Asian Sauces-Dragon Fruit-Cheffy and Greg Plays

Had a lot of fun playing....sooooooooooooo....

I have been an influence on Greg with Asian flavors and techniques pretty much since he has known me, so the past couple days have been kind of fun because we have had some f*** around time to play with food and flavors.

A couple days ago we had an Asian based buffet to do for a couple hundred people, one of our cooks, whom I will refer to as T used to work at a Chinese Restaurant, so it was a great opportunity for him to step up to the plate and pretty much let him run the event. One of the items we had on the buffet was generic spring/egg rolls so I told Greg that I wanted to do something different, fun and funky other than our regular infused soy sauce and sweet and sour for the buffet. He came up with a nice sweet, sour, spicy sauce with chipotles that was pretty good, reminded me of my honey sambal....Anyway, it was a clear sauce with vinegar, simple syrup, and lemon finished off with a chipotle powder I had made with "big brown chipotles"...the sauce was pretty awesome...nice flavor, beautiful viscosity and presentation....Good Stuff Greg....



He was so freaking geeked about the sauce that he put up this plate and I told him to take my camera and take some pics....The green thing is a flour tortilla and I told him a couple days prior that he could shape the tortilla to do something similiar that I do with parmesean tuilles, the red stuff is a sundried tomato and pepper chutney that he came up with from an idea that he got from somewhere that he went out to dinner a couple days ago...the chutney was pretty awesome, I used it a couple days ago for a special lunch for Sen. Tim Burgess (R-TN) I stuffed roasted roma tomatoes with the chutney mixed in with a parmesean bread crumb and topped with parmesean cheese as a garnish on the plate...sorry...no pic...but awesome nonetheless.....

Ssoooooo....rice paper, wontons and some other stuff that you wrap other stuff in.....

After playing with the egg rolls Greg wanted to take a trip to the Asian store to buy some egg roll wrappers....and to me, trips to the Asian store are right up there with sex, triple expressos, pool tables and beer so off to the store we went...

I bought some rice noodles and shrimp chips that we use for garnishes and some stuff called white rice cake that I have no idea what the hell it is or how to use it....I thought that it would blow up like rice noodles and things of the such do, but it didn't do anything but stay hard as a rock. First, I called my buddy Chef Scott in South Carolina and gave him the whole "what the hell is this shit" spiel and he had no idea what I was talking about so then I called the Asian Store and asked them and they said that I had to rehydrate it and use it in a stew or soup, but being hard headed I thought that it would expand...I was wrong. I tried to boil it, let it set in liquid overnight, fry it raw and all I got was freaking peice of hard "white rice cake".....oh well...the fun is in the experimentation I suppose....

(PS....yo' Cheffy, don't buy that shit again....)




So in going to pay for the stuff that I bought I was $.48 short of being able to put it on my credit card so I bought a piece of dragon fruit, something that Greg has never seen nor tasted, so I bought one. I didn't take a pic of the fruit but here are some aftermath pics. The first is a fruit display that Greg had done using the meat of the fruit, the second is that once it was peeled and the third one is that we decided to dehydrate the fruit to see if it held onto the crazy shapes and colors of the fruit and it turned out pretty crazy...was a fun experiment but the fruit is way too freaking expensive to make it practical for use, in our purposes anyway...

The fruit display that Greg did with the Dragon Fruit.




The inside of the fruit spread out




The exterior of the fruit, which I thought looked cool as hell



And this is what it looked like after we dehydrated it for a day...was pretty cool looking, not that we would use it on anything but it was pretty cool nonetheless...

Other cool shit that I will write more about tomorrow, just wanted to put it on here so I remember....

Jalapeno Jelly made from Florida Swamp Water...Swamp Jelly you say??? kinda crazy I know but it was a gift to my baby, Vickie from some waiter at a Ruby Tuesday in BF, Eastern TN and she gave it to me....it pretty much had no flavor, a very neutral jelly and I have had it sitting on the shelf for a couple months, so I made jalapeno jelly out of it today and it was pretty awesome...

Greg watched Rice Paper grow and expand in the steamer while I informed him how sensitive rice paper was to water and humidity...that was classical....Cheffy got a good chuckle out of that one... I was walking by and Greg was staring inside the steamer and I was wondering what the hell he was doing. I peeked in and he was watching the paper expand and contract, flipping it over and watching it again. I told him how moisture effects the rice paper and then he commenced on playing with it some more. More about Greg and Rice Paper later....

Then Greg baked a large rice paper atop a bowl in the oven to make a bowl and it turned out pretty good, to my recollection I have never tried to bake rice paper before so that was kind of fun and funky...now just to figure out an application that we can use it with should be fun. Greg was thinking about Wakame and Tuna Tartar (boy has Cheffy really gotten to this boy coming up with all of this Asian shit...ha ha)

We did a tasting today for a projected function of 700 and had only two hours to put together the menu and present the tasting, so we had some fun with that too once the stress level was gone...Greg did a Salmon ring stuffed with a crabmeat stuffing that I garnished with a white wine-shrimp cream sauce and topped with garlic herb compound butter. I did a blackened chicken with a chipotle hollandaise florentine sauce that was pretty rocking. The tasting was a duel entree that we served with orzo sauteed with garlic and roasted red pepper and steamed hericot verts. Was pretty good dish although the point leading up to the execution was pretty stressful because of the lack of communication between sales and the kitchen...that is another story in and of itself....maybe some other day....

Twisted Cristo's-Greg had this idea about Monte Cristo Sandwiches--just wanted to take the original and make a little con-Fusionary twist to it...Italian Flat Bread, ham and swiss cheese with apricot sauce dredged in tempura batter and fried....it was unusual, but really freaking good...still a work in progress, will write more when he or I develop it more...

Tempura'd Aspargus-held up really good, looked pretty cool, it would be a good garnish....

Greg had the idea to tempura brie cheese. I dredged it in flour along with some large wedges of provolone, but we forgot that we put it in the freezer and they are stil in there....whoops...forgot something....oh well, tomorrow is another day....

OK...that was some of the stuff we played around with today will write moreCheffy Babbles in the morning, I don't have to go in until late....

Peace, Hugs and Sesame Oil...

Cheffy