NOTICE: This Blog Is Moving
Category: Blogging

Hear ye!  Hear ye!  Update your bookmarks, rejigger your feed reader, and clear out your cache, 'cause this blog is packing up and moving out.  That's right, never to be one who is happy with the status quo, I have changed blog platforms and am now on Wordpress.  Here's the new address for my blog --

Sean McClintock on Wordpress

If you happen to be reading this via RSS feed, then here is the new feed URL --

Feed for Sean McClintock on Wordpress

The reason for the switch is because I have decided to start another blog (and actually update it frequently) that will be focused solely on my work.  It is... (drum roll, please)...

The Last Course Discourse

I decided that Wordpress.com was the best place to host this blog, which is why I'm moving my personal blog over there as well.  It will be easier if they are both on the same host.  Plus, myspace just isn't the best blog hosting solution.

Come on over and have a read.  So long MySpace!!

9:44 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Farm Bill, Schrmarm Bill, Why should I care?
Category: News and Politics

Okay, let's boil it down.  60% of our farmers receive NO subsidies.  Of those 40% who do, the top 10% received 2/3rds of all subsidies, averaging $35,000 a year.  The other lucky few who receive subsidies average only $700 a year.  The GAO found that $1.1 BILLION in subsidies were being paid to DEAD PEOPLE (over a seven year period).  Why do people like David Letterman, David Rockerfeller, and other "millionaire farmers" receive subsidies when small family farms are forced to seek, on average, 82% of their income from non-farm sources?  The system is broken!  Call your Senators and tell them to fix this mess.

Why Our Farm Policy Is Failing - TIME

5:28 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Restaurant Wages and Staff Shortages
Category: Food and Restaurants

Check out this interesting article from the San Francisco Chronicle

Chefs' high hopes, low pay leave S.F. restaurants starved for help

6:09 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Paper or Plastic?
Category: Life

"I have my own bag."

You would be surprised just how much this phrase can throw off a NYC store clerk or grocery bagger.  We have had a plethora of responses, the most common is a cursory acknowledgement of our statement ("Uh huh") and then they proceed to put the items into a plastic bag anyway.  There is also the very annoying response of moving the bag aside (which we've placed on top of the goods to be purchased with the express purpose of forcing them to acknowledge our bag), ringing up the goods, and then putting them in a plastic bag anyway.  All the while our bag languishes to the side amidst our protests of "We have our own bag!"  Then there is the test of wills in which the clerk rings up our goods and then leaves them on the counter, waiting for us to bag them ourselves.  I guess just because we've brought our own bag they feel this relieves them of the responsibility of putting the items in the bag.  Have I mentioned how much I'm looking forward to getting back to Seattle?

Maybe I should carry around copies of this article from the Washington Post that talks about the environmental impacts of paper and plastic bags.  The moral of the story - bring your own bags, people!  I carry around a collapsible bag with me.  It doesn't take up much room in my shoulder bag and has prevented a lot of plastic bags from winding up in landfills or being burned in China or being swallowed by a sea turtle.

1:51 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Job Update and Burgerlets
Category: Food and Restaurants

If you remember from a month or so ago, I left Jean-Georges and decided to pursue stagiaire positions at several restaurants before Lisa and I head back to Seattle.  I started my first stage last week at Del Posto with their very talented pastry chef, Nicole Kaplan.  I feel like this kitchen is good fit for me and I'm looking forward to spending six weeks with them.  As for my next stage... I'm not sure yet.  I need to go out and trail at some more restaurants to figure out where I might want to spend some more time.

Speaking of time, I have had a bit more of that on my hands this past month.  Some of that extra time has been funneled into cooking at home more often.  One dinner in particular was a very big success.  Lisa just couldn't stop talking about it (and I'm pretty pleased with the results as well).  I stopped by the butcher shop, one of the few left in the city, and picked up a mixture of ground beef and pork to use for hamburgers.  This is something I've discovered recently and I really never plan to go back to just plain beef burgers.  The addition of the pork really makes a difference.

Since Lisa will only eat burgers on actual buns (not sliced bread), I either had to go to the grocery store and buy the buns or make them myself.  Since I had the time, I decided to make my own buttermilk buns.  The buns turned out a little smaller than I anticipated, not quite full-size but not quite "slider" size either.  This is why I decided to call them Burgerlets instead of burgers or sliders.

The toppings for the burgers were goat cheese, carmalized onions, tomato "jam", fig jam, mayo, and lettuce.  I slowly carmelized the onions and then finished them off with some red wine.  We didn't have any slicing tomatoes, just little assorted cherry tomatoes.  I decided to make a jam out of them, however I didn't want to have to cook the tomatoes down and lose that fresh tomato taste.  So instead I chopped up the tomatoes, put them in a strainer, salted them, and let the juices drain off.  I then thickened the tomato juice using xanthan gum and added it back to the tomato solids.  This created a tomato "jam" that was thick enough to stay put in the burger but still had the fresh tomato flavor.  The fig jam I had made a few days earlier as a way to save some black mission figs that were almost expired.  Actually, they had just started to mold but the great part about making a jam is that you boil it and kill off the little bit of mold that started to grow.  I learned that trick at JG where we would save all the mushy and slightly moldy berries to be boiled down and made into sorbet.  Here's a picture of the final product.



And a shot of the sweet potato fries as they cooled after the initial blanching.

9:54 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

A Meal in Progress
Category: Food and Restaurants

After our wedding last year Lisa and I had a lot of leftover barbecue.  Really good barbecue.  The kind that takes a lot of time, a lot of skill, and more than a little bit of love.  Lisa's cousin's husband (or should I just say cousin-in-law?) has a bbq catering business in Kansas City.  Craig, the cousin-in-law cum barbecue king, smoked many pounds of various meats for the event and brought it with him on the plane from KC.  You can check out his company, Belly Up BBQ.

One of the various types of meat was a delicious smoked salmon.  The morning after the wedding I was trying to figure out what to make Lisa and I for breakfast.  We didn't have too much in the fridge besides a lot of leftover barbecue.  I wanted to do something a little nicer than cereal or toast.  That's when my eyes fell upon the foil packet of smoked salmon and my mind was alight with thoughts of softly scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, and cream cheese.  And that is just exactly what I did.  It was such a big hit with Lisa that it became one of her new favorite dishes.  Unfortunately, we don't get smoked salmon very often and so I have only made it a few times since.

Over this past Labor Day weekend we went up to Cape Cod and stayed at a friend's vacation house.  It was a relaxing weekend and we had a good time.  Well... I did.  Lisa, unfortunately, came down with a cold and it was at it's worst that weekend.  She soldiered through though and we even managed to spend a little bit of time on the beach on Sunday.  As far as food goes, we were a little disappointed with the Cape.  The food we experienced there was rather mediocre.  We tried to go out to dinner on Saturday night to what was supposed to be one of the nicest restaurants on the Cape, but were sorely disappointed (and much lighter in the wallet unfortunately).  Thankfully for Lisa she had almost completely lost her sense of taste because of the cold.  She wasn't able to tell just how bad the food was.  Oh, I almost forgot, we did stumble upon a bakery making fresh, hot malasadas, which was a nice treat.  On Sunday we managed to find a fish monger where we picked up some halibut to make for dinner that evening and some wonderful smoked bluefish to take back home.

Fast-forward one week.  Lisa has finally regained most of her sense of taste after it being wholly absent for more than a week.  We're trying to decide what to make for dinner when she remembers the smoked bluefish.  Smoked fish - check.  Eggs - check.  Cream cheese - check.  Add a little green chives and sliced shallots and we've got ourselves a meal!  To accompany the scramble we sliced a local tomato and sprinkled it with sea salt and extra-virgin olive oil.  A couple pieces of toasted multi-grain bread with our favorite butter, Plugra.  Breakfast for dinner!  It was fantastic.

12:03 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Gimme Some Sugar
Category: Food and Restaurants

It all started with ice cream.  Here's the concept - Milk & Cookies - but the milk is frozen and the cookies are deconstructed.  I want to make an ice cream that has the mouth-feel of a custard base but has no eggs and very low sweetness level.  Basically, I want it to taste just like milk but have the consistency of a fat- and sugar-rich ice cream.  That desire has sent me on a month-long research spree.  I have been trying to learn everything I can about ice cream and how it is formulated, including the use of gums, modified starches, sugars, etc.  I have learned a lot about hydrocolloids (gums) and modified starches but have not had as much luck finding good information about different types of sugars and what properties they attribute.

That is until today.  Well, it's not exactly what I'm looking for, but it's a lot better than anything else I've found so far.  Rose Levy Beranbaum published a piece all about Sugar in Food Arts magazine several years ago and has it posted on her blog.  It's broad in its coverage but doesn't go as in-depth as I would like into each sugar.  The search will continue but this is such a good article that I had to share it with you.

Sugar by Rose Levy Beranbaum

7:28 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

It’s a Food Fight!
Category: News and Politics

9:51 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Out The Door at JG
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

I tendered my resignation today at Jean-Georges.  Wednesday will be my last day.

Maybe you noticed that I haven't been posting much about my job.  Well, that's because I really didn't have a lot of good things to post.  I have struggled to meet my employer's expectations, unfortunately.  I have learned so much from this job and I know that I have improved quite a bit but unfortunately it hasn't been enough for my chef and I have run out of chances.  The final straw was an incident that happened two Saturdays ago.  A ticket came in for two dessert tastings but with a note that there could be no alcohol in the dessert.  I immediately thought of Jean-Georges' Famous Cherry Berry Soup, which is fully loaded with alcohol. I ran back to the kitchen and asked me sous, Emily, what I should do in place of the soup.  She told me to use the Strawberry Soda from one of the Jean-Georges desserts.  Great!  I ran back to the station, called upstairs for the strawberry soda, finished plating the dessert, and sent it out with the runner with instructions to pick up the soda on the way to the table (they have to pass by the JG pastry station on their way upstairs).  Not too long later the server stopped by my station and told me that I had screwed up.  I had forgotten to substitute out the chartreuse ice cream. Chartreuse is a liqueur.  DAMN!!  I was so upset with myself.

The ice cream was part of a new dessert and it was the first night that it was included on the tasting menu.  It didn't even cross my mind when the ticket said "no alcohol."  The guest is a Muslim and abstains from alcohol.  Of course, he's a regular customer and supposedly "spends a lot of money with us."  I later found out that he was accidentally served alcohol in something the last time he was in the restaurant.  He was quite upset that it had happened again and apparently stormed out vowing never to return.  I also later found out that there is now a note on his account that, should he miraculously return sometime in the future, that all of his food must be given to him by his server, not a runner.  Presumably, the waiter would be in a better position to stop any alcohol from being given.  This served as a very good lesson for me.  From now on I will thoroughly consider every component of a dessert whenever there is some sort of restriction on what can be served.  I mean, what if it was something he was allergic to?  I could have put somebody in the hospital because I wasn't careful.  Well, never again.

Never again at Jean-Georges because I won't be there anymore.  Like I said, I had been having some difficulty meeting expectations and this seemed to be the last straw.  There is a weekly "corporate" meeting on Tuesdays (last week's didn't happen) where they were supposedly going to discuss my future with the company.  I decided it was better not to wait for that to happen and so I tendered my resignation today.  Johnny, my chef, has been understandably upset with me, but he is also being supportive in my decision to leave.  He has offered to help find me a new position somewhere else.  The way we both see it is that I tried to jump to the top too fast.  I'm just not quite ready for the demands of a four-star restaurant.  Granted, I was working the cafe/bar, Nougatine, but Johnny still demands very high performance levels.  Everyone else in the kitchen has at least a year or more experience working somewhere else before they came to Jean-Georges.  So all of those "just out of school" mistakes were already out of the way.  For me, I needed to make those mistakes and learn from them, but there just wasn't a lot of room for that.  Don't get me wrong, Johnny gave me a lot of support, but I just ran out of rope.  Even if they would have decided to keep me after this last incident, I knew that I would be skating on razor thin ice from then on and I just did not want to try to perform where there was no more room left for error.

So now what?  Good question.  Johnny and I discussed some options today and he made some suggestions.  What I'm leaning towards is using the remaining nine months we have left in NYC (before we move back to Seattle) to work as a stagiere in as many of the top restaurants as I can.  A stagiere, or stage, is a person who works for free just for the opportunity and experience.  It usually lasts a few months at most and it doesn't have the same commitment as being employed by the restaurant.  It is a great opportunity to absorb a lot of ideas and inspirations in a short amount of time.  Unfortunately, it is unpaid work.  So I might try to pick up some catering work a couple times a week to at least provide some income.  Thankfully, Lisa's salary is enough for us to live on and anything I make has been going to paying down my culinary school loan as quickly as possible.

My theory is that everything happens for a reason.  I'll make the best out of this situation and I'm sure I'll be better off in the end.

Stay tuned!

10:52 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Menu Psychology
Category: Food and Restaurants

Forbes has an interesting article that lightly touches on the psychology of menu layout.  This is something that I studied in my management program at ICE and found very interesting.  Here's a blurb that's specific to dessert trends.  It's more about health consiousness than menu psychology, which I find it strange being included in the article, but is interesting none the less --

3:48 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment