The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (30 page)

 

A Dutch oven is a squat, thick-walled cooking pot with a tight-fitting lid. You can buy an enamel-coated steel number for as little as fifteen dollars, but for the quality and longevity, I recommend cast iron. A standard black preseasoned five-quart version can be had for thirty dollars, while enamel-coated cast iron varieties start at sixty dollars. Both varieties will last a lifetime with proper care.

CLASS BREAK

 

 

 

 

By the end of July, the bills for the class project started to mount. The rent for the Post-it notes kitchen, the barely above minimum wages for Lisa and Maggie, and the costs for food, business insurance, and even linens such as cloth diapers added up to a couple of thousand dollars. Meanwhile, I'd donated more cooking-class dinners to charity; one fetched thirty-four hundred dollars. The dinners promised to combine elements of the project, including a brief cooking or tasting lesson and dinner. Of course, since they were donations, all those same costs would apply—out of our pocket—to the tune of a few hundred dollars per dinner. Mike and I had a discussion about the mounting costs.

“It's a nonprofit research endeavor,” I said, making the case for the project. “And those dinners are for good causes.”

“
We're
not a charity,” Mike said. “How are we going to cover all this?”

My culinary-school friend who had led me to the teaching kitchen, Anne-Catherine, had offered communal dinners in the space and had made a small profit. Another friend had done the same on Vashon Island. A communal dinner simply means that everyone shares one big table. No tables for two or four, but rather tables for twelve or twenty or thirty-two, with one menu shared family style. I decided to try a few dinners to raise money for our little charity project. We'd ask people to bring their own wine and suggest a donation. The first was nothing short of a haphazard affair.

Mike arranged the tables and chairs the catering company used for events. Jeff ironed white linen tablecloths to an immaculate finish and artfully crafted bits of the lavender growing outside into small glasses and littered the table with tea lights. The result resembled a
Martha Stewart Living
magazine spread.

By coincidence (or fate?), we held the dinner on what would have been Julia Child's ninety-seventh birthday. I expected fourteen guests, yet twenty-two showed up. I forgot to add salt to the dough, so even though Mike led a great lesson on fashioning lovely loaves, the final bread had little flavor. My chef friend Ted and I hustled to cook the food, but the scene took on a strange Keystone Kops aura. We bought six dozen oysters but forgot to pack an oyster knife. The pilot light went out on the stove and we struggled to figure out how to relight it. Once Ted and Mike got started, my side towel caught fire. I dropped a huge vat of cooked green beans on the floor. The sole meunière fell into pieces as we started to cook it. We served the final dishes around eleven P.M.

Due to the steady stream of wine, few seemed to mind the lateness of the dinner as most everyone was hammered by the time the food hit the table. Due to clumsy execution, we collected less than we needed to cover the cost of the food, much less earn anything toward the project.

Julia Child consoled chefs by reminding them that they were alone in the kitchen, but this was not true in ours. The small dining room was open to the entire kitchen, so there was no escape. Before the next dinner, Mike engineered ceiling-to-floor-length inexpensive red velvet curtains from IKEA along the length of the kitchen to separate the cooking area from the tables. As he stood back to evaluate whether he needed to improve the torque to keep the heavy curtains level, Jeff stood next to him. Mike asked him whether perhaps he needed a turnbuckle, a piece of hardware, to keep the line straight. Jeff responded that the drapes needed more pleats.

“Pleats?” Mike's voice scaled up.

“Oh, yeah, I think they're tight enough, they just need more pleats. I can take care of it,” he said. “My sisters and I used to put on musicals when we were kids. My job was always fixing the sheets so they looked a bit fuller when we used them as curtains. If the pleats aren't even, they look cheap.” He borrowed our car to hit a store for small clamps and then spent the next ninety minutes moving a stool along the length of the curtain, painstakingly adding perfect pleats. I have to admit, the result looked fabulous. With that, the Red Velvet Dinners were born.

After the dubious start, I strategized the next dinners as if executing a battle plan. In earlier years, I'd been known for over-the-top dinner parties, and even then I planned the menus weeks in advance. Invariably, though, the party buzzed in the kitchen, drinks took prominence, and dinner arrived on the table late, often very late.

When someone pays for a meal, it's different. An entrée served hours late isn't charming; it simply shows you failed to plan. The French chefs would not be pleased. Learning as we went along, we became more proficient at performance. Maggie and Jeff, both experienced kitchen hands, agreed to help prep food and manage the tables. I made time lines, schedules, and multiple versions of the menu. I even started to litter the kitchen with my own Post-it notes. “Do NOT touch dough. For RVD only!” The menu for the first series included the following:

The red curtain invited something . . . sexy. We decided to add an “entertainment” to the dinners. “What about burlesque to go with the steaks? Kind of fits, doesn't it?” asked my friend Deirdre. She'd recently directed a documentary on the neoburlesque movement, and she knew all the best performers in town. She helped me arrange for The Shanghai Pearl, a nationally known burlesque artist, to perform during a break in the dinner.

For the beef tasting, a friend organized a variety of grass-fed beef options. Ted set his own Weber grill on the sidewalk in front of the storefront, tasked with cooking twelve steaks from four different purveyors to exactly the same degree; it was so complicated, it would likely have been easier to dribble three basketballs at once.

The lovely Shanghai was no diva. The first night, she arrived at the back door in jeans and a simple T-shirt, an odd combination with her intense stage makeup, which included bright blue drag-queenlike eye shadow and glitter lipstick, and a complicated updo. “I'm so sorry, I've lost my voice,” she whispered hoarsely. She held up a bulky garment bag. “Where can I change?” I directed her to the bathroom. “Oh, here's my music.” She went to change. I turned to give the CD to Mike, who was managing the audio. Instead, I bumped into Ted, lurking in the rear of the kitchen with a postgrilling glass of Syrah in hand.

He looked awestruck. “Uh, wow, she's, um . . . ravishing.”

Moments later, Shanghai emerged in a scarlet-sequined hip-slit burlesque costume strutting in five-inch heels with two large red plume fans balanced in one hand. A massive blood-red flowery ostrich plume sprouted from the side of her head. Ted tried to look casual as she readied herself behind the red velvet curtain. She turned to him. “Do you think you could hold these fans and hand them to me on cue?” she whispered hoarsely. “When I've stripped, can I hand you my dress? Do you mind?”

Ted stared at her and nodded without blinking. “Yes, I think I can handle that.”

He took the job seriously, watching transfixed as the dancer bumped, grinded, and charmed the tiny audience around the long table while she strutted through her set. As she discarded gloves, garters, and portions of her dress, Ted dutifully caught them and carefully smoothed them over his arms. She concluded by removing a tiny red silk bra to reveal bright silver pasties and bowed in time to finish with her music. The dinner guests exploded in cheers. Nothing completes a dinner like a beautiful naked woman. As she returned behind the curtains, Ted handed her back her dress and accoutrements. “I can do this anytime you want,” he assured her earnestly.

Maggie, Jeff, and I watched from the sidelines, clutching tumblers of wine. As her act concluded, Maggie leaned in to me. “I'm fairly sure that after The Shanghai Pearl, no one is going to remember any of the food,” she said. “I mean that in a really nice way.”

Empowered by that success, we developed more dinners. Demand overwhelmed the seats available. At first, the dinners were open to friends only, then friends of friends. Then we invited people to get on “the list.” Within a week, we had 370 names.

Six of those with reservations could opt to come early to help prepare dinner via a cooking lesson. After they chopped vegetables, plated the cheese course, or made pasta, they then sat with the rest of the patrons for the five- or seven-course dinner. All of them followed a variation of the first dinner: a main course that featured a comparative tasting, such as oysters, salmon, or differently raised types of poultry. Each featured an entertainment—usually live music, but once we brought in a tarot card reader.

For Halloween, we took the Red Velvet Dinners on the road to the upper floor of the Richard Hugo House, a literary center set in a rambling 1902 Victorian that once served as the city morgue. The house has been featured in news outlets from ABC's
Nightline
to National Public Radio for one simple attraction—it's haunted.

I did not know this minor fact when I rented a writing cubicle situated in the former morgue. I heard whispers past midnight. Doors slammed when no one was around. At two o'clock one morning, I caught the sound of what sounded like silverware rattling atop something metallic. It's such a cliché, but the hair on my neck did, in fact, stand straight up. Later, I understood the sound when I heard the clang of medical instruments atop a tray at my dentist's office. The next day, I put my name in to transfer to a different writing office.

For the masquerade dinner, we shifted the drab six-foot classroom tables into one comically long dining tabletop set with three-foot-high candelabras, immaculate linens, and the ramshackle mismatched thrift-store plates, forks, and glassware from the center's own kitchen. All twenty-eight guests arrived in costume and character for a mystery dinner, masks intact. Hugo House doesn't have much of a kitchen, so we stuck to an elegant yet simple menu:

That night's cassoulet dinner by candlelight had an air of sensuality. Champagne flowed. People flirted behind their masks. As everyone dug into three steaming vats of the traditional French white bean casserole and started to eat, the room went eerily quiet. A door slammed somewhere unexpectedly. Everyone suddenly looked around, startled. “I think I left a window open in the other room,” I said. Everyone returned to their dinner.

I never left a window open. But how do you tell people that it might be the sign of a ghost signaling his displeasure at failing to get an invite?

The last of the series featured an Italian theme. The evening included an olive oil and olive tasting, plus handmade pasta in a fragrant saffron broth with shrimp and tomatoes, a reprise of something I'd taught during the hands-on classes on the cruise earlier that summer. The scheduled entertainment was an opera singer performing excerpts from the works of Italian-born composer Giacomo Puccini.

It was a last supper, so I invited all the guests into the kitchen early to cook, and more than a dozen of them took me up on it. I'd developed the recipe as a lesson on tackling that issue so often mentioned by the volunteers: How do you keep a recipe from tasting bland?

After everyone helped to make the pasta and left it to dry on trays stacked on the counter, I discussed some classic seasoning points from Italian cooking. “Buy a basil plant and keep it in your kitchen window all year long,” I started. “You can just pull off a few leaves at a time and it will add freshness to the end of a dish, and it won't die in the bottom of your crisper. While you're at it, consider getting a thyme plant, too.” Next tip, keep lemons or limes on hand; the acid brightens flavor. Garlic adds bite and hot chili adds punch.

I made one very bland plate of pasta and let everyone taste it. Then we divvied the pasta into three bowls and let them experiment with shifting the flavor by adding lemon, fresh herbs, and hot chili. In another batch, this time dosed with garlic. “Wow, this is pretty boring without garlic,” one guy said.