mary eats

I have received a couple of emails lately asking if I am still in school and that answer is yes.

I am halfway through my third quarter (two more to go). Here I am in the bakeshop piping a mushroom filling into pate choux.

This quarter (3rd quarter) is our intro to casual dining. We rotate through international menus (French, Italian, American, Asian), each having an opportunity to test drive stations in brigade style restaurant kitchen, pantry, grill, fry, sauté, sous chef, and chef. We also spend a week in the formal dining room, and a week in the bakeshop.

Myself, I’ve been out of the kitchen for the last two weeks, in the bake shop (as seen above) and in the dining room, while my fellow classmates have been putting out an Americana menu created by Chef Nick Musser of Seattle’s Icon Grill.

The shift between second quarter and third quarter is close to the difference between undergraduate and graduate studies. My first two quarters I was jamming the basics into my head, cooking temperatures, visual clues for doneness, sauces: all very important, but less than riveting. Now, we study the history of the country/region out menu comes from, the ingredients, chef’s of the region, or who are representing that culinary style elsewhere. As someone who reads McGee (On Food and Cooking) for fun, I am ecstatic, as most of my classmates are, to be probing at the heart of why we love to cook and why we are in culinary school.

After braving and trudging through 11 long weeks of quantity cooking, Chef Gregg Atkinson (yes, Seattleites, that Gregg Atkinson, previous head chef of Canilis, author of several cookbooks including Northwest Essentials, and West Coast Cooking, Host of many KCTS Cooking specials, and regular contributor to the Seattle Times, as a recent article in Bon Appetite), stands and a savior at the end of that long dark tunnel.

Ok, to get that tangent back on path, our Americana menu, was eye opening in the fact that if really forced me to come up with a definition of what American Cuisine is. Having distinct regional cuisines, taking in to account the succession of ingredients and techniques from out “melting pot” population, and out processed food culture that doesn’t appear to being going away anytime soon, coming up with a simple answer to “What is American Cuisine?” proved more difficult than I expected.

When you make a quick mental list of what American food is what do you come up with? Apple Pie? Hamburgers? Pot Roast? Mashed Potatoes? Comfort food? Bingo. Our menu we put out this turn was much the same, fried chicken salad, mac and cheese, steak with blue cheese sauce and horseradish potatoes (something I tried at home and will post about in a bit), chocolate sundae, and bbq chicken pizza.

To me Modern American cuisine is defined by comfort food. It is food of nostalgia, in a harried paced world, uncomplicated dishes food that sets you at ease and tastes as though they were made with love. It is a style of food that with the right ingredients and technique can transcend fine dining to truck stops. Since Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971, her restaurant manifesto has slowly infiltrated the way American Chefs cook. A commitment to quality ingredients, cooking seasonal, creating relationships with farmers, foragers, and artisans (did you read the farm to table story in the October issue of Bon Appetite?). This once revolutionary side of cooking is now at the forefront of American fine dining.