Kansas City Blog

​It's time to go where you've never gone before: your pantry or that cupboard that's filled with dry goods that you haven't touched since you moved in. Tonight you are not going to eat out. You're going to make a meal from what you've got on hand -- and it's going to be good.

Recession Wire has 10 tips on how to cook from scratch, designed to help you save money and learn to cook the basics. The tip that makes the most sense is to begin most of your savory dishes by sauteing freshly chopped onion and garlic in olive oil.

Having just finished up a four-month culinary course, I thought I'd share some of the best kernels of knowledge I've acquired before I forget them myself.

What follows is ten different concepts, tricks or just plain sense that culinary school has taught me so far:

Number Ten: Mis en place. For chefs, this means having an organized kitchen after five hours of non-stop action. For lay people this means finally doing that major cleaning and overhaul of your kitchen's utensils, spices and food so that you know where everything is. The desired results are the same. When a culinary emergency arises, say a pie needs to come out of the oven now!, you're not frantically opening up drawers looking for the one with the oven mitt in it. It's all about making cooking go smoothly.

Number Nine: Ignore meat thermometers. There are better ways to accurately judge the doneness of meat, without resorting to the amateur way of cutting into it or trying to use a thermometer. My teacher at one point said to throw out your meat thermometers because you'll only ruin the meat by using them.

It's all about the touch and how much give a steak or a chicken has when you touch it. Next time you're grilling, try it -- you'll notice the meat is firm and doesn't have much give when done. 

Today's the last culinary diary. Last night's class was the de facto final. It was the practical exam that, unlike our written exams, was based on our individual skills in the kitchen. Top Chef without the cameras -- or drama.

The menu wasn't difficult: arroz con pollo with a Waldorf salad and roasted zucchini. The toughest part was making everything within the hour time frame.

Arroz con pollo is a Spanish chicken dish that's virtually error-proof and contains a full meal's worth of ingredients with rice, vegetables and the chicken. You can look elsewhere online for a recipe (here's a good one), but basically it's just chicken you brown in a pan and then put in a braising dish. Throw a little rice into the same pan and add chicken stock, diced tomatoes and peppers and get that mixture bubbling. Once it's bubbling, dump it over the chicken in the braising pan, wrap foil tightly over the top to seal in the moisture, and stick it in the oven for 20 minutes or as long as it takes the rice to absorb all the stock and tomato juice. None of those steps are technically difficult.

It does take some prep work, though. There's the dicing of the peppers, onion and garlic; the browning of the chicken; the gathering of the seasonings, etc. With only an hour to plate everything, I had to work efficiently but fast. 

By OWEN MORRIS

Tonight I finally realized why Johnson County Community College has our upper-level class cook in the smallest and most crowded kitchen in the entire school.

The answer dawned on me as I was literally stuck in an impasse between two students cooking on a stove-top with two more students beyond them in each direction. In the best of times the fit between stove-top and warming station is only two-feet wide but a mass of bodies filled that two feet.

I had a flashback to a similar moment years ago in a kitchen where I was a lowly busboy. I was holding some metal pan just out of the washer with my fingers when I got caught in a trap of chefs going both directions at once. The pan was burning my fingers and there was no place to set it down where it wouldn't hurt some food -- except the floor.

That flashback made me realize that this teaching kitchen is designed to be the most like a real kitchen, and because our class is an advanced one that's supposed to simulate real-world conditions, the college had either purposely or through necessity made it a tough kitchen to work in.

By OWEN MORRIS

My teacher repeated the two words "45 degrees" like they held the key to some buried treasure. They didn't, but they were close — 45 degrees is the angle at which meats should be laid on the grill. The presentation side is put down first because the first side that is put on the grill is the side with the best marks. "Once the meat has cooked a quarter of the way, turn it — don't flip it — 90 degrees the other way," my teacher said while showing us a drawing of a steak with a crosshatch on it. "That way, you get really nice marks."

By OWEN MORRIS

Last night's lecture was initially focused on braising but like most of the lectures, the instructor quickly got on a tangent.

Braising is a method of cooking that uses a little bit of liquid and a lot of time to cook a tough piece of meat. It's usually done in two parts: First you brown the meat on the stove-top and then you add some liquid and let it cook in an oven (pot roast is probably the most familiar braised dish here in the states). The idea of braising is a little counter-intuitive, in that you are purposely trying to overcook meat to get it to start to break down, which makes otherwise tough pieces of beef very tender.

In learning about braising, though, we also got a lesson in carrots. Or, as our instructor put it: "Please peel them before you tourne them." (Tourne is a method of cutting vegetables in which you peel them into seven-sided cigar-looking shapes. Very hard to do, very impressive to do -- but it creates a ton of left-over product.) "I had a student make these perfect tourne carrots but then he had to throw away the leftovers because the skin had the dirt and the grime on them. If he had peeled them beforehand, he could have added those into a vegetable stock."

We also got an opinion on sachet bags: "It's an old-fashioned practice not done out in the industry ... bags are messy, they absorb that wonderful sauce you've worked so hard to create and take too much time to make. I say don't use them."

OK! Back to braising: The two main lessons were to use the appropriate size of braising pan, since the depth and the width of the pan can really change the way the meal will cook. You need a braising pan in which the meat and liquid but snugly -- not too snugly. The other lesson concerned browning the meat. The textbook we use instructs you to make sure the pan is really hot before putting in the meat. But our teacher explained that had caused students in his other class to sear the meat and once a piece of meat is seared, the flavors change as it braises.

Finally we got to try cooking a couple of actual dishes.

By OWEN MORRIS

Going into this week, the class had been cooking seafood and poultry and learning the ins and outs of the real meat and potatoes of cooking. Also, we'd been gaining confidence. We have spent enough time in this particular kitchen to know its idiosyncrasies and where everything should be. Actually, the idiosyncrasy in this kitchen is pretty disruptive. It has to do with the stove-tops.

I've complained about the stove-tops in a past diary. There are only two for the entire class, but that's not my biggest complaint. For reasons I've been told have to do with cost, our class uses electric stove tops. To someone who has always cooked on an electric stove top that may not seem like a big deal, but electric stove tops are unheard of in professional kitchens -- except when someone's telling a joke.

Gas stove tops are so so much better. With gas, the top heats quickly and you can easily increase or decrease temperature on the fly. Neither is easy with the best electrical stove tops, much less the ones in our classroom. We've learned to adjust, though. Instead of turning the heat up or down, you move pans to different places that are hotter or cooler -- sometimes halfway off the stove top. When you're boiling water it's not a big deal, but when you're making something as sensitive to heat as rice, like the class did last night, it becomes a nightmare.

By OWEN MORRIS

I woke up Sunday with a mild stomach flu, and things were worse by the time class rolled around last night. I probably should have stayed at home and been relatively miserable in private. Instead, I decided to chance it and just wash my hands a lot during class.

Mine was a dilemma that many people face every day going to work but is especially important for restaurant workers. Even if they are careful they can still spread disease. In a previous class on restaurant health and safety I learned how restaurants are supposed to follow an "exclude and restrict" policy. Depending on an employee's symptoms, you either restrict them to an area of the kitchen and an activity where they won't make anyone sick (i.e. taking the sick guy off of salads and putting him on inventory), or send the worker home. It's all theoretical, though, because restaurants aren't required to follow this policy and many workers hide symptoms because they can't afford to lose a shift or don't want to let down the kitchen staff.

My symptoms would have placed me into the restrict category. But I wasn't going to a restaurant, I was going to a classroom where I was either all in or all out. If I had been cooking for other people I would have stayed home. But because I was only preparing food for myself (I didn't even the teacher sample my dishes) and I didn't want to miss the lesson, I decided to go to class.

By OWEN MORRIS

If heaven exists and God is merciful then my cafeteria will serve mainly seafood. I love seafood, which can sometimes be painful when there are no oceans for 1,500 miles in either direction. Fortunately, the miracles of air shipping and fish farms allow me to divulge more than is good for the environment or the fish.

That's why I was excited for yesterday's class.

By OWEN MORRIS

We finally put our learning to the test when we had to prepare a full meal by ourselves -- a classic French/American meal consisting of a airline chicken breast covered in pan au jus, mashed potatoes and blanched vegetables. Within those boundaries we were free to do whatever we wanted, such as plating, extra seasonings, portion size, etc. All the instructor said was he wanted a presentable plate at the end of class.

Before we could get that far, though, we had to cut our chicken breast off of the whole chicken. I am used to whole chickens. Roasted ones at the grocery store make a great meal and then a week's worth of of healthy late-night snacks. But this was my first time dealing with a whole chicken that wasn't hickory marinated and smoked. The first trick the instructor showed us was how to cut the chicken without letting chicken juice run all over the counter: He put the cutting board inside a bread pan (any shallow pan will work). It's a simple trick that really works. Ten students were hacking away at ten chickens on the same table, and there wasn't any chicken juice left on the table.

There's more than one way to cut a full chicken, but in all cases you need to get rid of the wishbone lest your guests stab themselves in the mouth. The wishbone is located underneath a couple of layers of meat in the neck cavity. The teacher tried to show the class how to prod with a knife and find it, but the way to find it fast is to get your hands in the neck cavity and feel for it. Mine broke as I tried to remove it, leaving shards of wishbone in the meat, so I had to dig into the meat to try and find it, destroying the look of my chicken before I had made even one cut.