chez pim

a glimmer of hope

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might still remember the blockbuster success of our last fundraising campaign Menu for Hope. We are doing it again this year, from December 11-22, and again with the help of food bloggers from around the world. This time we will be raising funds to support the United Nations World Food Programme. If you are a food blogger and would like to participate, I'm reminding you to please contact one of the host blogs near you:

US West Coast: Sam of Becks and Posh
US East Coast: Adam the Amateur Gourmet
US (the rest): Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen
Canada: Jasmine of Cardamom Addict
Europe and UK: David Lebovitz of Davidlebovitz.com
Latin America: Melissa de Leon of the Cooking Diva
Asia Pacific: Helen of Grab Your Fork

And, last but not least, a special wine host for wine blogs: Alder Yarrow of Vinography.

If you are in the food or wine related business and want to know more about how you too can get involved in this campaign, please email me.

I'm not going to give out too many details of this year's campaign yet. Why ruin the fun? You just have to check back here on December 11 to see for yourself. I promise you it will be full of fun and cool gifts to be raffled off to support a very good cause.

Soupe de Potimarron au beurre noisette

This is a pumpkin with many names. It's called Potimarron in French, or Hokkaido Squash in English, or Kuri Pumpkin (from Uchiki Kuri in Japanese), I've also heard it referred to as Chestnut Pumpkin, or even Red-skin Kabocha. I first encountered it in France, where the name Potimarron combined the two words Potiron, for pumpkin, and Marron, for chestnut, which are the two characteristic flavors of this particular pumpkin. Or is it a squash? I never can tell the difference. Perhaps someone could enlighten me?

Potimarron –which, yes, by any other name would be as delicious- makes a perfect bowl of soup. The cooked flesh is sweet but much less so than its cousin Kabocha, making it perfect for a savory soup, and the chestnut flavor adds an unexpected complexity to the simple soup. It's also so very easy to make, using just a few ingredients, and doesn't require any tool more sophisticated than a hand blender or a normal blender to make a perfectly smooth soup.

You could also puree it with a tiny amount of cream, like we did when in Mougins last year. The puree was perfectly silky without needing a few passes through the Chinois. We paired the gorgeous orange purée with just as gorgeous seared foie gras.

This time, I made the simple soup to warm a cool day and garnished with a handful of croutons and a few drops of sage brown butter. How simple, and how delicious.

The 'Whose dish' contest!

David has an enormous collection of menus from some of the best restaurants in the world. Some of them adorn the walls -in the you know what- at the restaurant while others live a quieter life in a large trunk upstairs. The other day he pulled them out to organize, and to see if there are more we want to frame and put up on show. There are a few of mine in that set by now too, though I must admit they are sort the Johnny come lately's, since I didn't start my collection until just a few years ago.

Looking through these old menus, I got an idea that there's a fun game I can play with you here on my blog. It is said that to be a great chef, one has to be more than just a good cook who could replicate other people's recipes, but one that has a style that is unique to his/her own. Many of these restaurants whose menu we were perusing are famous not merely because they serve great food, but because they have a style that is unique to them. These characteristic styles are often enhanced by the sense of place, the local produce, or we might even say the proverbial terroir.

So, to put this conjecture to a test, and also to test the culinary intelligence of you, my dear readers. I've devised a little contest for us. I'm going to give you twelve menu items, and you have to match them to the corresponding restaurants. But to make it a bit more fun I've decided to give you 15 names of restaurants. So, three of the fifteen are just decoys, you understand? Now, shall we play?

Which dish belongs to which restaurant's menu?

For when the wine is in, the wit is out

So I was just puttering around, minding my own business, when an email arrived from Premier Cru, a local wine importer and seller. I've been a subscriber to the Premier Cru mailer for a while, and though I don't buy as much wine as I used to –I'm underemployed, remember?- I still look at these mailers every so often, and scored some nice bottles here and there –like four bottles of Laurent Ponsot's Clos St.Denis that will be coming soon to a cellar near me.

But I digress. Back to the mailer. I took a quick glance through the email, noticing the usual suspects: DRC, Leroy, Méo-Camuzet, Coche Dury, Leflaive (the Domaine, not the other one) –my, these guys have good taste.

Moving on over to the Bordeaux list, my eye quickly tripped over an old bottle of Lafite, that's Château Lafite-Rothschild to you me. And by old I actually meant OLD, from 1865, en Jéroboam, that is to say a giant 3 l. bottle. A 140-yr. old bottle of wine 'in perfect condition' or so the mailer said.

(Oops, as Jeremy pointed out down in his comment, a 3L bottle is only a Jéroboam in Champagne and Burgundy. In Bordeaux it's only called a double magnum. What no name of an ancient king of the Jews for this? How unimaginative!)

The price tag –make sure you're sitting down for this- is US$ 79,995.00. Let's call it $80K, shall we?

Eighty-bleeping-thousand-blooming-dollars!!!!

Another mystery chef: perhaps the best chef you've never heard of?

Here's another mystery chef to tease you culinary hounds. A very talented guy, whose resume includes stints under grands chefs like Alain Ducasse and Pierre Gagnaire, to name but a couple (any more than that I'd be making it too easy to google!). He's hiding out in the countryside somewhere, cooking great foods and pairing them with lovely wines. To say where it is would make it too easy and ruin all the fun.

He is also credited with starting an annual food and wine event known for having the highest concentration of Michelin stars of any such event in the US.

So, who is he? Do you know?

What plant is this?

Do you know what this is? I'll give you a clue, it's edible, delicious even.

Top Chef: this is not a recap.

No, no, I'm not trying to be ironic or anything. This really is not a recap for the Top Chef episode that just ran last night. Why not, you asked? Well, I just could not be arsed to, frankly. Plus, there's no way I can do as good a job as the Socialite's Life did on Project Runway -now that's a recap and they should seriously do one for Top Chef!

So –I mean it- this is not a recap, I'm merely opining. I felt the need to, well, because Little Miss Betty really should have been out on her fanny this week. She cheated -admitted to it even- but was somehow allowed to stay. This is an outrage, ok, not Alan Richman Goes To New Orleans outrage, but still. (I see Adam agrees with me.)

Well, I should tell you I'm not a fan of Miss Betty to begin with. Her nicey nice smile –and that weird singing and swaying act she pulled while selling her ice cream last week- kinda scared the living daylight out of me. Betty smiles, people go oooh she's n-y-c-e, and me, me go hide behind the couch. Not to mention, of course, that tiny red halter number she got on in the photo and in the first couple episodes. Betty, dear, put the dress down. Step away from the dress. Slowly now...Oh, right, and double-you-tee-eff was her Fromage Frittata Chiffonnade? She took three words and two languages to make absolutely no sense whatsoever - and the dish looked rather icky on top of it all. Just stick with the badabang, Betty, stick with the badabang.

How to cook a jackass

I don't actually have a recipe, but I'm sure the fabled Creole cooks in New Orleans will be happy to come up with one, specifically to cook that Platonic-Ideal-of-the-specie Alan Richman.

If you still don't know what I'm talking about, get yourself over to GQ and read how Richman rips New Orleans, um, a new one. And when you're back here I'm sure you'll get in line to have a go at him yourself.

Brandishing generalizations and stereotypes –the city's occupants are no more than cooks and crooks (and leprechauns, apparently) whose idea of morning exercise regimen consists of stumbling out of bars- Richman's column reveals little about the city but exposes a great deal more of his own ignorance.

In a piece that's somehow supposed to be about food, Richman managed to rub salt into the all too fresh wound that Katrina inflicted on the town, calling New Orleans a city that 'fell in love with itself" and "[a] festival of narcissism, indolence, and corruption."

How to buy fish (and cook Paella) in Mexico

Earlier this year we went down to Todos Santos to visit our friend Joe who spends a couple of months every winter there. Joe's new house was still being built, so we stayed at his friend Paolo, who has a spare studio that he sometimes rents to friends. The house is beautiful, just outside of town, and conveniently locates near Joe's property

An Italian expat and a retired chef, Paolo is something of an aging Anthony Bourdain character. Chain-smoking and opinionated, especially when it comes to food, he even looks like Bourdain, or perhaps how Bourdain might look in ten years or so. Paolo moved with his Spanish Basque wife to Todos Santos over a decade prior to take over the chef position at the fancy Café Santa Fe in town. Like Bourdain, or perhaps like cooks everywhere, Paolo had a certain appreciation for fellow cooks and so got along famously with David.

We woke up in the mornings during our stay not only to find perfect coffee made in a proper Moka pot, but sometimes even some freshly made Rosquilla to accompany it. Joe told me that Paola -having spent a few years in Spain with his wife- makes a killer Paella. So we agreed to make it for our last dinner there.

On our last day, David went off to surf as usual. I remained at the house to help Paolo with the preparation for our Paella. Around three o'clock Paolo came around to fetch me. It's time to go get some fish, he said.

inside 'Inside the Kitchen'

This is Roland Passot admiring -or pitying- Hubert Keller's balls.

Carrot balls!
Get your mind off the gutter, readers!

Yeah, I do admit that joke is perhaps a bit racier than usual around here, but let it be known that it wasn't mine. It's Roland himself making that comment about the size of his and Hubert's, um, carrot balls. I hate to take a side here, but I must admit Roland was right, Hubert's balls were conspicuously small. Ha ha.

The scene for this rather French joshing was the Grand Cru dinner last Saturday night at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay. The premise of the dinner was a meal cooked by four chefs who have each been awarded four stars by the Chronicle. The dinner tab was $300 per head, and that included 'Grand Cru' wines, with a part of the proceeds going to support Meals on Wheels.

No, I don't have any picture from the dinner itself. What you think me so gauche I would pack a camera to a fancy dinner? Feh.

I was in the kitchen for a little bit during the afternoon prep, and the chefs were there in force, each doing their own thing with some help from the Ritz cooking team. It was quite neat to see Hubert Keller cooking the lamb himself, especially since, at a similar even earlier this year, I saw a certain Iron Chef cooking duck breasts by brushing some sort of marinade over them as a finishing touch (or was it a blessing) –everything else had been done and prepped by the minions even before said Iron Chef waltz into the lowly kitchen mere minutes before service. Nice to be famous (jealously she said).

Spending time in the kitchen was fun, especially watching all the components of the dishes being prepped without knowing what the final dishes would be. I saw Roland Passot working with the cutest little roasted pumpkins I've ever seen, adding to them carrot sticks and asparagus spears. It looked to be quite a vegetable focus dish, a healthy respite from the protein heavy dishes everyone else was preparing. Well, until I saw the amount of butter and cream he whisked into the sauce. You just have to love the French, don't you?

That afternoon reminded me of another day I spent observing in the kitchen at the Rarities Dinner at the Masters last year. I guess I really should tell that story soon too!

Meanwhile, more on the Grand Cru dinner extravaganza: Nitin has the low down and Amy has the menu.

tag(s):food |Inside the Kitchen |David Kinch |Roland Passot |Hubert Keller |Ron Siegal |Ritz |culinary event

Who is this?

Last Saturday morning, I was at the club lounge at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay. David was attending the Inside the Kitchen event at the hotel for the weekend, et moi, I was just arm candy. (So no serious report from me, check Amy's and Nitin's for that stuff.)

At breakfast that morning, the table next to us was full of French chefs. One of them was Fréderic Robert –perhaps one of the two best pastry chefs in the world- another, I think, was Bruno Davaillon, of Mix in Vegas, and a few other French chefs I didn't recognize. Commanding the attention of the whole table was an older, slightly unkempt man in a track suit, speaking rather loudly in French while the others listened rapturously.

I didn't recognize him, and strangely enough, neither did David.

I gathered from the conversation I was pretending not to listen to that he was also a chef. He must worked somewhere in the Midwest, as the other chefs were quizzing him for his opinion on a few famous restaurants in Chicago –and no, I'm not repeating what I was pretending not to listen to....no....

I saw him later on that same day, this time in the kitchen where David was prepping for the Grand Cru dinner that night. He showed up in shorts and a Les Bleus #10 jersey, that's Zidane's –so, yes, obviously he's French, and probably from the South. In the kitchen was also Roland Passot, Hubert Keller, and Ron Siegal, all of whom have four stars from the Chronicle. The mystery man seemed to know Hubert and Roland quite well, especially Roland.

I finally found out who he was, and was duly impressed, David even more so. The man is a legend, perhaps the first serious French chef to open a restaurant in the US. His restaurant was for a time considered the best French restaurant in the country. And, despite being literally in the middle of nowhere, his restaurant was so successful, diners flew their private planes in to visit his dining room.

He was also arguably the first celebrity chef in the US. Hubert Keller told me how he, as a young man, was inspired by a story about this mystery chef in the French tabloid Paris Match, posing with his collection of rare watches and sports cars with a headline "Millionaire Chef".

Do you know who he is?