If you aren’t reading IDEAS IN FOOD, my faithful readers, You should be.  I look forward to their frequent blog posts.  Food Porn in it’s purest form.  Innovation through science.  Pictured here is chicken skin crusted skate with rhubarb mustard, shrimp spaetzle, arugula and fresh bergamot.  Chicken skin crusted!?!  And what the hell is bergamot?  Seriously, Cheers to you Ideas In Food Chefs.  I want to eat your blog.  How could I not?  32 preparations of Foie Gras?  And what about Hot Ice Cream?  Amazing stuff here guys.  Best food in the Blogosphere.  Look at this Torchon!!

 If you’ve ever worked in a kitchen, you know that cooks can have pretty dirty minds, and sick senses of humor.  Our kitchen is no different.  It’s always a dick, fart, or deviant sex act that makes us laugh.  Or a food sculpture of a penis.  Not suprisingly, there is no shortage of cock-like food items to arrange and stash in your fellow cooks station.  Consider the cornichon, or the hand-made sausage, the almighty mushroom, hell consider the fennel seed.  Cooks will look at those items and think: “I can make a dick out of that.”  Now our game isn’t as easy as all that.  You can’t just walk up and plop a cock-sculpture on somebodies cutting board and walk away, you’ve gotta be subtle.  In or under a bowl, behind the six pan in the low-boy, perched on the ticket machine, these are venues for the true master of the game.  I once found a huge hand-molded polenta cock when I opened my station, complete with metal scrubbie pubes and heavy-cream dripping head.  It’s food, and hell, as far as I’m concerned,  you SHOULD play with it.

Faithful readers, it’s time to change ‘em up a little bit, we’ve gotta keep it exciting, right?  The Rosemary and Pinenut Tartlette  is coming off.  I can’t give that thing away.  Also bye-bye is the Cheesecake Three  Ways, because its too much work.  I’m bustin’ my ass over a mediocre dessert, when I should have been making Chocolate Flourless , Passionfruit, and Creme Fraiche Sherbet, pictured above.   Sauced it with Valrhona, ’cause it’s good  Also we have Poached Pear, Olive Oil beignet, and Valrhona milk chocolate.  Take a look below.  We poached the pears in a bag for six hours in Jake’s thermal bath.  This is attempting that “in the woods” feeling that I was trying to capture with the Pinenut Tart.  Maybe this time the clarified butter and chocolate will make it happen.  That’s right, we got Valrhona on both, peeps.  You’ve tried it , right?   Also revised was The Irish Car Bomb, which is now Gunniess stout brownie, Bailey’s anglaise, and Jameson’s salted whiskey caramel ice cream.  And don’t forget to check Elvis’s out  new bacon cookie!!! 

Here is some of the delicious food being served at Carlyle.  Clockwise from top-left: Black Cod with Suedoise sauce, roasted beets, and apple frisee salad.  Confit Octopus with Breton Vegetables, broth of hamhock, manila clams and thyme.  Yellowfin Tuna with Fresh Corn Polenta, roasted Chanterelles, and Poached Duck Egg.  Hamachi , with Dashi broth, bok choy,  and crispy wonton.   The Hamachi was prepared by Chef de Cuisine Patrick Shultz, and the other dishes by Sous Chef Jake Martin.   These guys are fun to work with, and are creating some dynamite food.  I hope this post will convince them to cook me up that foie dish.

Cooking for a living can be a really tough job.  The hours are long,  pay is low, and the prep monotonous.  If you work for a good house, however, the rewards can be…delicious.  Pictured above is a typical daily diet for me while I’m at work.  On the left, was my lunch of grilled salmon with fingerling potatoes, spinach and yellow pepper salad, and some kind of rich butter sauce which I slurped up to fast to define.  On the right, dinner, a mid-rare Kobe tri-tip with grilled asparagus and “Kobe Sauce, ” which is made from two kinds of stock and reduced with some kind of wine.  Sure, I don’t eat like this everyday, and when I do, I usually have to scarf it down over a garbage pail as I’m running to pull something from the oven.  But hey, I eat well.  The free coffee is also a perk.

For years, I’ve been hearing bits and pieces of the Kobe beef process, and finally decided to find out for myself what is actually going on.  Kobe Beef comes from a breed of cattle called Wagyu, ranched exclusively until recently in Kobe, Japan.  Wagyu cows are now raised in parts of America and Australia because the land and grain are cheaper than in Japan.  This type of cow is genetically predisposed to intense marbling, and the strict Kobe style of raising them produces a higher percentage of oleaginous unsaturated fat than any other in the world.  Kobe beef cattle are fed expensive grains, japanese beer, and purportedly rubbed down with sake.  They are fed beer to stimulate appetite in the hot summer months, and continue the fattening up process.  The cows recieve frequent massages as well, to simulate the exercise the don’t get in thier very restricted living conditions.  What does this all mean to you faithful readers?  Simply put: YUM.

Remember the clarified butter that Jaybill and I made to poach pork loin?  Well,  when we got some ultra-delicious looking lamb sausage from New Seasons, so did we.  After poaching about twenty minutes in 140 degree butter these babies were bursting with  buttery goodness.   So we lightly browned them, then devoured them.  This is the first time we made sausage that Jaybill was only able to eat one.  I on the other hand, ate two, and then butter poached bacon the following morning.  When I die way too young from massive heart failure, it will be with a big smile on my face.

If I can make a custard with one arm, then I can make bread pudding.  If I can make bread pudding, then I can deep fry it.  Jaybill came up with idea as a joke, but I really liked the idea of taking old croissants, soaking them in custard, baking them in a waterbath, breading them with panko, and then deep frying them.  Anyway here’s Panko-Fried Chocolate Bread Pudding.  PFBP for short.  Check out how to make it in my new Recipes section.

No, this isn’t about the thing with the butter and the guniea pig, so dont get excited.  Sometimes when I look at food being prepared or served I think: That is Food Porn.  Seeing a pig rotate slowly rotate over a hot fire, watching someone fold whip cream into eggs and choclolate, a case of red peppers cut up into a perfect julienne, are all great examples. This pig spun over hot coals for 27 hours.  Then I ate an eyeball.