Culinary Invitational.

The dishes are pouring in. Take your time , the competition is stiff and there is no clear winner yet. This could be you if you impress your peers enough. I will wait as long as I need to because I want this to go to the best dish. If you're not in, you can't win.

Wouldn't this look good in your kitchen?

Baked Brisket And Brussel Sprouts With Walnuts And Sweet Peppers

Delicious melt-in-your-mouth meal. I ordered this piece of brisket from the butcher in the local supermarket. It wasn't this exact piece. The one I ordered over the phone turned out to be the wrong cut when I got it home. I had to go back the next day and show him what I wanted. Not too popular in the meat department right now.

Anyway this is the brisket, the cut from which a lot of corned beef is made. You brown it on all sides and then you remove it from the pan and add onions, carrots and celery cut up into large pieces to the same pan. You let that cook slowly to get all the flavors from it and then you add chopped garlic, thyme and bay leaf and allow all the flavors to come together. Then you add some red or white wine and reduce until dry and you get that strong wine aroma. Finally you put your brisket on top of that mixture and add wine and water or stock ( I always use water) 3/4 ot the way up the meat, leaving the top above the liquid. Otherwise you have boiled beef. Bring to the boil and cover with aluminum foil. Allow to cook in the in a medium oven until tender. It should take a couple of hours. Keep checking to make sure there is still liquid in the pan. I did mine half in the slow cooker and half in the oven.

When it is cooked remove from pan. Strain the remaining liquid from the vegetables, reduce liquid and you have your sauce.

You can serve it with whatever you want. Here I did some Brussels sprouts roasted with peppers and walnuts and some plain boiled Yukon potatoes tossed in butter and chopped parsley.

This is a great cut of meat. Full of flavor.

This original recipe is an old recipe from Terry which I loosely followed. I put colmans mustard over the top of the meat before it went into the oven and I slow cooked some onions and put them on top of the mustard. The results were quite good. The next time I do it I will put a heavy layer of strong Dijon mustard on top of the meat and onions over that and top the whole this off with breadcrumbs that will brown this giving a layered crust when it is sliced.

Thanks to Ter for the recipe.

Chanie Des Rotisseurs Dinner At The Renaissance Pittsburgh.

I have a collection of menus from The Savoy London and such that I will post. They are menus from the sixties and they shine a big light on how people ate in those days. I think I also have a menu from the Gresham from '61 or so.

This one is for a very special dinner in The Renaissance Hotel for a French Organisation called 'La Chaine Des Rotisseurs' which is a very renowned gastronomic society in France. This was a huge success and the talk of the town in the hotel industry in Pittsburgh at the time.

This was a wonderful evening. Everyone did their best to make this event a success and it was a great success.

Ze Last Of Ze Poulet

Chicken, avocado and caper salad, tomato chicken soup and toasted bagel.

Poulet, Round Two!

Left over chicken breast with tomatoes and avocados on a ciapata roll with home made french fries.

Cooking.

The photos of the dishes are coming in already to be judged. Anyone need more time? Remember, as they say in California, be there or be square.

Putting this one the two sites so nobody misses it.

Plain And Simple

I did something plain and simple but the chicken was cooked to absolute perfection. It took me a while to learn how to do that. In the Savoy Hotel in London they had a carving trolley every night. It was a big silver thing on wheels and the carver was a Hungarian who prided himself on his knowledge of languages. He was even able to say hello to me in gaelic. All the roasts were done to absolute perfection. They were golden, shone under the lights and made a spectacular sight on the huge, highly polished silver trolley. They don't do things like that anymore in hotel dining rooms.

Some peas and a little mashed potato. It was almost like Sunday at home.

This chicken cost $3.05. This is one meal, tomorrow I will make a chicken and tomato sandwich with matchstick or oven fries and on Sunday I will make a big pot of chicken and tomato soup with rice. Hope nobody comes to visit or all my plans will go awry.

St. Patricks Day Dindin.

I know I have posted Corned Beef And Cabbage before but this was the best yet. Plus, it gives me an opportunity to point out that although there is a lot on the plate... four vegetables and one starch.... it is very well laid out and it doesn't look too crowded. For all the contestants out there.

Twice Baked Potatoes-

I had this tonight with a big bowl of beef barley soup and it was quite enough for dinner. You can have this with a salad, with tomato rice, with almost anything and it will be a meal. It will also be a cheap meal that you can dress up or down.
Bake the potato and let it cool. while it is cooling saute a few chopped onions with a little garlic and thyme. Go to your fridge and see what leftovers or scraps you have to go into this dish. I found a little bacon, a couple of slices of ham, tomatoes, frozen peas and carrots and onions.
Cook what ever you find in with the onions and then add some crushed garlic. For vegetarians you can use scallions, chopped mushrooms, sweet peppers and the like,
Mix this in with the potato and crush the mixture in a bowl. Fill the empty skins with this mix and cover with cheese. finish in the oven and under the grill.
This is a full meal with a bowl of soup or a tossed salad.

Baked Rice Pudding With Raisins

Bake and heat through in a med/hot oven and brown under the broiler.

Pour the mix into an oven ready dish and sprinkle with a little brown sugar.

When the rice is cooked allow to cool a little and then add sugar to the desired sweetness. Allow to cool. Whip a little cream, must be whipping, heavy cream. Seperate one egg from its whites. The night before you will have steeped raisins in a little water to plump them. Fold in the whipped cream and add the egg yolk and the raisins.

Cook some pearl rice in milk until tender. This was a ratio of about 2 to one. Cook in a double boiler , a slow cooker or watch it on the stove because it catches quickly.

Leftovers.

This is a plate of leftovers and a couple of new things to supplement it. The red cabbage is left over, the stuffed bell pepper is left over. I did a couple of stuffed tomatoes with the left over curry pork stuffing that I used on the peppers a couple of days before. The only new things are the potato salad and the pasta salad. No big mysteries there.

There is a point here. All of these items are really good and really fresh and appetizing. The plate is very attractive, it is a 12 inch plate.

The only problem is that the whole thing is a mess and if this was a professional kitchen this would never go into the dining room.

So you see no matter how good your stuff is, if it is not properly presented you lose the whole point.

If I was a judge I would give this food an A on taste. I would give the presentation an F or lower, say 2 out of 10.

Scroll Down To The Update!

Individual Tarte Tatin

AKA: French apple upside down tart. The bottom photo is with espresso chocolate ice cream.

If you tell a frenchman that this is an upside down apple tarte he would probably kill you and rightly so.

This is a classic of french cuisine and not easy to make. This is not a perfect example of it but it follows the same principals. I didn't expect it to turn out so well but I will make it again and document it. Very tasty dessert indeed.

Spanish Paella

Serve in a deep plate and sprinkle with chopped parsley. Serve a few lemon quarters with this dish.

Bring to boil on the top of the stove and finish in the oven. Cook until the rice is tender. Then everything should be cooked.

Add water or fish or chicken stock. I use water two to one. With all these wonderful ingredient you have a stock in the making. Add the peas and bay leaf.

When this is heated through but not cooked entirely, add the rice and cook for a couple of minutes until the rice is covered by the olive oil. Then add the Garlic and the saffron if you have it. If not then a little yellow food coloring will do. Allow the flavors to combine. Then add the shrimp.

Add the chorizo and the chicken and cook slowly.

Heat a little olive oil and a flat pan or a paella dish if you have one. Add the peppers and onions and cook slowly to bring out the flavors. Add some fresh tomatoes or a couple of hight quality canned tomatoes. I use ore and more canned because the liquid content is always good and the are always nice and red

These are the basic ingredients you will need for Paella. This will be paella of chicken, chorizo and shrimp. These are not the true ingredients for paella but it is safe to say that you will never get them all together unless you like in a big city. Normaly there would be mussels, squid and clams here and the chicken would be complimented with rabbit. These ingredients will give you a tasty paella while remaining more or less true to the original dish. This is one of my favorite rice dishes. Clockwise from the top: Saffron, shrimp, chorizo, peppers, chopped onion, chicken breast, Arborio rice, tomato and frozen peas.

Ingredients
3 cups Arborio rice
8 cups chicken stock or water
1 large onion diced
3 Garlic cloves minced
1 large green and red bell pepper diced
I cup of frozen peas
4 tomatoes, diced
15 large prawns or shrimp (feel free to add clams, calamari, prawns or mussels)
4 links chorizo sausages sliced into 1 inch pieces
1/2 cup Parsley chopped
1 pinch saffron
Salt and pepper.

Notes: You will see that I play down the saffron in this recipe. That is because the average person does not know how to work with saffron or can't afford to shell out money on something that will be used only once in a while.

If you have it then add it when you add the liquid. If you don't have it but want the same effect then add a little yellow food coloring.

Safron makes a big difference to the taste but maybe only to the educated palate. The dish is great without it too.

This is a great dish but be careful not to overcook it.

Spaghetti With Shrimp, Mushrooms And Greens

Very delicious. By far one of the simplest yet tastiest pastas I have made. Tight, succulent and flavorful.

Braised Red Cabbage

Finished product: Barbequed short ribs, parsnip

sour cream mash and the red cabaiste. I first precooked the ribs and then finished them in the oven on a bed of carrots, onions and garlic along with the bbq sauce. I added these vegetables to the dish. Ony gorgeous.

When the cabbage is cooked transfer it to a pot and put on the stove until most of the liquid has gone. The cabbage is then ready to eat. Correct the seasoning and serve. It should be slightly sweet. Great with roast pork, barbeque and almost everything else in between.

If you have a slow cooker tranfser the cabbage and cook for about one hour or until the cabbage is tender. If you don't have a slow cooker or prefer conventional cooking then cover and place in a medium oven for the same amount of time.

Add the sugar, apples and finally the vinegar. You will need very little vinegar as the cabbage yields enough liquid. The cabbage will turn bright red when you add the vinegar. Heat the entire mix through, add the garlic, salt and pepper and a couple of bay leaves.

Sauté the onions in the bacon with a little oil.

Chop the onions and slice the cabbage. Cut the bacon slices into strips and chop the garlic.

These are the ingredient to make red cabbage.
1 head red cabbage, about 2 pounds
2 tablespoons oil
1 onion, sliced
2 Granny Smith Apples, cored, peeled and sliced
2 bay leaves
1/3 cup cider or red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons sugar
Garlic to taste
Salt and pepper, to taste

You will find many recipes on the internet but these are the basics.

Note:

You will have to adjust this recipe to find the level of sweetness you want as you go along but remember you can always add sugar but you can't take it out.

Do not add too much liquid or you will spend a lot of time reducing it out at the end.

A Tale Of Three Peppers

Out of this world. I added some extra hot curry powder to the pork mix and it fit the bill. I think the recipe for this is somewhere on the blog. I think I will need a secretary soon.

Three was a little too much so I kept the third and I will have it with a salad and some kind of special vinaigrette tomorrow.
Here is the recipe:

1 ½ lb. ground pork I large onion
I peeled carrot in largish dice
1/2 rice medium onion)Plenty of chopped parsley
Plenty of garlic chopped or crushed
½cup of fresh white breadcrumbs
Olive oilSalt and Pepper

Chop the onions up finely and cook them in the olive oil add the diced carrot at the end so it stays firm. Don’t be afraid of having too much onion because it will reduce by half. When cooked add some fresh thyme and the garlic. Put to the side and allow to cool.
Cook the rice until tender in some hot water. Strain and leave aside to cool
When onions are cool add the ground pork and mix well by hand.
Then add the rice, the breadcrumbs the parsley.
Knead this mix until it is nice and tight. You can add an egg if you want to but I never do, it make it messy.
If the mix is a little wet add more breadcrumbs.
At this point finish the seasoning and make sure you season it well because you won’t be able to correct it.
One way to check the seasoning is to take a little piece of the mix and make it into a little patty. Fry this off in a pan and you will see how the seasoning is. This is sometimes done for pates and terrines before they are cooked.
If necessary add more garlic or thyme etc etc.
Cut to bottoms off the pepper remove the innards and the stalk. Stuff them with the mix. Overstuff them because the mix will shrink when it is cooked. Put the cover on them and cook in an oven ready dish with a little water, white wine and olive in the bottom of the pan. You can throw in some thyme, carrots, celery and carrots and make your sauce from this when they are cooked.
A tomato sauce goes well with this dish.

Maurice Brazier Hotel Meridien Paris

Front row 3rd from right:

This was the most professional hotel I ever worked in. The chef, Maurice Brazier, was very intrumental in forwarding my career. I first worked with him in Africa in the late 70's. When our time in Africa was done I went back to Ireland on holiday with a potential job in an opening of a hotel in Paris with the Sofitel Hotel Company. Mr. Brazier went to Nice to open the Meridien Hotel on the Promenade Des Anglais, the main thoroughfare in Nice. Unfortunately the opening of the Sofitel Hotel in Paris did not work out so I was without a job. There was nothing interesting in Ireland at that time.

I wrote to Mr Brazier in Nice and and he offered me a job there: thus started a great period. He later sent me to Cairo, Paris, Yugoslavia, Corsica, East Berlin, Tours and almost to India. When the authorities in India realized I was Irish and not French they wouldn't give me the visa. Someone else went. Too bad but it would have been hard for me to complain. As the only single sous chef in the Meridien in Paris I got all the opportunities.

This was a great time for learning management techniques and to see how a very large hotel can operate without the chaos that is very often present in badly run operations. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief with all these cooking and reality shows around, the real professional kitchens are run very quietly and with little confusion. This was the case in this hotel. No one raised their voice and the standards of behavior were very high.
Maurice Brazier taught me a lot about kitchen management and employee motivation. We had already worked together for a long time and he showed me how to solve problems in a quiet way. Most important he taught me how to prevent problems from arising in the first place. It was a great pleasure working for him. He knew how to motivate people and he was a highly respected professional throughout the industry.

Nice Drop Of Bean, Chorizo And Greens Soup

I think I should have mashed the beans up a little more here but it was good. The bagel was an onion bagel with chicken and mayonnaise filling.

I Have An Idea!

Why don't we do a competition of dishes done by individual members of the family and submitted to a special section of the Food Blog. We could run it for a month and or so and then have a secret ballot by email and announce a winner. Seeing as we can't taste we would judge on presentation, originality, use of fresh products etc etc. All that can be worked out. The winner would receive a diploma posted on the blog. Let me know who would be in favor of this. No pressure just your every day efforts. I think it would be fun. Let me know what you all think. Whoever wins would be the Ard Cocaire which I think is top chef in Gaelic. If my memory serves me well.