what I have learned.....about kitchens and food

Part II in the series.

Finished up work yesterday, everyone was very nice to me and stayed for a few extra minutes in order for us to share a glass of prosecco and toast in my honor, which I appreciated a lot. However I was still perfectly happy to be walking out that door for good, and was greeted by the most amazing sight: it was snowing all yesterday evening, and while Florence isn't quite white, there has been a little bit of accumulation and this morning when I went out I was greeted by that perfect blue sky and crisp air that follows snow, and so someone must really love me. Snow is not common here; the city seems to be in a bit of a panic over it, and everyone is amazed at the wonder of this weather. Also the hills around the city are all dusted with snow now, which just creates this beautiful, powdered-sugar effect (photo not mine, but this is what I saw). Definitely leaving this city on a high note!

So what have I learned about kitchens and cooking? I have learned about the importance of cooking in a clean kitchen. "You don't know what you've got till it's gone..." Most people would not call the kitchen here dirty, but I've worked in very clean kitchens in the states, where you clean everything every day and clean the hard to reach spots, like under the shelves and the back corners of fridges, weekly. I worked for one month and we did those hard to reach spots once, and the daily clean we did was more focused on getting the stainless steel shined than on making sure that things were actually clean. I think it is just part of the whole quality control mentality. Making sure that your kitchen is of the best quality is just another part of making sure that the food is of the best quality. If you don't feel like you're standards of cleanliness are as  high as they can be, then it spills over into your food not needing to be the best it can be. Or maybe I'm going too much into the psychoanalysis on this one. Point being, I get why we clean the corners that can't be reached and why we keep things anally tidy in the states now.

I actually feel like I've learned quite a bit about medieval cookery, oddly enough. We did a lot of braises at the restaurant, and the way those dishes were structured was clearly traceable way back in time. Maybe Italian food just has good connections with its roots or something, but that is a cool bonus to the whole setup.

I think I've learned about sage as an herb and what it can do. I feel a lot more familiar with it, as it is suchc a crucial herb in the cooking here, and would be comfortable playing with it in the future. It also steeps nicely for a tea.

I've also gained a lot more respect and gratefulness for the stages I've done in the past. I was able to realize just how much I've learned from them, how they influenced me, and helped shape my perspective on kitchens in so many ways. I'm hoping that when I start searching for a job next month that this new vision will be able to help me find a place which fits well. I could handle a job I didn't love for a month, I would not be happy there for a year.

From the experience here more generally, I've learned how to make great breads, how to whip up a pasta sauce with anything in the fridge, a new appreciation for donuts, why the foam on a cappuccino matters, and the powers of gorgonzola.

As for this blog, it will be no longer about Italy as I'm about to leave, but if I have the chance I will be using it as I travel the middle east for the next few weeks. So to see pictures and hear news about the next adventure, continue to stay tuned!

what I have learned.....about myself

These next few posts are going to be a bit of a series. I'm trying to sum up my experiences here so I can leave with some recollection of what I've accomplished. Or at least something sentimental, emotional, and all that. So part I, below, is covering what I think I've learned about myself.  Deep, huh?

This is also a continuing part of my "think positive!" campaign, as work has not been a totally positive experience. There have been times when I wanted to just leave, and a large part of it wasn't anybody's fault. It was just that when there isn't enough business to keep one person busy, what do four people do? It was getting to the point where I started trying to work more slowly so that I would be bored less. And "slow" is never a compliment in the kitchen unless you're braising a piece of meat. There was also a passive-aggressive waitress who didn't like me. But I want to leave on a high note, and I don't think that I'm forcing myself to make a silver lining, but rather am just trying to remember the good times.

I've learned a little more about my problems with authority, and at the end of the day they're connected to my problems in dealing with incompetence. Because you see, most authority *is* incompetent. Clearly these problems are interconnected, and at work especially I have learned a lot about how incompetent authority can rub me the wrong way. While some things with Susanna got better, some didn't. A large part of the problem was just that I didn't have any standing instructions, which meant that at the end of almost every task I did for the restaurant I was left waiting. Once I was left alone in the kitchen for about twenty minutes with absolutely no clue where everyone else had gone, what I was supposed to be doing, and nothing to accomplish. So what could I do but stand there and wait? Not the best use of my time. But I was trying to be positive......oops. So I've learned more about my problems with authority, and how I bridle at it. It just aggravates me and I feel frustrated. I need to start accepting people in authority positions, listen better, and put my head down to work.

Additionally, slowing things down for me isn't good. I've begun to notice that even when I'm trying to work quickly, I'm not particularly fast. I would much rather get things done right, and my skills aren't up to the level they should be so that I can move quickly. I like to be precise, to get the cuts just square, to butcher the meats in such a way that I get the best possible cuts, but sometimes something just needs to get done, and I need to learn how to turn off the perfectionist switch so I can just do it.

The irony is that I actually enjoy tweaking and experimenting with things, and furthermore that I am horrible at doing anything with any sort of exactitude. I despise measuring. This makes me wonder in some ways what I'm a perfectionist at, and I think it might just be my knife cuts. Which, at the end of the day isn't too surprising to me. I've always known that I'm not the best baker because of how much I despise measuring, though I think I'm learning more about how to bake without measuring things, which is definitely making me think that I actually do like baking things. To the point where if I was producing interesting things I don't think I would mind working on pastry. I still prefer doing savory things, but I'm definitely becoming more interested in the other side. Speaking of which, if anyone has an idea on how to make something crunchy and very strongly olive oil flavored for a dessert, I tried the other day and failed miserably, and have yet to think of a new way to make this happen. I think it might require some heavy molecular gastronomy, but I'm not sure.....

Anyway I'm finding all this introspection to be quite tiring, and so I'm going to bed. Tomorrow is my last day of work, and then I'll be heading into the sunset! Yay!

The land of overcooked green things

The other day in class Patricia was cooking green beans for a dish. She brought one over to me. "Is this done?" I tasted it, and it was just at that spot I love: a little crunchy, but no more raw taste to it. Bright green, it tasted like summer and I helped her pull them out and shock them in an ice bath.

About five minutes later Chef started asking who had done the green beans. I presumed he wanted to praise that person for her excellent timing in making sure that they were cooked to perfection. Apparently not.

"These are still raw! Where's the cooking water so we can put them back in?" Patricia defended our decision by explaining that the green beans were going to get re-heated and thus cooked more when we added them in to the next step. Chef looked at her strangely and told her to cook them for at least another four or five minutes. She smiled, "better undercooked than overcooked, right?"

Well I have come to the realization that in Italy that isn't true, because I have seen so many green things be abused and overcooked until all nutrition, flavor, and color has been leeched out of them. I have admired the Italians' respect for products in every department except the one of things which are green.

I've seen the chefs at school do it over and over, and my host mom does it every time she cooks anything leafy. Now, there is a Tuscan dish called "rebollita", which means "re-boiled", where you take a soup of spinach, kale, chard, celery and some other flavors, eat the soup with bread, soak the bread in the soup overnight as a thickener, and re-heat it the next day as a kind of stew you eat with a fork. I understand that when you reheat those things they will get overcooked, but that's the point in this case. However I don't understand the point of overcooking them on round 1 as well! I've started to term it an official philosophy of Italian cooking. Whenever I see something overcooked (for example we overcooked otoro tuna the other day--so painful to watch!!) I just remind myself of the Green things philosophy. Which doesn't make the slaughter any less painful, but at least lets me categorize it as a cultural difference.

I guess the main point of this post is that cultural relativism is not always a good thing--sometimes they're just wrong!!

In other news, now that I've now learned how to embed videos, I'm going to have fun with its awesomeness for a bit. Check out my sister and her show!

A Smidgen more on gender

So I just wrote up that whole thing on sexism and all that. I have to say, despite the behavior of this chef, he is a really fabulous teacher and cook.

The other day in class we were waiting for a whole bunch of things to cook, and so he took the moment to give us a little speech. During this entire speech, his face lit up, and you could tell that he was really happy to have this relaxed chance to talk to us, especially since he was now feeling comfortable with us. In the speech he described the passion one needs to cook, and the importance of really loving it if you want to do it professionally. As he said this in his fish print baggy pants and green Birkenstock clogs, you could tell that he had this passion and was excited to see it present even in a few of us. He really loves what he does, and I only hope that I can always feel like him.

Gender in the kitchen

Has the whole gender in the kitchen thing been done to death? Probably yes. But I think here I have encountered a bias for the first time, and I think I also have just recently (aka this week) overcome it.

Of our instructors at school, only one makes me think of a real chef with actual restaurant experience. His demeanor and comportment triggered my trained responses, so when he asked me to do something at the beginning I always replied "Yes, Chef." I had to force myself to humanize him in my head so I could behave like all the other people in the class. Now I just reply "Yes." or "Of course." However part of the reason I think I respond to him differently than the other instructors is that he is male. I am well adjusted to working under women in a kitchen, but even so there's something about a man which elicits a different response. Its stupid, I know, and probably has to do in part with my first culinary school experience as well as my first work experience being underneath very classic male chefs, which has created the association in my head. But that isn't the part which was fascinating to overcome.

This guy has been discriminating ever so slightly against the girls in the class. Or I've been projecting such that I think he has been. I had noticed, however, that whenever he needed a job done right--a piece of meat cut in the correct way, a perfect dice, a good saute of a dish--he would call over one of the boys. Now, this is a reasonable thing to do, logically, because of the four boys, three have worked professionally, and the one who hasn't is the most competent of the non-professional cooks. Furthermore, one or two of the girls get a little grossed out at the idea of gutting fish and removing the heads from chickens, so again, in terms of pure statistics, it makes sense to call on the guys.

But I want to behead chickens too! So I started a campaign to insert myself on his list of competent people who do things right. I started choosing tasks very specifically--anytime anything needed to be chopped evenly, I tried to snag the job. I always asked, "can I try?" when he did a demo, I avoided doing dishes when he was in the middle of something serious, and I tried to never work on the dessert. I tried to act more like the guys (who never ever do dishes unless explicitly asked), and by the end of last week or the beginning of this one I felt like he was starting to see me in a different light. Having to act like one of the guys sounds stupid, but it made the most sense as a good way to get around things. And I don't like doing dishes either, so while it was sort of an asshole move towards my female colleagues, it had its advantages.

Finally this week he asked me what I'm planning on doing after the course, to which I replied that I'm going back to the US to work the line in some restaurant somewhere in DC. He paused. "Have you worked in a restaurant before?" I could see exactly what was going through his head, because it had gone through mine so many times when I had friends or classmates say they want to work in a restaurant, be a cook. Do you know what the sacrifice is? Do you understand the physical stress? The mental stress? The misery? The crappy pay? Do you love it enough? Of course, when he asked me, I was able to laugh. I replied that I've worked in a handful of interesting and diverse places during my summers off from school, and that I love the life. I also replied that I knew exactly what he was thinking, and he smiled back.

Yesterday we were deboning chickens to keep the skin intact. He first asked the boys to start the work, but then when he told them to let some other people take over, he handed one of the knives to me. And I have to say I rocked it :)

Defining American Food

So back to food-related posts....last week was just a little too busy for me to focus on that stuff as much, with a total of some 46 hours spent at and around school, plus the visit to I Tatti, plus attempting to buy a bicycle, plus needing to deal with life in general, etc, etc, and so I got a little overwhelmed. But now we're back on track a bit! Just as a warning, I step up on my soapbox here for quite a bit--its long.
***
This is a prototype of a conversation I've had a few times here:

Italian: No wonder you came to Italy to learn about cooking! Goodness knows there's more to food than hot dogs and hamburgers. Don't get me wrong, I like hot dogs and hamburgers a lot, but American food just isn't as good as Italian or French food.
Me: Well there's lots of great food in the States! And American food isn't just hot dogs and hamburgers.
Italian: Well then what is American food?
Me: Uhhh......

I usually get stuck at this point. I've been thinking a lot about the subject in the past few days, trying to develop a pithy explanation of what American food is all about. What are some quintessential American dishes? The South definitely has their own style of cuisine, with a lot of great, rich food, and I think I could explain that well, but that isn't all of American food. Even within regions of the South there are different styles: cajun, creole, tex-mex, etc. But I wouldn't use any of those foods to describe what American food is.

Regional variation is definitely an important part of a national cuisine. Here in Italy everyone makes pasta, but the southerners do it with different shapes, doughs, and sauces than the northerners do. Each region has its own style of what is essentially fruitcake to be eaten at Christmas, and yet while there are these regional variations, there is an underlying base style of food which everyone adheres to.

The only thing I can think of which follows this line of thought in American food is BBQ. Almost every part of the US does barbecue, but everyone does it in a slightly different way. However I don't think that as a style of cooking it defines our national cuisine in the same way that pasta does Italian food (or mustard for the French!).

Of course there is the argument that America is the big melting pot, and that everyone brought their own cuisine in to the country, and so every household does different food. I suppose this is true, but I also think that the country has been around long enough that despite this a national cuisine could emerge. Or perhaps the States are too big for that to happen. Italy is just slightly bigger than Arizona, and ranks 71st in terms of square footage, just behind Oman. Their population is just under 60 million and shrinking, and so obviously we're talking about a very different situation (CIA factbook). If you asked the residents of Arizona how they define the food of their state, you would get a much more specific answer, and while it might lack some of the variety that Italian food has, they only have 6.5 million people, so we'll let that be their excuse.

Yet despite all of this I feel that there is more to American food than what immigrants have brought in from the old country, and that can be found across the entire country. The difficulty is that its a very simple kind of food, and I would define it almost entirely by how it is ingredient-driven. While we are seeing restaurants pop up everywhere describing themselves as serving "New American" (which I think is actually just a derivative of Californian cuisine as passed down by Alice Waters, Thomas Keller, etc), I think this kind of food is also getting onto the dinner table, at least in the households where people are cooking dinner.

My proof is going to be through the food network. While there has been a lot of discussion lately on whether the food network is actually teaching anyone to cook, a quick glance at their website shows the trends that I think define a lot of American cooking. They have a tab for "in season", which features pumpkins, apples, potatoes, and squash; the first tab listed is "quick and easy", which also is focused mostly on fall ingredients, with things like butternut squash mac & cheese and pear and fennel salad. These kinds of dishes don't belong to another culture's cuisine, and even the ones that can be traced elsewhere culturally seem to have little twists that make them somehow American. Using the "quick meals" tab, I selected that I want a beef dinner that can be made in less than 45 minutes, to which it supplied quite a few options. The "lime marinated flank steak with herb salad" has a title which makes me think that it will be based on Mexican or central American flavors, because of the limes, but looking over the ingredient list the marinade also includes balsamic vinegar and olive oil. The herb salad mixes basil, cilantro, parsley, and tarragon. I could find everything for this recipe here except the cilantro and maybe the tarragon. I haven't seen them anywhere since arriving, and the limes would have to be considered an import item because they aren't really common in the cuisine here. So here we go, a dish offered up on TV by some guy named Danny Boome who has a show, and people cook it. But how do you define a cuisine like this?

The best explanation I can come up with is ingredient-driven. While that makes sense in an American context, the only problem with it is that in large parts of the world (here included), food is always ingredient-driven. It is hard to find bad produce here. I haven't seen things around that aren't in season somewhere in the country, and it was considered unusual that the supermarket had to import their lemons from Spain. That's about 500 miles, which is just a little further than Chicago to Nashville. However in the States ingredient-driven means a little more than just in season or local (though they're getting to be more and more synonymous), but it means keeping things simple to let the ingredients shine. Nothing about that steak is particularly flashy, the flavors aren't masking anything, and I imagine all the ingredients balance pretty nicely so nothing is overwhelmed. In Italian cuisine, a ragù is made with so many different ingredients that there is often no way to know all that went in there (think about the beef in dolce e forte I featured a few weeks ago). These are definitely two distinct approaches to food.

I am definitely still not satisfied with this as an explanation, not only because it doesn't quite do justice to American food, but because saying that another cuisine doesn't focus on ingredients to let them shine is also wrong. The bistecca fiorentina (Florentine Steak) that they serve here is nothing more than a whole lot of beef with salt and pepper cooked very briefly on the grill. Straightforward and simple, it is nothing but the one ingredient.

However I feel like as someone who wants to cook so-called "American" food, I do need to be able to define what it is to a certain extent. Fusion and multicultural make it sound like it is just a remix of some other foods, which also happens to imply that it is inferior, which I don't believe it is. I want to find a definition, a way of explaining to people what American food actually consists of. And perhaps if its successful, maybe one day the stereotypical American dish won't be a hot dog!

Here's a little more randomness

Dear people who read my blog,

Tonight I need your help. I have a couple of problems which I need responses for. Email me, skype me, or use the comments tool below to help me out (please!)

First question (medical): My ankle has been hurting when I walk for about two weeks now.  It has not been constant pain, and it is not related to my shoes (I've tried several pairs for several days in a row to no avail). There is no swelling, the hurt one is a little bit warmer than the good one, but that could be because I'm determined to find some symptom of the pain. Its been getting worse over time. I feel like if I go to a doctor he'll reply "there's nothing I can do". What should I do? I might buy a bicycle next week (I tried last week and this one to no avail--Italy!) which would get me using it less, but not by much. I need to be on my feet anyway for school. Should I go to a doctor anyway? Does anyone know of good ankle exercises? Should I use a brace? Should I just ignore it and hope it goes away?

Second question (culinary): There are lots of quinces starting to pop up at the market here. As this is not an ingredient I get to play with easily in the US, I'm going to buy some this weekend and use it. I was thinking of doing a jam, since there don't seem to be many other things to do with the fruit, but am not sure I want to just do an old-fashioned straight up simple jam. Any ideas on what quince might go well with? I saw a recipe for quince and vanilla, but would love any other ideas/suggestions.

Third question (mental health): I was in class almost continuously for eight hours today, cooking. I came home, did some shopping, and went back to cooking (dinner). I picked something trick just 'cuz. Then I thought about my whole baked goods project, and instead of making the easy scones I was going to do, I made an apple pie, complete with lattice top. I think I'm addicted to cooking. As you can see from my previous question, I'm already thinking about the next project. Is this healthy? I had things I was going to do tonight, like blog about my visit to Villa I Tatti and showering. (I was not going to blog about showering. That was a different thing I was going to do tonight.) I guess its good that I want to do this professionally, since I can't seem to tire of it....

Anyway, that's what's going on for now. If you have any info/advice about any of this, let me know! I'm going to go check on my pie to see if its cooking well.....

Also: Just saw this on the NYT blog. Its the 1st 50 rules for waiters, and it is really interesting to read. I definitely agree with it!

Socialization, Speaking, and Library

The day I made banana bread this week, two members of the house I'm living in asked, independent of each other, "so, are you making friends here?" While I don't think that was meant to be a probing question into why I was baking on a mid-week afternoon instead of socializing, it still made me think about how I am adjusting to life here.

One goal I have while here is to meet locals and get a taste of the real Italy behind Florence's all too popular tourist facade. I feel that with the apartment I chose I have done part of that, and I do feel like I'm starting to get to know the city in a very different way than most do. However, in terms of meeting lots of locals and getting to know them, learning what they do with their time, I have been less successful. I'm making friends at school, but most of them are other foreigners who don't quite have the perspective I'm looking for.

The question is, how do you meet locals? If I went to a bar alone tonight, I would be more likely to meet locals, but they would probably be single cassanovas looking for girls to take home, and that's not the kind of person I want to meet. Some 99% of the people at museums are tourists, and while I would probably get along terrifically with that other 1%, finding them is probably an impossible task. Once I start work I hope I'll make friends, but by then I'll be working 60 hour weeks with them during the nights, and I don't imagine we'll have much opportunity to socialize outside of work. Furthermore, I don't want to wait until my last month here to meet people--what will I do until then?

So that's my situation, and I'm trying to figure out ways around it. I'm in need of advice and suggestions about what to do. Maybe I'll try to find a concert schedule and see if I couldn't meet people at those kinds of events--that would probably be a crowd I would get along with, and lots of tickets here can be found for just about 10 euros. That would be fun even if it wasn't successful!

In other news, I'm feeling great about my progress in Italian. I bought Twilight in Italian, just because its something I'm familiar with, and have been reading it, at times without a dictionary. This is so exciting for me! When I would read Chinese, it could easily take a half hour to an hour to get through a page, and while I'm probably reading at about 6 minutes per page in Italian, which is definitely not fast, its still really great. Its helping me a lot with both my confidence level and my ability to recognize verbs despite them being in different tenses and conjugations. Verbs are definitely my achilles heel of romance languages, and so I've been focusing a lot of my studies on them. I'm creating a cheat sheet for verbs, which, when completed, will have one page for every tense, including how to conjugate them, what the tense is used for, and what verbs are irregular in that tense. I'm hoping that by doing that and studying it I can improve how I use verbs...right now I pretty much am doing it in the Chinese style, where I say: "Yesterday I go to the store", speaking in present tense and explaining the actual action through auxiliary words. However speaking improperly is not really the best way to communicate, and so I'm working hard to correct it. Its definitely exciting!

I definitely feel like I'm doing well here, and as if I've found a good groove. I also found a library right around the corner from school, and if I show them my passport they will give me a library card so I can borrow books, CDs, and DVDs. The building the library is in looks like it used to be a monastery or cloister, with very simple but beautiful architecture and a beautiful, large courtyard with some statues in it. You can sit outside overlooking the courtyard at some tables they have, or you can sit inside where the wood-beamed ceilings and comfortable couches make a great atmosphere. Obviously I have found myself a happy place, and will definitely be spending afternoons there when I have breaks between classes!