The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (19 page)

3 tablespoons sesame oil
1 tablespoon orange juice
1 tablespoon Chinese 5-spice powder
4 green onions, minced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon soy sauce

 

3 tablespoons vegetable oil or butter
cup lime juice 1 teaspoon chili powder 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 teaspoon dried oregano
teaspoon ground cumin

Pinch or 2 of cayenne or a few drops of hot sauce

You can add any of these flavorings to individual pieces to roast separately. Again, press the flavorings under the skin. Put the pieces on a baking sheet atop aluminum foil or parchment or in an ovenproof baking dish in an oven preheated to 375°F. Thighs and legs will take about 45 minutes, bone-in breasts about 30 minutes, and boneless breasts about 15 minutes, depending on the thickness and your oven. Aim for a final internal temperature of around 165°F. If roasting mixed pieces, remove them as they're done and keep them warm by covering them with foil.

CLASS BREAK

 

 

 

 

The morning after the chicken class, I received a frantic call. “Can you be in Rome next Tuesday?” a woman's voice said. “A chef canceled. Ten-day cruise on the Mediterranean. It would
really
help me out.”

Such things never happened in my corporate life. Months earlier, Holland America had invited me to work for a week on one of its ships as a “guest chef.” When Mike and I joined the cruise on the
MV Amsterdam
for its final leg from Honolulu to San Diego, we met Erika, the manager of “culinary entertainment” for the cruise line. Mike and I liked her instantly and bonded with her over the short trip. Back on land in Seattle, we kept in touch. Now she was in need of a replacement guest chef for one of the line's culinary-themed cruises—stat. “I'm racking my brain thinking about who could go on such short notice,” she said. “We'll pay your airfare.” She called not realizing the trip would fall during our fifth wedding anniversary and Mike's forty-fifth birthday. We'd have to reschedule two weeks of classes, and I worried about losing momentum with the project, but then I looked at the itinerary: Rome, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Tunis, Palermo, and Naples, with three days at sea during which I was expected to entertain cruisers with cooking demonstrations and hands-on classes.

I immediately called Mike. “I know you've been planning something for our anniversary, and this is so crazy last-minute. But what do you think?”

“I don't think I can top that,” he said. “Let's do it.”

Within four hours he'd sorted flights and scored a last-minute deal on a hotel room in Rome. Just three days later, swarms of buzzing Vespas escorted our death-defying taxi ride from the airport into the city center. We abruptly turned off a main road to creep along a narrow, ancient street to the Hotel de Ville nestled at the top of the Spanish Steps.

It felt decadent jetting into a foreign city with no itinerary on short notice. On our first night, we walked arm in arm to dinner at the restaurant Tulio. Mike ordered us each a glass of champagne to start. We eavesdropped on conversations around us and flirted across the table. I ordered the day's special, handmade fettuccine pasta dosed heavily with eggs. Mike splurged on a bottle of earthy Italian wine. As the immaculate waiter shaved slices of black truffle onto my plate of handcut noodles, I jumped up and down in my seat, giddy with anticipation.

Mike took my hand across the table and twisted his fingers in mine. “I love that you can get this worked up over pasta,” he said, and tenderly kissed the back of my hand. The scene was impossibly perfect: a romantic candlelit restaurant in Italy, Mike in a smart jacket, my complete disregard for carbohydrates.

“You want to hear something?” I whispered. He leaned in across the table. “I would marry you all over again just for this one moment with you.”

The waiter cleared his throat. We had failed to notice his return. He stood over us with the bottle of red. We politely waited for him to pour while my heart pounded. I picked up my fork to start on my pasta. I stole a quick look up, assuming Mike would be tending to his plate of osso bucco. Instead, he was looking at me. Without a word, he picked up his glass of wine in a toast.

“To five more years,” I offered.

“No, wait.” He stopped me as I held my glass up in midtoast. “I believe we agreed to forever.” We clinked glasses.

The next morning, he lazily threw an arm around me as we started the slow ascent of waking from our jet lag. He nuzzled his chin against my hair. “You still smell like truffles,” he murmured softly.

 

Being a guest chef on a cruise ship is not quite work, but it's not exactly a vacation. To earn my passage, I had to perform two live cooking demonstrations before an audience, and then conduct two hands-on classes for a small group of guests. The demonstrations took place in the ship's Culinary Arts Center, a no-expense-spared TV studio–style demonstration kitchen set atop a stage in front of about three hundred plush upholstered audience seats. Huge plasma screens showed the action live to the audience, while the audio-visual crew pumped the “show” into every single stateroom on the boat. So it was more like planning two forty-five-minute live cooking shows with an unfamiliar kitchen crew plus cooking a tasting for hundreds of audience members. Piece of cake.

On the
MV Noordam,
guest chef activities were coordinated by party planner Linda. Fun spirited and high energy, she spoke in a throaty northern England accent and was a dead ringer for Patsy from
Absolutely Fabulous,
although the similarity ended there since she's not a shallow drunk. Guest chef status provides access to parts of the ship most cruisers never see. Behind the gilded mirrors and velvet wallpaper exists a maze of kitchens and prep areas that span five decks. Linda led me to Chef Don, the executive chef in charge of the kitchens. He noticed my bare head and fished a paper chef's toque out of a drawer. I'd never worn a tall toque before. It didn't quite fit and kept falling off as I walked through the sea of Indonesian and Central American kitchen workers, all 337 of them male. Women kitchen workers, much less chefs, are a rarity. The sea of workers parted as they saw me. They smiled sweetly and nodded furiously. “Oh,
hello
, Lady Chef.”

Chef Don and I zigzagged through the vast kitchens stacked on multiple floors. The scale of the operation overwhelmed. The
MV Noordam
served eleven thousand meals a day from five separate restaurants, plus busy stateroom room service and special events. One area equipped with a floor mixer the size of an impressive Jet Ski turned out nothing but the morning pastries and evening desserts. Rows of tables stood at the ready in one prep room awaiting the hundreds of plates the crew assembled each day. Don took me through two baking kitchens and an entire floor dedicated to
garde manger
that managed cold foods such as salads and refrigerated desserts. A full-time butcher worked in a walk-in cooler the size of my first apartment tucked deep belowdecks. During meals, the kitchen buzzed at a frantic yet practiced pace. At ten A.M., it might be quiet in the fine dining kitchens, but the crew of the Lido Deck buffet—the hub of breakfast onboard—was just clocking out. “At every hour of the day, there's someone working somewhere,” Chef Don said. “We never really close, we just slow down production.”

On our tour, Chef Don asked, “You want to see something?” We took an elevator down to the cargo hold in the belly of the ship. In front of us, pallets the size of double-wide trailers held tons of produce. “We have a crew who spend their days getting the food off the pallets and moving it to the right parts of the kitchens,” he said. “It goes faster than you can imagine.”

Chef Don explained that the complexities of the supply and thin profit margins of the operation required a delicate balancing act. “Managing our food supply is one of the most critical things that we do. We can't go through it too quickly or we will run out before our next port. But we can't afford to let it go bad or waste too much food either,” he explained. “We try hard to figure out how to maximize everything yet never run out.” My thoughts went to the volunteers and to my own kitchen, and to the larger issue of wasted food. Just how many wilted vegetables in our crisper awaited my return?

In the elevator heading back up to the kitchen, Chef Don glanced again at my demonstration list. “Paella? I can't wait. You have much experience with it?”

As it happens, for a girl from Michigan, paella has odd prominence in my life. It was the subject of the first food story I ever published back in the early 1990s. Days after we got engaged in Spain, Mike and I happened upon a paella-making competition in the heart of Valencia, home of the classic rice and seafood dish. Knowing that, our chef friend Ted built a custom-made box and shipped his three-foot-wide paella pan across the country from Seattle to Florida for our rehearsal dinner on Anna Maria Island. If that's not friendship, I don't know what qualifies. The pan was so massive that Ted rented a portable commercial four-burner stove to ensure adequate heat. Our seventyfive guests hovered, clutching cocktails in the sweltering Florida night, as he browned chicken, cooked sausage, sautéed onions, and added the rice and stock, stirring with a spoon the size of an oar. To finish, he tossed in a plethora of Gulf-fresh seafood from Cortez, a historic fishing village nearby. As a tradition, we've made paella every year to commemorate our wedding; it's as much a ritual in our lives as turkey at Thanksgiving. By fate or sheer coincidence, my last demonstration was scheduled for the Fourth of July, our fifth anniversary—right after we'd visit two ports in Spain. We both agreed that I had no choice but to make paella, and to pick up a pan along the way.