Fine French Delicacies

My family and a friend of ours ate out at Kris' Bistro which is inside of The Culinary School LeNotre in Houston, TX on 7070 Allensby.  The staff there are friendly and knowledgeable about the school and the culinary arts curriculum as well as the trends in the job market relating to it.  I must say that we had a really nice time.  No really, we did!  Honestly!  I have never eaten French foods, and though the seasonings were something for me to get used to it was all very palatable.  I enjoyed Chef Kris' creative charcuterie, if I am spelling that right.  I also enjoyed the trio that we ordered.  You choose the appetizer, main meal and dessert all for one low set price and two can share.  They are able to keep the prices low so successfully because among other reasons, the cooks are senior chefs that attend the school, and all the foods are organically straight from the kitchens' garden so there are no middle-man chiefdom going on.  Next time, I'm going to try the charcuterie.

There were a host of other delicious sounding foods as well as a wine list.  We truly had a delightful evening.  When I say we in this context I mean myself, Richard my friend and my son Mica who is 11.  We asked for a kids menu, their chef put together an excellently crafted plate of steak, fries.  His fries had 3 very different dipping sauces and we tried all 3 of course!  His meat also came with an array of dipping sauces. 

Our dinner, however;  consisted of steak, bone marrow, hashbrowns (not like what you may be used to).  It was delicious!  The bone marrow, was so light and delicious I could barely tell I had it in my mouth.  It was buttery and seasoned very well.  Again, the seasoning took a little bit of getting used to.  They give you a big huge bone, split open and a tiny spoon to eat the marrow.  It was a good sized meal and because it was a lot our server suggested us sharing.

Our appetizer was something duck liver.  You could surely taste the wine in it.  It came with a lettuce that to me was very salty.. my son, fiance loved it though.  It also had dried, reconstituted cherries and to me that accented the liver and the lettuce.  I love liver, but this duck liver was a bit too fancy for my palette.  The cherries, lettuce went well with it and thus I was able to appreciate this dish.  Still, I enjoyed the whole experience and can appreciate those with a, say: finer palette.


Links

Kris' Bistro
The Culinary Institute LeNotre

Gas or Electric

I prefer gas.  It's not the gas that I love but the fire that it gives.  Fire is primitive, it's how cooking should be performed.  Electric gives me many problems because the stove never seems to heat evenly enough for me whether the burners or raised or flat.  If the electricity goes out in a storm or I forget to pay the light bill, not only does frozen food thaw but anything needing to be cooked cannot be.  Electric burners stay hot for a little while after their turned off, I can't stand the drip pans.  They become nasty, ugly contraptions that really have no real use unless you spill a good amount of something but even then they don't hold much at all.  Once you remove a burner it seems they never settle exactly as when new. 

Now gas, here is the many reasons as to why I love cooking with gas:

• It's primitive - okay, we already established that.
• Fire heats evenly, and I don't have to worry about it regulating temp correctly.
• If there is a power-outage, food may thaw in the fridge but I can still cook, have heat and light.
• No disgusting, useless drip pans.
• No need to remove the burners.

I think that what matters to people mainly is the whole safety issue.  Really gas stoves/ovens are a lot safer now than they were before.  There are a lot more regulations and compliances that these contraptions need to meet before they are ready for our kitchens, homes, families.  Gas leaks are everywhere, not just in kitchens with gas appliances.  Actually, gas appliances do not cause fires or explosions when used properly.  But really, nothing does when used properly.  Everyone has a gas pipeline running somewhere near them, underground according to pipeline101.  So permanently and totally shielding ourselves from this is in most cases a moot point. 

Cooking on an electric stove/oven is a hassle!  To do any work on it you have to turn off the circuit breaker or else!  That is something that had never occurred to me until I saw one getting serviced recently.  You can actually get majorly electrocuted just by replacing the little metal conductor thing that the burners' leads snap into.  That is serious stuff!  It's just something that hasn't occurred to me before.  I mean, I know to unplug a computer prior to opening its chassis, unplug a lamp or basically anything else electric prior to doing any repairs or installs.  But I guess people just wrestle with electic stoves and ovens so much; re-seating the burners, replacing the drip pans (drip pans have gotten to be quite pricey now-a-days) that turning off the power for the stove at the circuit breaker just is not something that comes to mind.  I mean, you can wrestle with this big contraption and pull it out from its covey to unplug it several times a day or week but who does that?!  I mean, really?  People could also turn the power off at the circuit breaker the multiple times during the course of a week.  Just be careful to not turn off the wrong item, say the living room TV during the game or favorite show!  Lol!

However, cooking with gas is much less of a hassle for me.  A lot of people are afraid of the pilot light; lighting it, that is!  With gas stoves/ovens all you get is raw surface.  Cooking may require a bit more technique and knowledge of the appliance but it is cooking in it's rawest form besides fireplace and coal, campfire.  If you were to set a flame to a gas line then, yeah I'd worry!  But as I said earlier, the safety pre-cautions built in with gas stoves/ovens really help alleviate a lot of that worry!  Okay so, my fiancé is scared of gas appliances.  I grew up with them, and believe me.. back then, it was good.  Well, it's far greater now, blame technological advancements.  So uh no, you cannot accidentally leave the gas on and end up blowing up yourself and the neighborhood.  If you light the pilot on your stove or in your oven, you are not setting fire to an actual pipeline.  There is only a small amount of gas, aka BTU's, that is allowed for your kitchen appliance.  It's really regulated and takes the fear out of it.

I am posting a link to some referenced topics, also some of my favorite appliances that will hopefully be making a permanent appearance in my new kitchen.

Links
Thermador slide-in-ranges
GE gas ranges
A crash course in gas pipelines by pipeline101
BTU's and gas

Can good cooking really be so simple!

Think about it, I mean really, from our native brothers and sisters here in America, and elsewhere cooking really came from the heart in make-shift kitchens with unskilled yet determined hands.  These people had to cook and kill so their families could survive.  We adapted to fur clothings from the animals we slaughtered, really nothing was left over.  Every part of the animal was used for something.  Our crops gave us many vitamins and minerals from the immense variety of vegetation.  From fertile life giving soils to volcanic soils that produced richer more hearty fares according to some.  Back then, cooking was really simple.  Now, it's a work of art that requires intense training depending on which cuisine you are cooking. 

You see, over the thousands of years we've come to realize that other people whom we didn't even know existed can cook too.  History has laid the groundwork like a beautiful quilt of cuisine. We have come to know, like my great-grandpa that good cuisine can come from Ireland, the UK.  Like my dad, good cuisine can also come from all points east, that's east as in East Asia... including southeast asia, japan, china and korea.  Creole here in the southern US is a blend of French, Native American and African cuisines but the significance of the term Creole really has a more international flare than that.  Creoles and creole cooking exists in the Caribbean, Europe and Africa, etc.  It has come to be that anything mixed with French is considered creole.  But, creole can even mean anything that is mixed.  That is the beauty of cuisine, it's mixed!  It will tell you a beautiful story linked in the histories of the hands that molded it, like a quilt, it warms the heart.

Cuisines have been made by candlelight, bon fire, in caves, huts, shacks, ditches, foxholes, campgrounds, big multi-story mansions. small one-story estates, a child's easy-bake oven, a college dormitory, a writers coffee cup, a computer screen, pencil and paper.