First Blog First Post! Part 1

After much consideration, reading and desire to discuss all topics food I've decided that blogging could be a great outlet for my thoughts and discoveries. I'm a professionally trained cook, former chef and current culinary instructor, with a driving passion to learn more about the food and cooking. There's not many topics of discussion that are as stimulating or enriching as talking about ways of cooking or places to forage or how many generations have made the same recipe and how important that is. Many people find food and eating or dining experiences as an ice breaker for getting to know each other. Being in the culinary field for a few years now, many who that hear I'm a chef want to talk about such things as somethhing they've cooked or want me to answer a question on how to cook something. That's fun stuff! That is sort of what I hope to get out of this blog...but at a seemingly slower pace. It's quite obvious that it's a topic we all share no matter where you're from or what your cultural background is.
We had a great dinner party last night with a couple that came into town from Brooklyn. I knew I had a opportunity to try out some new things but also knew I had to be careful not to turn anyone off getting too creative or undercooking something (Do you believe there are people out there that stil don't eat their meat pink!). My wife and I went to Whole Foods and shopped for all the things we were gonna need. Starting with the meat and fish, we built the menu around the best things (and price) we saw. We found some Branzini and a big bone-in ribeye steak with a good "cap"to "eye" ratio. I'm a big fan of the cap. Branzini is not my first choice for fish but I had to make the decision and it looked like the best quality amoungst all other things in the case. Then we were off to the produce to build the rest of the menu. I picked up some grapefruit (at it's best this time of year), a couples of lemons, a fennel bulb, radishes, some shallots and a few other things for the house. I wanted to make a salad with fennel and radish, grapefruit supremes and a lemon and ginger vinaigrette. So I shave the fennel and radishes very thin on the mandoline and used some of the fennel tops for the vinaigrette. Then I tossed it all together and set it aside until later. This was for the fish. Good call! As a side note, I'm a very seasonal cook. I don't like to rack up the food miles like frequent flyer miles just so I could have it for dinner. Oops! Out of blog space! I'll continue later.