Every Monday night I teach a cooking class in my corner of Queens. I am by no means a chef, but I can be funny and I love my job like a first crush which is good for business.
To keep my people happy while they waited for the lemon garlic cream to reduce for our pasta, I sauted paper thin slices of onion with a whole garlic clove, a few fresh sage leaves in olive oil and butter until they were absolutely and completely delicious. Sometimes this is the only way to know when something is done. I seasoned beaten eggs with a little salt and pepper, waited for a pan to get hot, gave it a good drizzle of olive oil, poured them in for a frittata and covered them with the onions. When the bottom of the eggs were set, I slipped them onto plate and then flipped them for no longer than it took to turn off the flame and get them out of the pan. Eggs love to be soft. On the side was a little salad of bitter greens and no bread. Not because it’s right or wrong but because I can’t eat all of that and bread and want more. “Do you remember I said, when you were in the 8th grade and boys thought the best strategy was to come at you like a hurrican with high winds?” “You don’t want to overfeed your people and risk losing your people. What we’re looking for is what started to happen in the 11th grade, when the boy would give you just enough to leave you begging for more.”
Then we threw rough cut linguini into a massive pot of boiling water and poured the reduced cream sauce through a sieve so that every bit of garlic that had been braising in the cream (along with fresh thyme, a peppercorn, a wide strip of pithless lemon zest and a little salt) was smashed through.
The steaks (2 1/2 inches thick): Half hour outside the fridge. A little salt on all sides (pepper later.) Sear the fat edge first until it was crusty. Then sear each side. About 8 minutes from beginning to end for nice, juicy and red. Tip out the fat from the pan, and put the steaks on a plate. Get a little butter in the pan, soften shallots until they give it up, add the classic piece of thyme and clove of whole garlic and a good pour of the red wine. Reduce, reduce, a few tablespoons of butter off the heat, the collected juices from the steaks on the plate and dinner is served. Along with we had a Tuscan spinach sformatta that we had been working on all at the same time. While the main course was on the table dessert was shoved in the oven, and ready in a half hour. It was a clafoutis set on the outside and creamy on the inside with fresh organic rasperries and organic cream. “You know” I said, “I am a big believer in seasonal” but “sometimes something happens between you and the raspberries that you can’t avoid and they end up in the cart demanding to be reckoned with in the middle of December, so what are going to do?”