and Buddy Valastro, for example. I also made the cut to Fox’s new seeming-hit MasterChef, which I’d likely never have heard of had I not had the blog, since I don’t own a TV and don’t much keep up with that sort of thing.  The latter was a life-changing event. When I was in California doing a reconnaissance mission at the grocery store we were restricted to shop at for ingredients for our premiere signature dish on MasterChef, I had an interesting conversation with the fish monger (if you can call him that). I needed Dungeness crab for my dish, and in the process of trying to explain this to the guy, no fewer than five times he said to me, “Rachel Ray just uses the crab in a can. Why can’t you use the crab in a can?” Initially I played Ms. Nice Girl and politely explained that it was really important that I have the Dungeness because I was from Seattle, blah blah blah. I couldn’t say anything about it being for a TV show, so he just assumed I was some entitled broad off the street dissing his canned crab. When he said “Rachel Ray uses the crab in a can” for the fifth time, however, I kind of blew up. It was the culmination of a lot of stressful events and I fear I took something out on him that didn’t entirely have anything to do with the poor guy, but I gave him to it straight. “Do I look. Like. Motherfucking. RACHEL RAY?” And then I huffed off.

The events ran their course and I eventually got my Dungeness crab (albeit canned- wtf, Whole Foods, LA?) but the moment was not lost on me in terms of sorting out who I really am in this crazy culinary world.  I have this big bravado of confidence that I am GOING PLACES. I am sure of it. I never let my circumspect insecurities seep out in my blog posts, video vignettes, or twitter updates, because I am the shit. I know all there is to know about this culinary show and I am WAY BETTER than Rachel Ray, so why hasn’t someone given me my own show, goddammit? Because maybe I’m not. Maybe I don’t work as hard, maybe I squander my meager talent for combining esoteric ingredients in elegant ways just because I can. Maybe I have nature down pat but my nurture is hanging out somewhere in middle school. I’m too cool to cook from cookbooks. I am WAY BETTER than Rachel Ray. Or maybe I’m not. The woman is a machine. An empire. A Martha-in-the-making minus the jailbird chic. I would probably do well to get off my damn high horse (or heels, as it were) and pay some respect to those who have come before me. Good things come to those who wait, but better things come to those who work hard. So that, my friends, is what I am starting to do.

There will be no more skating by on my laurels and lavender. I’m going to start gnawing the marrow bones of my respected predecessors, and I mean that in the best possible way.  My own recipes will be tested many times before they appear on this site, and I will bite the bullet and begin the learning process I never wanted to admit I needed. I want to take it to the next level. I am not interested in dipping shortbread in Callebaut for the rest of my life. I want a real motherfuckingcareerinthiscrazythingcalledcookingandtheonlywaytogetitistoPUTITINYOURMOUTH. I want to make my THIS IS IT and live to see it. So I’m going to start at the beginning.

Well, sort of. I guess it’s kind of insulting to call Thomas Keller the beginning when he is so clearly the ultimate frontier. But hell, I respect him so much and his books (again, with the exception of Ad Hoc) represent such a challenge, that I’m going to cook from them. Intensely. And really learn what he has to teach.  I’m also going to admit my shortcomings. This is meant to be a real journey and even though I’ve been cooking far more than recreationally for 15 or so years, I still don’t know how to properly truss a chicken. I just learned how to tie a butcher’s knot last week (courtesy of Russ, the soulful proprietor of Rain Shadow Meats in the Melrose Market).  If you asked me to pinch a filet and tell you if it was medium rare or medium, I’d probably guess wrong.  I’ve been skating on unabashed cavalier fearlessness for far too long. It’s time to learn the ABC’s.  So brace yourselves, there may be some boring posts ahead in which I detail the enchanting art of debearding a mussel properly or suss out the real difference between the eight and ten inch chef’s knives.  But it’s for a greater good, my friends, and it’s high time I put some technique behind my wild mind.  I started by cooking from Keller a few weeks ago. Under Pressure has become a bible of sorts, since I am a big fan of sous vide. Today I took a departure from that and cooked from The French Laundry. I made skin-on sea bass with parsnip puree and spinach spheres. I learned a lot. I made a broth from mussels, then reduced it to a syrup along with vanilla bean and saffron. Then I turned the syrup into a sort of beurre monte by adding cream and butter. I wasn’t happy with my emulsification abilities. I will do it again and get it right, even though it tasted perfect.

I learned how to quickly dry fish skin so it crisps properly. Shave it in one direction with a knife, then go back over it with the knife like a squeegee. It works wonders. I learned that all white wine isn’t straight from the devil, since I had to buy a nice bottle to use a cup in my stock, and I wasn’t about to let the rest go to waste. I learned that poaching parsnips in cream makes them amazing, but in truth, I kind of already knew that:) I learned that I am missing a critical piece of kitchen equipment. It is a sieve like a chinois but it is flat and round and it is for pressing things through in order to achieve a perfect texture, like pureeed soups, and in this case, my parsnips, which I had to laboriously shove through a strainer. It is called a tamis, and it is considered a “tool of refinement.” I want to be refined. How else is the Foodie Fashionista s’posed to take over the culinary world if she doesn’t know everything about everything? And that’s a lot to learn from one humble recipe. Writing one humble post.  It was a dinner that exploded on my tongue. Every flavor perfectly clung to the next. There was not an instant of incongruous hesitation about this or that not being just right. It was just right. It just was. I want to be that, and I believe I will be.  Great things are on the horizon. But I am still a young Jedi. I think I just called Thomas Keller Yoda, so I had probably better sign off.  Exes and Oh Baby’s, Linda

ps- this was really from the heart. So much that I wrote it all in one run-on-ey long paragraph and I’m now going to go back and separate it from itself. Like lobes of foie gras.