A whiff of Montreal

Second head cook shift at HiP successfully completed. I'm finally sitting down after ~5hrs of ridiculousness, full and happy and tired. My hands carry a light scent of garlic and homemade Montreal steak rub, which they haven't done for a good five or six years. It was glorious to feel up that massive pork loin, chop it into roasts, season the heck out of it and smell it waft through the kitchen as we cooked the rest of dinner. There is something incredibly satisfying about roasting a beautiful cut of meat, preparing it so that it will remain moist, packing it with flavor, and watching the delighted faces as it is consumed. Nothing like it in the world. Tofu will never be as satisfying, even if someone manages to figure out how to make it taste like something (I have yet to find the answer).

Because themed dinners are always the best kind of dinner, I chose "food my mother loves to make for my brother". First off, a Montreal-steak-rubbed pork loin, roasted slowly in the oven, as you may have guessed. I brined a whole loin roast (must have been about seven pounds and a good two feet long), overnight in a cup-salt-to-gallon-water mixture. The pallid colour of the roast is at the end of a day of brining (for this size, a couple of days would have been better, but alas, I didn't think of it on Sunday) is no indicator of the deliciousness imparted by the extra moisture the meat has absorbed (it may actually just be additional locking-in-juices, I haven't really thought about the science of this). When dried off, drizzled with olive oil, and coated in an approximation to McCormick's Montreal steak seasoning, there is nothing better. Since y'all are probably wondering what this stuff is, it's amazing, delicious, and if you eat meat, I recommend trying it on everything. Pork is nice because it doesn't have a strong flavor of its own. Serving it with dijon mustard is always a winner.
Since I didn't have any of the authentic stuff, I found an approximation on the internet, which I added to and will share below.

Next, my brother is hilariously in love with my mum's scalloped potatoes (oh wait, is that me? well, both of us). They're pretty ridiculous. Otherwise known as potatoes au gratin, these guys are cheesy creamy wonderful. Potatoes, onions, flour, milk, salt and pepper, and sharp sharp cheddar (or any other nice strong cheese, tonight I used a large block of Swiss). That's it. Heavenly. This one you'll have to email me for if you want the recipe, I'm not sharing it with the entire internet.

And then broccoli, because my mum always has to have a green vegetable at dinner. I've gotten in that habit too, as I've learned the nutritional value of lots of "vegetables" (ie potatoes are not a vegetable, they are a starch; zucchini and summer squash have almost no nutrients; corn is mostly sugar, not much good there; et cetera). Tonight I decided to make the vegans happy and make a stir-fry of wax beans (yellow green beans), broccoli, and mushrooms. Unfortunately, I gave over watching the vegetables par-boil to one of my assistant cooks, so the broccoli ended up mushy, but the effect was nice all the same. Note to the wise, which I didn't realize everyone doesn't know: if you are going to saute mushrooms (or, really, cook them at all), be sure to start with a little medium-hot oil in your pan; add dry mushrooms (mushrooms should NEVER be washed with water, or else their pores close up and you can't caramelize them because they leach out their water); and mix only occasionally. If possible, flip them only once or twice as they cook, using a quick wrist motion while holding the pan. Do not stir them constantly. If you must stir because you can't do that nifty flip of the wrist thing I'm talking about (you know you've seen someone do it), again, only do so once or twice. Otherwise you'll end up with chewy mushroom goo. Nice sauce though.

The first time I cooked at HiP, I co-headed the kitchen with Megan. We had a pretty successful night, and I received wonderful feedback (along the lines of make this again!!!!) on a variation of a recipe I learned during one of my last practical classes in culinary school. There we made our "Tuscan bread pudding" by grilling bread, cutting it into spears, fitting it into molds, and filling it the molds with a bread/tomato mixture. I knew we had a ton of stale-ish bread sitting in the pantry (since I helped unpack it Saturday), so I made another version tonight, which turned out very well (that is, after Megan was a life-saver and did some dishes so we would have pans to cook it in... one of the downfalls of cooking in a co-op, someone will inevitably blow their dishes shift the night before you cook). This guy is super easy and doesn't really require a recipe; all you need to do is get some stale baguettes (or similar) and an equal amount of tomatoes by volume, an onion or two, a handful of chopped fresh basil, some garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper. If you happen to have an oven that broils, drizzle a bit of olive oil over the bread (chunked) and broil about 4 mins either side, to crisp it up a bit. Chop up your tomatoes in bread-hunk-size pieces, saute your onions and a bit of fresh garlic til soft, and mix all the ingredients together in a pan greased with olive oil, and pat it down a little. The tomatoes and bread will sort of meld together, but you'll get bits of each. As Dave would say, nom nom nooomm.

To appease the vegans (there are lots) and vegetarians who require protein, I forged new personal territory and cooked tofu (this may have actually been the first time I've done this, at least in recent memory). [Aside: I hate tofu. It has the texture of eggs, which I can't eat because the texture literally induces an involuntary gag reflex. I'm an unhealthy vegetarian.] Not having any clue what to do, I turned to my trusty Moosewood for directions. There's an incredibly simple recipe to make "crispy baked tofu" in one of them (perhaps more), which I stumbled upon last night. It essentially said to throw some soy sauce and sesame oil in a bowl, lay out your tofu on a baking dish, drizzle this stuff over, and bake at 400degF for an hour, flipping over once. Well, that's exactly what I did. I threw a couple of squirts of soy sauce in a bowl with a bit of sesame oil, some random spices I pulled off the wall (red pepper flakes, mustard, garlic, onion powder, ginger, and I think turmeric, though that didn't do much in such company), and poured it over my tofu and a couple of onions I chopped up. One of the assistant cooks asked when we were eating how I had made it, even though he was there the entire time- must have been un-noticeably easy! To serve, I sauteed a few more mushrooms and threw them in the mix, because no one in their right mind would choose to eat tofu on its own.

So... I forgot to tell the assistant cook who was cutting up bread when to stop. We ended up with a large bread bag (these are actually 50-lb flour bags that Acme gives us bread in) full of 1-inch chunks! I had planned on the Tuscan bread pudding, and this gave me an opportunity to try a sweet vegan bread pudding I had been considering for a while. When I brought this up in the office today, Lauren suggested we look up recipes to figure out how they dealt with the lack-of-egg thing. It looks like arrowroot is the answer, but I just ended up throwing together a bunch of soymilk, some sugar, a bunch of spices (we were all out of cinnamon!!!?!) vanilla, and a tiny bit of cornstarch, which I poured over the bread, along with some raisins, apple slices (not actually a good plan for the pudding, but it kept one of my assistants busy for a while), cashews, and cranberries. This went in the oven at 375degF for a while (time didn't matter since there wasn't anything raw in it).

We had more bread yet, so I threw together yet another bread pudding, this one more traditional. It had eggs, milk, and the like. I'm not entirely sure how, but it ended up kind of salty (?). Maybe I accidentally put some in while trying to cook the other billion things I had going at the time. Meh, one failure isn't too bad for a night.

And then, to finish off, I made a chocolate trifle. I asked Adam, the kitchen manager, to get some heavy cream for me... to make whipped cream. It is hilarious how shocked people are when they see how easy making your own whipped cream is! It's simpler than opening that ridiculous spray can it comes in, seriously... and especially if you have a massive Hobart to help you out. So I made a chocolate sponge cake, layered it with whipped cream and ganache (cream and chocolate), and the HiPsters were happy.

And so was everyone's tummy :)