Uncle Vinny's 40th Birthday

My brother-in-law Vinny turned 40, so our little 11 year old Chef R.D. decided to make pork and ginger fuji apple chutney pot stickers (recipe was from Chef Ming Tsai's new book Simply Ming:Easy Techniques for East-Meets-West Meals). If you know anything about Chef Tsai, this is a very ambitious undertaking for an 11 year old. But, he is very confident in his skill and did not hesitate once during this undertaking. Ming Tsai is one of R.D. favorite chefs, and we were luck enough to eat at his restaurant Blue Ginger and meet Ming.

The day started very early with a trip to the grocery... thank goodness Shaw's had everything needed (it normally doesn't). R.D. likes to start out by reading the recipe several hundred times, this is a tediousness part of R.D.'s technique, but works well for him.

First came the filling, R.D. had to make the Fuji Apple Chutney which would be combined later to the pork. This took quite a while, all the apples had to be peeled, cored and chopped. Once done it was added to the pork with only a few other ingredients. I did help fill the dumplings, but once done we had a ton for the freezer and 40 to bring to the birthday party.


Now for the hard part... sauteing/steaming. R.D. knew this would be the tricky part, but he quickly mastered it. The recipe calls for leaveing the dumplings in the pan to crisp a second time. We decided to do this at the party, which worked out great and the relatives got to see R.D. in action. Everyone was very impressed, and the hostess actually gave R.D the additional task of watching other items on the stove.

The party was a hit and so were the pot stickers, they were gone in less than 20 minutes, and R.D. left the crowd wanting more.


June 21, 2008

Grill It! with Bobby Flay

We periodical visit the Food Network website for recipes and to see if anything will be happening in our area, like a Throw Down. One day while visiting the site, I saw there is a new show Grill it! with Bobby Flay that was looking for people to grill with Bobby. We decided to make a video entry and we crossed our fingers to get selected. The show is looking for people to show their best BBQ techniques in less than two minutes. Two minutes is not very long, but we planed a basic menu of cheese burgers an instead of french fries backed potatoes. The hardest part of this video would be the continues talking for the full two minutes. The other road block for the video is that it was March, and March in New England is not the easiest place to BBQ. The first thing we needed to get, even before our ingredients was charcoal. The only kind we could find was self lighting, so we knew the burgers wouldn't taste great but that really doesn't matter for video.

I thought the tapping of the video would be hard, and the editing would be harder. So my idea was to have R.D. practice a few times with out stopping and i would just have the video running with out him knowing. But, during the tapping he knew that it was just practice so R.D. didn't really work the ingredients like he would in the real tapping. So, after about 4 practice runs i told R.D. to run around the house a few times to get out the nerves and we would go for it! R.D. did the first part of the video, up to putting the burgers on the grill in ONE take. I couldn't believe it, but it was great. Part two of the video took 4 or 5 tries and the end took about 1o takes, yes the biting of the burger took the longest. Unfortunately the show started last week, so i guess we did not get selected, but it was fun and we have this great video memory.