Pico de Gallo

Pico de Gallo is a fresh Mexican salsa that is one of the simplest yet most delicious things I know how to make. At its base, you only need five ingredients: tomato, onion, cilantro, lemon, and salt. However, you can add any number of ingredients to spice it up (literally or figuratively), such as Serrano peppers, cucumber, mango, corn or a number of other things. You'd never want to add all of these things to pico de gallo at once, but one or two of these additives, and sometimes the subtraction of tomato, can change this simple salsa into an exciting one.

Pico de Gallo

Ingrediants
Half a white onion, diced
6 Romano tomatoes, diced
A handful of cilantro, shredded
The juice of one lemon
Salt to taste

Procedure
Combine onion, tomatoe, and cilantro in a bowel and fold together. Mix in lemon juice and salt. Serve immediately or store in the fridge for up to one week. Best with chips, tacos, or tortillas :)

I took this recipe and added two ears of corn and two Serrano peppers, minced. That way, I have added both sweet (the corn) and spicy (the peppers) elements. I also love the bright crunch the corn adds.

Blog 19: Independent Component 2

LITERAL
(a) I, Desiree Zarate, affirm that I completed my Independent component which represents 37 hours and 37 minutes of work.
(b) Baker, Chris. Personal Interview. 17 Feb. 2015.
(c) My Independent Component 2 Log is updated and completed
(d) I worked in a restaurant kitchen as a preparation cook on the busiest day of service. I chopped vegetables, made pancake batter, restocked the omelette and sandwich stations, constructed sandwiches, and often made soups. I completed about 37 hours working for the restaurant.

INTERPRETIVE
My mentorship is significant because I got to experience real life in a restaurant kitchen. I am a legitimate preparation cook and have worked side by side with real cooks in a very busy restaurant, serving over one hundred people in just a few hours. My work demonstrates 30 hours because I had a six hour shift once a week every week for the last two months (and three months before that for mentorship). I will bring in my most recent pay stub Monday (after recieveing it from work on Saturday) as part of my proof I work there. I also have these pictures a coworker took fr me on a slow day.

I would have liked to get pictures of myself making soup or sandwiches, but I mostly work on those when the restaurant is busy. These pictures are from particularly slow days doing my most basic duties.

APPLIED
This component helped me answer my EQ by exposing me to many taste and flavor combinations I never would have thought of. For example, one of our sandwiches contains sliced tri-tip steak, cream cheese, grilled onion, grilled bell peppers, and Monterrey jack cheese on sourdough bread. I would have never made this combination at home, but after trying it, I really enjoyed how the onions and peppers became sweet and felt well complimented by the creamy cheeses. The sandwich was a bit decadent for me, but it's also one of our best selling sandwiches. I also got to try making a couple different soups, which was fun because I made a couple different ones I'd had but never made, or had never had and wanted to try. When I made broccoli soup, for example, I didn't know the recipe included Worcestershire sauce. However, trying the soup before and after adding a few teaspoons of the sup made it clear that Worcestershire sauce was very important because it was the only ingredient that included umami; the soup was definitely lacking something salty and savory and moth filling; the nearly 100% umami sauce helped a lot. These types of exaples were presented all the time, and I got to work with my mentor a lot. He'd often drop little bombs of wisdom, related to my EQ or just my topic in general, which was always entertaining and interesting to listen to. He was my 3rd interview, and told me about the chef I interviewed for Interview 4. Both of these sources are cited many times on my three column and in my I-Search Paper. My mentor basically formed my second and third answer with me during mentorship. He was the one that advocated strongly for btoh quality ingredients and the importance of salt/seasoning when cooking.

Meatloaf with a Cutie

I made meatloaf, baked potatoes, broccoli and garlic bread for dinner a few months ago; it was a nice night of straight cookin for hours. Meatloaf itself is nothing special; it's a basic recipe I've made dozens of times that's a favorite in the simple-palatesof my grandpa and father, so I figured, what better way to please them? Besides, it can still be entertaining to cook. What I didn't expect was for my little brother, Mattox, to walk in half way through preparing the meal and ask if he could help!

He has done this before, but I never took him seriously. I'd say, "Sure! Go mix that right there!" and he'd take one look and reply with, "Hmmmm, nevermind."

Othertimes, when he seemed more anxious, I wouldn't know what task to give Matt and I'd have to tell him he couldn't help. How could I let an 8 year old that's never been in the kitchen chop onions or sauté green beans? My teaching him to cook never seemed to work out.

Today, however, as he approched me hand mixing a bowl of ground beef, onion, and crushed bread, I thought I knew how he could help. I didn't want to wash my hands, but needed to add more ingredients, so I coached Mattox on adding pepper, seasoned salt, garlic, an egg, and worshishire sauce. Then, as I continued to mix, I had him.make garlic butter.

"Garlic butter?" He had exclaimed when I told him what he was doing. "Why not garlic bread, Dez?!"

"Don't worry, Matt, once we out the garlic butter on the bread and toast it, it will become garlic bread." Boy, did that make him happy!

When I was nearly done with the meatloaf and getting ready to shape it, Mattox asked me for gloves. When I said I didn't have any, he ran away and found some, stating, "You and I are going to switch jobs. I jist wanted the gloves so my hands wouldn't get icky." Well imagine my surprise when me germaphobe little brother stuck his hands into a pound and a half of beef and started mixing it all together!

Once I had him form the loaf, he helped me make a glaze. At first, pouring ketchup, Dijon mustard, brown sugar, and worshishire sauce groassed him out, but as I added a little more of this or a tab bit of that, he asked if he coud pour the ingredients and mix the glaze. Sadly, I couldn't get him to taste the glaze on his own, but at my age I wouldn't have either.

From there the movie Thor came on TV, so I was on my own for the broccoli and such as Mattox went to watch the movie. It was still a lot of fun to see my little brother take an interest in cooking. I hope he keeps it up so he doesn't live off of Top Ramen when I'm gone.

Want to try the recipes I mentioned above? Visit October 28, 2014 Recipes.

Fourth Interview Questions

My Interview 4 questions:

1. How would you define flavor?
2. What are the most important factors to flavor?
3. How important is taste when it comes to flavor? How does taste affect flavor?
4. What is the difference between flavor and taste?
5. The similarities?
6. What role does sight play in the enjoyment of food? How can you harness this to make a dish better?
7. And touch?
8. And smell?
9. And hearing?
10. If you had to rate the five senses in order of most important to least important in the enjoyment of food, what would your order be and why?
11. Describe umami as a taste. Is it important? Why?
12. What kind of role does umami play in cooking?
13. Which of the tastes is your favorite? Why? What is your favorite way to use it?
14. What is your favorite taste or flavor combination? Why? What are some examples of that combination?
15. In your opinion, what is the most surprising combination of ingredients you have worked with? What made them work well together?
16. Name two ingredients you would never put in the same dish and why.
17. How can you balance the tastes on a plate of food? That is, a main course that may have 2-3 different components making up the meal.
18. How important is the quality of ingredient you use when cooking? Does organic/free range/no additives affect the quality of an ingredient? Why?
19. What makes an ingredient high quality?
20. How do you define "natural" when talking about ingredients?
21. What are some good brands or suppliers that produce "high quality" or "natural" ingredients?
22. How can the average person incorporate natural food into their cooking?
23. How important is salt when in comes to cooking?
24. What is your favorite kind of salt and why?
25. What are your favorite seasonings? Why?
26. How do you utilize herbs in your cooking?
27. How might you alter the seasoning of a certain dish to make it reflect a different style of cooking?
28. What is the most effective way for a culinary artist to enhance the flavor of a dish? Please describe your answer and reasoning.
29. How did you develop your previous answers? Were there any movies, books, articles, or videos that helped you?

Nine of the questions above were used in my Interview 3.

Blog 17: Third Answer

1. Essential Question: What is the most effective way for culinary artist to enhance the flavor of a dish?

2. Answer 3:The most effective way for a culinary artist to enhance the flavor of a dish is to use salt along with proper seasoning while cooking.

3.  Support:

• Salt is a flavor enhancer; it brings out the tastes and makes them more obvious in other foods. This is one of the reasons why many fine quality meats are seasoned with little more than salt.
• Chemically speaking, salt can alter the way your taste buds perceive certain flavors when the salt is broken down by your saliva. For example, when you add salt and sugar to grapefruit, an extraordinarily bitter fruit, the sodium in the salt blocks the taste receptors for bitterness, effectively tricking the tongue into only tasting the sugar and other flavors in the grapefruit.
• Salt is an integral part of not just food, but also the human body. Incorporating it tastefully makes it easier to consume. For example, salt is an electrolyte; when you sweat, your body loses electrolytes, but something like a Salty-Nutty-Crunch bar helps replenish the lost electrolytes.

4. Sources:

• Dornenburg, Andrew, Karen Page. The Flavor Bible. New York. Little Brown and Company: 2008. Print.
• Ramsay, Gordon. Gordon Ramsay's Home Cooking: Everything You Need to Know to Make Fabulous Food.New York. Grand Central Life & Style: 2012. Print.
• My third interview with Chris Baker

5. The world would be a very boring place without salt.

VFW Breakfasts

For the last year and a half, I have volunteered at the West Covina VFW Sunday breakfasts. They have a three hour service every second and fourth Sunday, and I started working at the end of my sophomore year. I spent a full year working exclusively as a waitress, but then I started filling for other positions; omelettes, pancakes, expediter. By the summer before senior year, I began working almost exclusively as expediter, which is a very stressful job; I had to call out all the orders, put together the plates, and find a waitress to take them out, along with Dillon in for any station that needed extra help.
Once senior year started, however, that job became too stressful, so I switched to pancake station!!
Pancake station is the griddle. I make pancakes, French toast, and any breakfast meats needed. I have a lot of fun, because even though we are far slower and run for far smaller amounts of time than a real restaurant, I still feel like I am in a real kitchen.
I work at Carl's Jr., the Avocado House, and I volunteer at the VFW. Out of all of those places, I only ever really cook at the VFW. At Carl's Jr. I run the cashier and at the Avocado House I do mostly prep work. Therefore, even though the VFW takes away my one day a week to sleep in (since I work at 7am on Saturdays for mentorship), I still go as often as I can. Being able to cook the pancakes, organize the gridle, and grill bacon and sausage for a couple dozen people to enjoy is as satisfying as cooking a five star meal for myself.

Answer 2

1. My EQ is: What is the most effective way for a culinary artist to enhance the flavor of a dish?

2. My first answer is: The most effective way for a culinary artist to enhance to flavor of a dish is by multiple tastes perceived by the human tongue.

3. My second answer is: The most effective way for a culinary artist to enhance to flavor of a dish is to utilize all natural ingredients.

4. Three reasons:

• Natural produce is brighter and more appealing to look at. An example of this might be seen at a farmers market, where the lettuce is bright and vibrant green as opposed to the muted color often seen in lettuces at the super market.
• Natural food is fresher and contains less or no preservatives. Preservatives effect taste, such as in the case of many apples bought from the store. If the skin of your apple tastes sour, bitter, or just a bit unusual, it is probably from the protectant sprayed on top.
• Natural food does not need/contain as as many additives. For example, most store bought chicken has been soaked or injected with preservatives that cause it to release flavors, and is then injected with some type of salt-based solution to make it retain flavor; the resulting meat is often dry, salty, and harder to cook.

5. All About Braiseing is a printed source that supports my answer.

6.  My second interview helped me come up with my answer.

7.

"It’s all about the ingredients, because if you make a really simple-ass dish and use really crappy ingredients, the end product isn’t really going to be be that great." -Chris Baker 

Well, I agree. Many things can taste decent after being cooked with tons of spices, seasonings, and other ingredients, but the mark of a good ingredient is how good it tastes on its own.