A home cook part 2

A week ago I wrote a post entitled A Home Cook and Proud of It and it appears to have struck something of a nerve. Not only did it get more comments than any post I’ve done since my recipe for imitating the famous green sauce of Paris’ Relais de l’Entrecôte, but it also got more comments on Kilt in the Kitchen’s Facebook page than any post I’ve ever written and people I know in “real life” that I didn’t know read the blog have talked to me about it.

Of course all of this talk introduced things I hadn’t sufficiently considered the first time around, so I want to revisit this for a bit.  In particular, I want to explore a couple of things that came up when talking with my true love.

In my previous posts on this topic and in the writings of other writers on this topic, the conversation usually centers around technical skill, access to ingredients, equipment, and health, and how the food is shared.  There are a couple of other big differences, though, between cooks and chefs that don’t always enter the discussion – nutrition and menu planning.

Nutrition is actually a big deal.  I’m responsible for not only providing interesting and flavorful meals for the family table, but I also need to make that food healthy.  My favorite dish at my favorite restaurant is Truite a la meunière at Bistrot La Minette in Philadelphia.  Trout coated in flour, pan-fried, and accompanied by green beans, fingerling potatoes and a butter/lemon/caper sauce.  It is absolutely delicious but I can’t even imagine how much butter is used in each presentation. Chefs are under no constraint to control fats, salt, sugar, or carbs just as they are under no obligation to provide vitamins, minerals, and any other vital nutrients.  On the other hand, home cooks need to do all of that if they want to provide food that will keep their family healthy while figuring out whether the latest nutrition/diet scare is real or hokum.

Consider the meal pictured above.  The fish was pan-fried in 1 tbl of vegetable oil and the beets have 1/2 tbl of olive oil. The pita bread is designed to scoop up a yogurt-cucumber salad with no oil.  No added sugar anywhere except in the orange juice used to flavor the beets.  There’s a pinch of salt each in the beets and the cucumber salad (and I guess in the caper brine used to flavor the sauce on the fish).  On the other hand, liberal use of herbs (herbes de Provence for the beets, mint for the cucumbers), roasted tomatoes and vinegar (sherry for the fish sauce, raspberry for the beets) make this meal pretty flavorful without a lot of “bad stuff.”

Menu planning is another difference between cooks and chefs. A chef needs to construct a series of different dishes that complement each other within the concept of the restaurant.  Having done that, the task is to consistently reproduce the best version of those items night after night, occasionally tinkering with the menu to keep it fresh. The audience picks their meal from the chef’s pre-planned choices.

For a family cook, it’s the other way around. The audience is the family and the cook isn’t preparing a list of items for the diners to choose (Aunt Jane can’t ask for a kale salad with red miso dressing instead of herbed vinaigrette).  The cook is preparing a meal that will everyone will like and will be different every night.  In other words, some serious thought has to be given every single night to the question “What’s for dinner?”  Having to answer that question needs to consider that the “audience” is the same one that showed up last night and the night before that and the night before that.  You already know what everybody likes but you can’t keep making the same thing or everyone will get bored.

It also has implications for how a cook shops.  For one thing, unless you use a food delivery service, you have to go get the food, it doesn’t get delivered to you.  For another, you don’t always know what you need. In a restaurant, where there are 6 appetizers, 8 entrees, and 4 desserts, you know what ingredients are necessary to pull that off.  When you’re pushing a cart through the supermarket, you’re more likely trying to figure out what you need for the next three days from scratch.

Finally, there’s the question of how to stock the pantry. Much of my cooking comes from either a French or Italian tradition and so I always have garlic, onions, olive oil, olives, wine and sherry vinegar, tomatoes, and herbs and spices identified with French and Italian food on hand.  But because I really like exploring other cuisines, I also have a half-shelf of Chinese oils, sauces, and vinegars, along with a smattering of other Asian ingredients, herbs and spices associated with Middle Eastern and North African cooking, Mexican chilis, tortillas, and Greek yogurt. At the same time, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started to cook something only to reach out for the preserved lemon (or chicken stock or turmeric or rice or fresh parsley) only to discover I don’t have any.  It’s tough to stock a pantry when you don’t have a fixed menu.

Enough ranting for now.  I’ve got to check my pantry to see if I have any konbu to make a dashi based soup for lunch.