When one realizes that one’s reputation as a gastronaut and a chef has begun to outstrip one’s actual abilities, one would do well to enroll in L’Academie de Cuisine’s 20-week semi-professional program. Culinary Techniques 101, which is offered twice a year, focuses on learning to cook without recipes; instead, learning the techniques and thought processes that one needs to become a creative chef. I’ll be updating occasionally with what I’ve learned from each session.
Week 3 focuses on soups, and because it is too hot to talk about butternut squash soup with maple, sage, and bacon (wait till October, and remind me if I forget), I’ll now share with you how to make a gorgeous white gazpacho, which is a much better summertime dish. My instructor shared with us the list of ingredients, and I looked at epicurious.com for the approximate proportions, but didn’t really measure anything, so please don’t take the measurements as gospel.
White Gazpacho
half a stale baguette, ripped into bite-sized pieces
1 cups ice water
2 cups chicken stock
handful sliced almonds
2 cloves garlic
3/4 pound seedless green grapes
3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
several healthy shakes of Tabasco
1/2 cucumber, peeled, seeded and diced
6 oz sour cream (do not use fat-free; that stuff is revolting.)
Put this all in a blender and whirl it around. My blender wouldn’t fit it all, so I put half the stuff in with the stock and half with the water, and stirred it up together in a big bowl afterwards. I now have enough gazpacho to last me through the week, unless someone else finds it in the fridge and snarfs it down first.
(The author started this entry with a rather grand tone involving what “one” ought to do, and ended with “snarf.” She finds herself so entertaining.)

My grandmothers are all very picky eaters, but in very different ways. My mother’s mother has a long list of allergies and other diet-limiting conditions, so no one can blame her. My paternal grandmother, who lives here in DC and eats dinner with my parents (and often me) most Sundays, on the other hand, simply does not like vegetables.
She’ll eat lettuce, carrots, cooked onions, asparagus and the occasional eggplant, but that’s about it. This makes cooking a healthy and delicious meal rather a challenge on Sunday nights, and has inspired not only our creative efforts but also, in the case of this dish, our subversive humors.
You see, the vegetable that my paternal grandmother hates more than anything is squash. Yellow, green, pumpkin, or zucchini, she will at any restaurant return any dish served to her with squash anywhere on it. The thing is, my mom and I love the stuff. So, we sometimes find ways to sneak it in to dishes anyway.
Like this (adjust all proportions to taste):
4 lbs. fresh red snapper
3 large yellow onions
1.5 cups whole green olives, chopped in thirds
3 28 oz cans of diced tomatoes, drained (can use fresh as well)\
1 3.5 oz jar of capers
½ a yellow squash, chopped very fine (to hide)
1-2 tbs coarsely ground black pepper
1 tbs red pepper flakes
½ tsp. chopped garlic
Feta cheese
Olive oil
Chop and sautee onions in oil with the garlic and some salt.
Once the onions are soft, dump in the tomatoes, capers, squash, pepper and salt (to taste), cover and simmer 10-15 mins until the squash is done.
Salt and pepper the fish.
Ladle some of this sauce into a glass baking pan, lay the fish over it, and cover in the rest of the sauce. Top with about 8 oz. crumbled feta, and bake at 350 until done – 30-40 minutes.
Serve with a good, hearty bread or over rice.

Groups of women sharing herbs. Sharing herbs is, in a cultural sense at least, what groups of women are *for*. Herbs for impressing a guy, herbs for bandaging up a kid, and herbs, historically at least, for when you don’t have the first and are in danger of the second. Women passing around herbs – it might as well be the definition of society.
My personal herb sharing network – ooh, that sounds so much more illicit than it actually is – says right now is the time to pass around some Basil. I know this because I got handed some this morning over the wall of my cube. Apparently the super hot weather we’ve been having has been perfect for Basil growin’, and now that it’s cooled down it’s time to munch before the plants start to do some crazy flowering.
But while gifting is all very well, what do you do with all that fresh Basil?
We asked Pee Jim, absurdly capable guide of Khmer ruins to high-ranking military officials in the Thailand university town of Burriram (it has its own market!) near the Cambodia border. And even tho as a devout Buddhist she often fasts after 12, she’s willing to do a bit of culinary creativity for the local monestary; feed the monks, get a blessing. But not the nuns – their major spiritual duty seems to be washing the dishes.
Pee Jim’s fried basil w/ chicken wings, adapted with a lot of internet help
Mix together:
1 tablespoon fish sauce
A bit of finely chopped lemongrass if you’ve got it.
10-15 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoons chopped fresh red chilis
quarter cup chopped cilantro
quarter cup rice whisky (or whatever sort you have around
2 tbsp olive oil (my addition)
2 tbsp of ketchup
Cut off the tips of a couple dozen wing, rinse and dry ‘em off, toss them into the marinade, and stick the whole thing in the fridge overnight. Grill or bake ‘em at 375 ’till they’re nice and crispy.
Holy basil is what you really want for this – but go for the smaller leaves of other varieties if you have to. Rinse off and dry your basil – lots and lots of it, and strip the leaves. I mean it about drying it well, squeeze it out between paper towels and lay it flat for a little while if you have to.
Get a nice big wok with a couple inches of peanut oil and heat it super hot, almost to smoking – a drop of water should spit all over the place. Then drop in handfuls of the leaves – they’ll only need a few seconds to get nice and crispy – and lift ‘em out with a slotted spoon to drain on a paper towel.
Gently mix together the leaves and wings to keep from crushing them. Toss in another handful of chopped red chilies – or you might want to saute the chilis up a bit first. A sprinkle of salt over the finished product…It’s a dish fit for a monk.

Ever since the weather started reasonably cooperating, I’ve been on a grilled fish kick. I get home, and it’s all I want to cook, since it’s quick and outdoors, and all I want to eat, since it’s fresh and light tasting. Plus, I’ve recently discovered (like MAW) that those Trader Joe’s frozen fish fillets taste better than I ever expected.
Last Monday, I did tilapia. Since grilling makes me think of corn on the cob, I was brought to think of my favorite way of preparing the vegetable (namely, using lime butter with chili powder), and figured the combination of flavors would lend itself well to fish. Sure did – a squirt of lime juice, a dash of powder, a dollop of butter and everything came together. Served it with a roasted red potato with cumin, and steamed green beans.
This Monday, it was Mahi Mahi. I didn’t go too crazy on the marinade (just a little salt and citrus), but I topped the fish with a salsa made of fresh tomatoes, avocado, lime, red onion and a little turkey bacon (namely because these were ingredients I needed to use up). A red wine risotto with spinach and peas served as my side (a bit indulgent, given the main course, but it seemed a good idea at the time).
Tonight, I gave cod a shot. I had one lone piece of prosciutto left from some appetizers I made recently. I soaked the fish in a bit of Worcestershire sauce, seasoned, and then wrapped the fish in the prosciutto. Cheated on the side dishes, though – frozen fries from TJ’s coated in garlic salt, and a carrot/bean vegetable medly weren’t inspired choices, but they were easy ones.
All these recipes, by the way, are thirty minute meals without the annoying acronyms and exclamations of “Yummo.” Next week, I’m thinking my favorite tuna recipe – coated in red, black and white pepper, seared, and served over white beans simmered with sage. What’s your favorite way to grill fish?

The thing you forget, when you’ve been out of school for a while, is how annoying exams can be: it’s not even that you don’t know the material or that it’s so difficult, it’s just that they sneak up on you. And you worry about little things. Especially on take-homes, which seem like they ought to be easiest: even if the text sucks and you’ve skipped all semester so don’t have notes, Professor Google is available to rescue you. But the catch is (if you’re a bit OCD like me), that you spend a million years making sure every answer is perfect.
What’s this got to do with food, you ask? Well, studying brains need fuel, of course! And what with time constraints and general student poverty, studying brains need a certain kind of food: fast, cheap, and (preferably) healthy!
While working on a particularly unsavory take-home midterm (not a hard one at all – so easy and pointless, in fact, that it took Herculean effort to muster the will to do it), I decided I needed a slightly tastier lunch than the habitual bowl of Cheerios. I had a craving for my Haitian-not-grandmother’s red beans and rice, but she lives in DC and my time was short; real cooking was out of the question.
Surveying my kitchen for a suitable substitute, I found the following:
Leftover saffron rice;
Half of a Vidalia onion;
A can of red kidney beans (unsweetened);
Olive oil;
Hot sauce (I used Walkerswood Jonkanoo – another might be better for the less masochistic chef) ;
Garlic salt;
Turmeric.
And, of course, the lazy chef’s ultimate hero: a microwave.
I took a bunch of the rice, added about half the can of beans, and nuked that in a bowl for 2 minutes to get everything nice and warm (not very hot, though that’s up to you). Then, I chopped onion until I had about 2 handfuls worth. I added that, a couple tablespoons of olive oil, and a tablespoon or so of hot sauce to the rice and bean bowl.
I stirred, added garlic salt and black pepper till it seemed right, a bit of turmeric, and ate it.
I was soon much happier, and managed to finish that evil bloody midterm.