Event: James Beard Greens Event

If you are in NYC on December 11th, you might want to include their next Greens event on your calendar.

The greens are a sub-group within the James Beard Foundation, originally put together for young 'foodies', it has developed into an 'it' party for young foodies in NYC.

The menu sounds fabulous and you get a chance to taste a bit from some of the up and coming chefs are NYC for a limited price!

For more information and to purchase tickets, go online to James Beard Foundation Greens Event Page.

Here is the menu that they emailed me (and isn't it interesting that only 2 restaurants have a website - what is it with the restaurant industry? They just haven't realized the value of the internet I guess):

• Saul Bolton, Saul, Brooklyn, Foie Gras Bon Bon with Toasted Hazelnut and Sauterne Jelly, Mini Veal Boudin Blanc with Pickled Cabbage, Sardine Escabeche
• Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez, Lassi, NYC, Kala Chana Somosas with Boondi Raita, Kofte Saag (lamb meatballs with spinach puree), Cardamom Custards
• Amanda Freitag, Sette Enoteca e Cucina, Brooklyn, Parmesan Fritters, Tuna Crostini, Pumpkin Ravolini, Swordfish Involtini
• Jordy Lavanderos, Secretes, NYC, Chestnut Soup Shot Topped with Celery Root Foam and Caramelized Celery/Jamon Serrano Nibs, Roasted Butternut Squash Ravioli Stuffed with Smoke Shallots Puree, Orange/Ginger Duck Confit and Pickle Radish Brulee, Deconstructed Cheese Plate on Caramel Squares
• Julie Taras and Tasha Garcia, Little Giant, NYC, Peppadew Peppers with Marinated Goat Cheese, Chicken Liver Mousse and Fig Onion Compote, Peppermint Whoopie Pies
• Pichet Ong, Consulting Pastry Chef, Spice Market and 66 and future chef/owner P*ONG, NYC,Kabocha and Pear Walnut Crisp with Caramel Ice Cream, Banana Yogurt Cake with Chocolate Honey Buttercream
• Michael Waterhouse, Master Mixologist of Dylan Prime and Devin Tavern (coming soon), NYC, The Big Apple, HO-HO Collins, Tiramisu Cake-tail

Wines and Beer:
2004 Bottega Vinaia Pinot Grigio (Trentino, Italy)
2004 Grove Mill Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough, NZ)
2004 Feudi di San Gregorio Falaghina (Campania, Italy)
2004 Navarro Correas Malbec (Mendoza, Argentina)
2003 Faustino VII Rioja (Rioja, Spain)
2003 Jean Luc Colombo Cotes du Rhones Les Forots (Rhone Valley, France)
Wines courtesy of Palm Bay Imports
Bass, Stella Artois, Leffe and Hoegaarden Beers

Article: So You Want to be a Personal Chef?

My personal advice to those considering a personal chef business:

1. Get certified. Get Educated.

If you want to be taken seriously by not only your customers, but your peers – get certified and educated.

Part I: A (personal service or catering) business license, appropriate (catering or personal chef) insurance, your local food safety management certification through the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation and then of course, following the regulations and local city or county laws.

Educate yourself on local liquor laws, food transportation issues, etc. I would never hire or take seriously a caterer/personal chef that doesn’t carry insurance or tells me how they deliver their meals out of a cooler in their Pathfinders trunk. True stories!

Part II: If you don’t have a culinary degree or business experience, get some through your local community collegue, culinary school, culinary class outlet, local foodie clubs, associations and non-profits.

Listening to others experiences, gaining basic knowledge about accounting, business management or even cooking techniques. These gain you experience ‘in the field’ without even doing an actual ‘cook date’. They also help you build collegue references and give you an opportunity to ask all the questions you need answered about the ‘logistics’ of being the food business.

I will also insert into this section that it is probably important to join a personal chef association only if you have no idea how a daily personal chef business works. Most personal chef associations make you pay a horrible fee to be a member that allows you to get introductory information about the business and a listing on their website list of members. You need to decide for yourself if having an outline of what a day in the life of a personal chef is like is worth $500-$1500 for the first year and $150-$350 per year after that.

(Contine reading So You Wanna Be a Personal Chef?)

2. Figuring out ‘What you do’.

A good way to figure out what kind of cooking/service/product you want to provide is to first analyze your experience and then cross check that with what kind of client you want to cook for/service.

Middle-class, both parents work, with 2 or more kids? Fad dietiers? Young Professionals who want to eat in 2 minutes? Uber-rich busy people who don’t want a live-in private chef?

Everyone will say – of course – uber-rich people that will over pay me and I’ll be set for life! Be serious…99% of personal chefs across the nation serve the standard middle class, family of 4 with a bunch of freezer ready casseroles. I know one personal chef that makes 4 servings of 5 casseroles for $395, including groceries. Can you say – 90% profit!

This will help figure out not only your ‘service niche’, but your pricing, your demographics and that will lead to where you need to market – be it a local school board letter or just through your website.

3. Don’t quit your day job.

Sometimes it takes a while to build a client base, get your marketing going and just being ‘open for business’ with your website live and your phone on, just isn’t enough. For every person starting a new business there is a new path on how it happened or how it become to be a ‘full-time’ job.

One personal chef I know just starting cooking for a neighbor while they were recovering from chemo, the neighbor suggested they do this for a ‘job’ and through the clients referrals and the chemo-outpatient nurse, in 3 months they had a full time personal chef meal delivery service, niched for cancer treatment patients in out-patient. Another chef I know, after a year, never got more then 1 steady personal chef client. They tried to make ends meet by teaching cooking classes and barely a year after that they have flipped their business where 90% of it is teaching cooking classes and they will fill in a personal chef client when they have the time.

4. What are you willing to do to be famous?

It sounds like what a seedy holleywood studio manger would say to a young and beautiful, wanna-be starlet. Sadly, it is very translatable to the success of your personal business. And nothing is a guauntee.

Are you willing to work for next to nothing just to get your business name out there? Are you willing to negotiate your prices to keep that client? Are you willing to give discounts, donations to charities, etc.?

Some personal chefs I know are unwilling to do any of the above. Frankly, all of them are successful personal chefs that have been in the business for almost 10 years, as long as it has been around. I don’t truly think they understand what it takes to start a personal chef business today, now that there are over 300 personal chefs in my DC Metro area alone! You have to be competitive and sometimes, ‘discount’ yourself out.

When I started my personal chef business, I under priced everyone, trying to get any clients, even if they were cheap – and it was hard work. But I knew I had the focus and a product that would make this business successful. Therefore, as my business grew, so did my prices. In just a few years of service, I am making 3 times the amount I made when I started my business. And comparing myself others, my prices sit in the median-lower rang, so I still have room to grow – in fact, I can raise my prices at least 40% before I am in direct competition with some other expensive personal chefs in my area.

This is all up to you and how bad and hard you want to work to get your business started.

5. Marketing, marketing, marketing….marketing!

If you have ten clients a week or zero clients a week. Marketing needs to be a weekly shot into your business.

6. Do the basics:

Get a separate phone for your business. There is nothing worse then calling what you think is a business and there is some 3 year old on the answering machine saying ‘The Andy-sons ain’t home white now!” Would you leave a message? Then why would your customer. And with cheap cell phones, you can carry your business line with you all the time, ready to get that next client!

Get a website Be a million dollar site or a build it your self site for $10 with just your name, phone and email. I get 99% of my new business from my website and people always say “You have the best website” – “Your food on your website looked so good, I had to call you” – “Your menus are exactly what we want for our party”. The more information you provide on your website to your ‘niche’ (pictures, menus, faq’s) customer, the more you will weed out those that you don’t want to serve. My personal website advice – Don’t put your picture on your website unless your hot. Many a marketing researcher knows, people subconsciencly do not relate to unattractive people. And frankly, just keep your picture off your website altogether - whether you are hot or not – it is probably NOT a good idea. You might be putting yourself in danger, since you work mostly by yourself, in a strangers home - a pervert might figure this is a good way to get you alone in the ‘comfort of their home’.

Get an email account: Some people looking for caterers/personal chef will email you when they have time, meaning, it may be 2am after they have spent time with their significant other, after putting the kids to bed, after making dinner for family, after working until 8pm….come up with ‘auto-responses’ describing the basics of your business and some things that ‘hook’ a client into your niche. And for petes sake, please don’t use a personal account – like ‘MrsRobinson@aol.com or Drinkmorethanyou@hotmail.com’ – then you are advertising more than you would probably like to a potential customer.

Online listings: Get on any and all local and national website, email and business listings you can. Your goal…When someone googles your business name – you are the first listing that shows up. You want people to be bombarded with your business – because when you see a business advertised everywhere – don’t you think they must be a respected, well-known business…

Tip: De-Seed a Pomegranate

Pomegrantes are the new 'haute' of cuisine, especially now that they are in season. You can easily drop $3 bucks on one of those snowman shapped juices and $8 bucks on the nuevo pomegranate molasses.

But can you get out those pretty little seeds without making a mess or loosing half the seeds to the juice on your cutting board gods?

Scaning over some pomegranate salad recipes for a client, I was horrified to learn that Nigella recommended cutting into your pomegranate with a knife, and just remove the seeds that weren't broken!?! That would be like cutting into an orange and then trying to remove the segments, without spilling any juice or wasting any segment?!? I started googling around found that most recommended this (even the site: http://www.pomegranate.org/nomess.html which I thought was a little funny).

Therefore I thought I would make the apparent top secret way to de-seed a pomegranate known.

I learned this trick from a persian chef who has probably been cooking with real pomegranates longer then I have known what a pomegranate even was.

1. First, using a sharp pairing knife, you want to cut a 'curly cue'. Like you are cutting away the peel and pith from an orange without getting the segments of juice - but all in one long curly cue line. from the top of the pomegranate to the bottom. You are only cutting in about an 1/8th inch, just through the pith, with the intention of not cutting into any seeds. Take your time, this is the most imporant part of the process and will decide if the rest of the process is 'juice free and easy' for you.
2. Carefully working around the pomegranate, loosen the cut you made, pulling the cut open about a 1/4 inch or so.
3. Now you can pull the pomegranate apart easily, into sections.
4. Take a section and hold it in one hand, you can run your thumb along the seeds, bending them back and forward gently to have them 'pop off' the pith.
5. If you run into a section that is covered with a lining of pith, just peel it away before popping off the seeds from that section.

Other tips:

• You want to remove all the pith, even the little dots of it that stick to some of the seeds. It tastes like eating orange pith.
• You don't need to wear gloves - you aren't going to make a mess right? And if you get a little juice on you, just wash your hands off and then return to pomegranate peeling bliss.

Recipe: Chocolate Covered Strawberries

Talk about easy...impressive...and everyone loves them.

You cannot fail at these at long as you use good quality chocolate (here is a great website that explains everything you would ever want to know about chocolate and more importantly, quality chocolate), don't burn it and fresh strawberries that aren't over ripe.

I will not go into the 'tempering' of chocolate - as that is a whole article in itself. I'll just say that tempering chocolate is esstentially breaking down the chemical compond of chocolate with a varied degree of temperature in order to produce (melted) chocolate that will eventually harden, therefore producing the chocolate in a new 'chemical state' for the baking purpose you desire. Yeah, I think most pastry chefs study this stuff for weeks - then putting it in practice is a whole different thing! Here is a quick an easy few paragraphs to read if you are interested about tempering. I googled around for a more serious description, but most were more generalized them what I mentioned above. So I guess that gives me something to write an article about later.

Recipe: Chocolate Covered Strawberries

• 11 oz. or more (is enough to double-dip 8 medium sized strawberries)
• 8 Medium Sized Strawberries

1. Wash and dry your strawberries.
2. Set them on a sheet tray, covered with wax or partchment paper.
3. Place a sieve inside a medium sized pot. Fill up the water in the pot so that the water line sits just below the sieve.
4. Place the pot on the stove and bring to a boil.
5. Meanwhile, chop up chocolate into very small pieces - no larger than a tablespoon.
6. Place the chocolate in a metal bowl (that will fit nicely in the sieve).
7. When the water is boiling, place the chocolate filled bowl into the sieve and let the chocolate melt.
8. After a minute or two, gently stir the chocolate, moving it around the bowl, scraping the edges, helping it melt and circulating it, so that it doesn't burn.
9. When 90% of it melted, remove the bowl from the sieve and quickly dip the strawberries into bowl, covering 80%. When you pull out the strawberry, give it a little shake to remove any excess chocolate, then lay on sheet tray. Continue with remaining strawberries.
10. Let the strawberries sit at room temperature (around 65-70 degrees) until you plan to serve them (within 6 hours).

You are welcome to double-dip the strawberries. Just wait about 15 minutes after the first dip - while the first layer of chocolate starts harden. Then heat your chocolate again over the boiling water and do the process over again (steps 7-9).

Recipe: Mascarpone Stuffed Dates

Recipe - Mascarpone Stuffed Dates

Ingredients:

• 6 Dates
• 6 Tablespoon of Mascarpone
• Salt and Pepper
• Chives, Chervil or even minced Candied Orange Peel for Garnish

1. Using a pairing knife, cut half way through the date, from tip to tip.
2. Pinch the ends of the date, so it opens up and you can easily remove the seed.
3. Prepare piping tip in bag and fill with mascarpone.
4. Fill dates from tip to tip with about 1 Tablespoon of Mascarpone per date.
5. Snip chives into ½ inch pieces.
6. Place chives on top of mascarpone, in an ‘X’ for garnish.

Refrigerate until about 1 hour before you plan to serve, then remove and let come to room temperature.

Other ideas for serving this?

• Use a piping tip to change the shape of the mascarpone in the date.
• De-seed dates, place in oven at 400 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Remove and let cool enough for handling. Fill with mascarpone and serve slightly warm.
• Great as a petit four or on a cheese platter.

Recipe: Vanilla Bites

This recipe is an adaption from the Book Amuse Bouche by Rick Tramonto. It really is a great example of combining all tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salt) to form a perfectly flavored bite.

People either love it or hate it - and it is usually only loved at dinner parties where the eaters are adventurous - so you might want to take what can your guests are before serving this.

Recipe - Vanilla Bites:

• 1 ¼ cup crème
• 1 packet of gelatin
• 2 Tablespoons of Vanilla Paste
• 5 Medium Sized Mint Leaves
• 1 Teaspoon of Sea Salt
• 6 Larger Sized Purple Potato Chips (Plain or Ruffled)

1. Place large bowl on countertop, fill half way with ice, then fill a quarter of the way with water, creating an ice bath. Set aside.
2. Meanwhile, place a kitchen towel in a circle on the countertop. Place a medium sized bowl in center of circle, pushing towel just under bowl to keep bowl from moving.
3. Place ¼ cup of crème into bowl. Add gelatin powder into bowl, whisk until gelatin is almost completely dissolved.
4. Meanwhile, place ¾ cup crème in a small pot and whisk in 2 Tablespoons of Vanilla. Turn heat to high and bring crème to a boil. Remove from heat as soon as crème starts to rise up the sides of the pot. Whisk vigoriously to circulate vanilla and cool crème.
5. Slowly pour vanilla-crème mixture into gelatin-crème mixture, while whisking, until completely combined and gelatin is dissolved.
6. Place a sieve of chinois in a metal, medium sized bowl and slowly pour mixture through.
   Immediately place strained liquid in the large bowl-ice bath, slowly and gently stirring until steam stops rising from the liquid. Immediately remove from ice bath, cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge to refrigerate at least 2 hour before service.
7. 45 minutes before you plan to enjoy the Vanilla Bites, remove the vanilla mixture from fridge, mashing with a whisk and gently stirring to break up the gelatin mixture into small pieces.
8. Drizzle in 1/8 cup crème, whisking until combined. Continue to drizzle remaining crème until vanilla mixture is a ‘fluffy’, ‘foamy’ mixture that is the consistency of ‘pudding’. Set aside.
9. Stack mint leaves on top of each other and roll up tightly together to slice off in ‘chiffonade’ pieces. Set aside.
10. Lay potato chips on cutting board and spoon out about 1 Tablespoon of vanilla foam mixture onto each chip, place chips on serving platter.
11. Sprinkle Sea Salt over bites and around edges of plate.
12. Sprinkle chiffonade of mint over bites and around edges of plate and serve.