want i've been out here six years now from california and i say now as you know what it means when the weather and spring and summer arrives winter is just around the corner so i'm sorry that's kind of mean but anyways so with this nice weather we have some great produce a lot of this is from the market here and all these herbs right here are just cut out of my garden this morning it's amazing what a little warmth will do for the garden so today i wanted to do a few of my favorite things couple things that are recent on my on my menu when i do events that have been kind of popular one is i call it column asparagus fries and so we're just and then a minute show you a real simple salad it takes advantage of strawberries this time years since they're just coming into season and then i'm going to start out with a beverage which i see a number of regular faces here they probably have even had this at one of my classes or at one of my events this i think i did three years ago here too so if it's a repeat i apologize but it's it's so good i always like to remind people make this during the spring in the summer because it's so healthy and tasty easy to do stores are a little outlets along any street and know how these big five gallon glass jars maybe four or five different flavors sitting up on the shelf that were made that morning and they're just fruit water's ok and all you need to make a is some fresh fruit preferably something in season all right strawberries because maybe you want to hear that have strawberries today whatever fruit in season preferably had a speaker rightness thro blender you don't even need a recipe i gave you one but you don't even need one you throw your food in a blender yeah add some water ok and then we're going to basically puree it with just a little bit of sweetener around and just i want you to pass it around and the smell it tell me tell me it doesn't remind you of fruit loops so anyways it's got a great kind of a tropical citrusy a roman flavor to it and so there is some right here this out of my garden so it's going to throw a few sprigs of that in you can always add more of something so don't overdo it a little bit ginger i haven't your s b i didn't have ginger with me today you can either just peel it and slice a couple slices or you can grate it i think i have a teaspoon of grated on the recipe and then just showed us really fin now keep in mind when you puree something in a blender especially something of color like blueberries strawberries or even herbs the longer you puree the brighter that color is going to get ok so if this happens to be a commercial blender so it's a much higher higher powered you might have to run yours twice as long to really get it pureed get the flavor of that lemon verbena in there and also to get that nice red color if you don't play it long enough it's going to be kind of pale in color ok so you take your fruit puree this could be peaches and so on august could be apricots it could be watermelon i mean any fruit or ix you're going to put in your pitch and you're going to add enough water to your puree just to get rid of that that puree that the scottie ok so it's not watery but just one step above ok and then what you're going to do is you're going to taste it all right and it's going to be kind of flat because you just diluted it with a bunch of water ok but because you're using really right fruit you've got that nice strawberry flavor so then what you're going to do is you're going to add a little more sweetness to it in whatever form i usually at this point like to use a liquid sugar or something that's a powder that dissolves so a lot of people are into the syrup ok that's classic mexican as well that's a lot of times what they use ok as an alternate step via extract i like the powder this one happens to be from trader joe's probably the best one i've had this little container here has six hundred twenty two servings that's how sweet it is ok so you only need like a little teeny pinch or a little shake i'm just using both just to and then you want the acidity to be the same acidity that the fruit has when you're eating it fresh so it needs just a little bit more sweetener again not to make it sweet sweet but just to bring the level of fitness back to where the strawberries were and then it needs a little bit more acidity so wine juice is more traditional in mexico lemon juice is fine or you could even use such a cast of powder i mean it's perfectly natural product and  half a teaspoon would make that whole thing the whole pitcher tart and then you wouldn't be adding lemon or lime flavor if you didn't want that so so then again give it a taste and you just kind of go back and forth adjusting it until you like it however you like it throw in the fridge drink it all day long and i let my kids drink this unlimited i usually use a little sugar to start it but then i use extractor gobby syrup so there's really not a lot of sugar in it compared to most of the drinks sweetened drinks you buy ok so any questions on that yeah i period one hundred being right in there yeah and then ginger which is pure a fresh ginger right in there to the other option you have if you want to infuse a flavor like that is to make a simple syrup ahead of time which is just equal amounts of sugar and water so maybe a couple cups showed or a couple cups of water that won't you know four cups will yield about three cups bring that to a boil for about a minute add whatever infusion you want so i encourage you go home and make a pitcher all right so now i'm going to move on to the salad this is sound like it's pretty basic it's not terribly creative but there's a couple little things that make it stand out and one of those is the dressing  what i like to do a lot of times when you're between seasons is use the dried version of a fruit and then if you're in the right season use the fresh version as well so this salad you could really do all year long but it's best in the spring and summer when strawberries are fresh in their local course you get strawberries year round if you want so what i do is take some dry blueberries and you want to reconstitute them so you can reconstitute them with water however water you're somewhat you're watering it down but not really because the berries flavor already concentrated for me and dry so i bring that up to a summer want to still be kind of dry then just bring it to simmer turn it off and drain them right away and they'll still be kind of chewy so you can play around with the texture of the dried blueberry that way ok so now what we're going to use will will strain those berries and set those aside to cool now we want to take this juice that's now got some of the sugars from the dried berries in it and we want to reduce that down to its syrup and and this is going to be kind of the base for our salad dressing ok whenever you have a sugar ingredient that syrup you like molasses maple syrup honey a little bit in addressing it's going to help them also fire that dressing so it's nice and almost creamy if you will it's not going to be oily and vinegar you know separated like an oil and vinegar it's going to intensify the flavor of your dressing which isn't going to obviously coat all the leaves and it's going to add to the complexity of the salad  shallots or one of those magical ingredients in the onion family and what's great about him is they've got a really intense flavor yet they kind of just melt away if you can and some nice and small i apologize we don't have the mirror anymore i asked about it and i guess it cra so you can never go wrong starting address you now with sh but if you want it to be more of a mustard style dressing you could of course add more now when you buy a salmon vendors there's a lot of different ones out there some are better than others you really want if you want a really good quality you want to look for a product that's  italy number one you want to look for the government seal on there that says it's a true boss anik and then more importantly go to the ingredients and it should say great must concentrated great must sometimes i say red wine vinegar as well that says carmel color just pass pass it up and go to the next one and and well because carmel color number one they determine isn't good for us and number two that means it's not real balsamic vinegar ok costco actually has a very good one so and it's economical so again the basic dressing so far shallots venator a little dijon if you can always fresh ground pepper if you've ever done a taste test of pepper that came out of a little jar you bought at the store pepper that you ground a week ago and pepper that just came out three totally different quality levels of taste if you will some salt ok and in this case we've taken this down you saw that was about a third of a cup or so we've taken that down to about a tablespoon all right which has concentrated the flavor my philosophy was salad and dressings you want just enough dressing to coat the leaves right if you have too much dressing it just leaves just they will right away right and then you don't taste the greens so if you're only going to have a  dressing to coat the greens and that dressing better have some flavor right so that's will get we got the full we're going from the reduction here it's going to tie in with the blueberries that are in the salad at that cool little bit before  we're going to take some fresh strawberries and i mean you could you could slice it and you can quarter and however you want it to look in the salad when i put fruit in a salad i don't like it too thin when you are so you want to get a nice nice chunk of fruit to bite into right so we're just simply going to take our berries we're going to put them in a bowl and what happens when you sprinkle you don't need much a couple teaspoons happens when you sprinkle berries with sugar to get juicy to create their own syrup right also makes the strawberries taste really good hot i mean to take something that already tastes great and make it taste even better without too much sacrifice calorie wise so you can lead to a set no i mean ten twenty minutes is ideal but today we're crunched for time so we'll give it maybe five or ten maybe i'll start the other thing while you're sitting once that syrup kind of comes out you right so it's all about building these flavors and the more complexity you can get in in a recipe or in a dish the more of the wow factor you're going to have when you bite into it remember too you can always add more oil so add your own oil i usually start two to one taste it should be nice and acidic but not not worry or you know cringing right because if it's if it's that acidic your lettuce leaves are going to cringe when it when it hits your leaves but the more oil you put the more you dilute all the flavor you have in your base right so we'll set that aside for the time being and then we've got some nice you know you can buy the masculine spring mix all the baby lettuces some of the farms visser farms donates to all these demonstrations so we take whatever they whatever they can give us so you know usually bite size is good when you're tearing up some lettuce you want more of the baby field and then take the centers these are a little bit wet normally i would spin dry these in a spinner because the more water you have on the lettuce the more you're going to dilute that dress and you just  take the center out of there and then we've got some remain here keep in mind two of these our really big leaves tend to get a little bit better so a lot of times i'll get over that kind of first layer anybody growing let us in their garden it's just going crazy on no ok so a little slower y i just this summer this school year i started a school garden that douglas elementary and we just finished planting with all the kids one of the gals on our committee she  she took it upon herself to organize every class of kids and there's like two or three of every grade first through fifth and she got every single kid out there over the course of two weeks physically planting seeds and stuff so now we've got you know three sisters garden and we've got a real go and let us isn't strawberries and herbs and carrots and beings and so it's all the lettuce is and herbs are doing really well and then when they come back in september it should just be lush and it's an interior courtyard at the school and so it gets all this sun and for the six years i've been in the area and at that school this courtyard had nothing in it it was just dead grass and an old elaborated fountain that didn't work in the middle and so we decided to do something a little nicer so if you're ever out that way or you have kids or grandkids go check it out it's really need to see these seven eight nine ten year olds out there eating in a room and liking it you know some kids have never even held a shovel before it's amazing ok so there's  is just finished this now we've got our strawberries if yeah i mean obviously they're not in season quite yet but we have fresh blueberries i like using fresh and the dried so you get the dried intensity in the dressing scatter a few on top and some fresh blueberries on or mixed mixed into is great again a little bit of salt and pepper you want to progressively season things when you're seasoning season the dressing also want to see the season the greens all right and then and then what i'd like to do instead of crude taunts just take some good artisan style bread this is homemade ninety percent whole wheat sourdough that i make and so i just put it in a toaster until it's nice and toasty and sometimes all i'll put all of oil on it and put it back in so it's like a crew john but it's crispy on the outside and chewy in the middle yeah yeah we've been all over the bread and put it on toast or toast and then just put some all on it yeah it's my favorite way to do it to middlemarch roll a salad now instead of slicing tomatoes and cheese on a platter and drizzling it i dice it into a cubes and the tomatoes in the cheese and throw the base on and i take those to chewy crunchy sourdough while it's warm and toss it in with a ton of extra virgin olive oil and then the bread so it's like a panzanella salad but it's not got the red wine vinegar and the garlic and all that it's just the extra virgin olive oil it's good to see sa t and and the tomatoes basal and yeah but then the bread soaks up all the oil in the juice from the tomatoes and it's it's really satisfying will be doing that this year and then when you when you play the salad kind a little bit in form of the bottom get all your greens on top or even if you're doing having a party and you're serving in a big bowl or platter always put your greens on and then put all of the good stuff on top because it's people as you're eating the salad or as people are taking it out of the big portion all that stuff's going to start falling to the bottom anyway far left they saw this so it's almost like a brewery but it's not as soft and creamy as agree but you can see it's got a little bit of an aged edge on there and it's really creamy in the middle so you can either just break this up or you could slice it into slices i typically don't toss coach use with the salad because it tends to break down and then it makes everything really heavy on the greens and i'd rather just get a nice by the goat cheese here and there however you want to do more of a creamy goat cheese dressing then just whisk some goat cheese into your dressing ok that's an option too all right it's really a shame we can't taste out here i know i can but any question on the salad or the dressing or salads in general yes then it'll keep forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and longer pass it on yeah it's shelf stable you don't have to refrigerate it the only thing that might for reducing just in a nice you know good you know small stainless steel pan on a low heat for as long as it takes to take whatever amount you started with and reduce it by half but let it go nice and slow you almost don't even see any bubbles see some all right so let's move on to our asparagus fries so i started doing these a few years ago and i think i had green bean fries on a menu somewhere and i thought why not do asparagus fries bright green beans not quite ready yet and so it's proven to be really popular for an hors d'oeuvre in a lot of my events even at home occasionally i'll whip up a batch and i've got asparagus going in my yard now and had two years of it's blossoms and babies you keening are great this way as well so as a chef you don't want to just do fried asparagus you've got to call it something fancy like nice nice lemony characteristic which obviously goes well with asparagus if you don't have summer shandy which i i didn't make it to the store or any any any of your work fine if you don't want to use beer you could use you want to get fancy you could use champagne sparkling cider seltzer water but anything carbonated is what's going to help you get that nice light ten pure effect ok and then the other key is a nice light flour a dry mix ok so this one is based on a recipe from a restaurant and some cisco called boulevard one of my favorite tronson the entire country and baking it's cornstarch cake flour baking powder salt and i put a little bit of rice flour in there as well which makes it even lighter and then depending on how think you make it gives you different results so if you want to really light thin crispy coating then it's i mean you can make it almost watery ok it won't even look like it's sticking to the asparagus but when you  get this really thin coating if you want it thicker like a fish and chips then you just leave the batter thicker you put less beer or more more other ingredients and then really the only thing is you don't want to open the beer more than or make the batter more than an hour ahead half hour ahead so the more carbonation you have the better your temper is going to come out  and so while we're doing this also talk a little bit about deep frying and things to look for things to keep your your food at its best also help you understand  fried food doesn't have to be as bad as people think it is for you especially with a better life this is probably if you do everything correctly no different in calories than if you took a spur guess and tossed it in some butter all boil ok let's just pass some of this around so just feel free to tear off a piece and just eat it too on it and what you'll find is you're chewing it all of a sudden it gets really intensely acidic kind of sour not so much acidic the sour  it's a little bit like a spinach leaf but it's got a nice lemony tartness to it and the great thing about sorrel unlike basal it doesn't turn brown or black like faisal does so it's years ago i thought why not make a for the asparagus and so that's kind of how it  so you could use any pesto recipe and just substitute sorrel for basal and this is the steps of perennial cade so is it down there as well and really all you gotta do is just strip the leaves off especially these thicker stems can be a little bit fibrous  d yeah i started with a two plants six years ago when i moved here now i've got eight and this is a this is this was all off about three quarters of one plant so they can get bushy and as they start to you get shoots that come up that want to start building just cut it all back in and they'll keep coming all summer long and then comes back next year can dig it out divide it plant more if you want give it away sorrel with salmon salmon with sorrel sauce it's it's so good you basically sweat a bunch of shallots and a little bit of butter and add a little bit of wine and a splash of vermouth and a whole bunch of sorrel and cook it down t it melts and gets all wealthy any other sir and then add a little cream and serve it like that or you can puree it into more of a creamy sauce and it's just can't explain it it's just salmon and sorrel it's like peanut butter and jelly this goes really well together it's also great when the leaves are tiny when they're nice and tiny about that size or smaller i planted next to my lawn right i plant my lettuce near my sorrel and i just as i'm picking lettuce and thrown in a bowl for a salad i put a bunch of  the amount of garlic is up to you obviously some people like more some people like less but keep in mind when you're when you're cooking you're trying to balance all your flavors so too much go like that's all you're going to taste right so you have to kind of find that fine line too much go like you can make it a little bit spicy so anybody ever planted garlic use it when it comes up in the spring yeah spring like i'm seeing more and more one or two farmers have it here year round so anyway the gardens are even if you don't if get a little shoot in the refrigerator that's that's the sprout side of this take your finger and just poke some holes in the soil about this deep popular cloven and covered with dirt and is what it go and springtime you're going to end up with a chute looks like a green onion ok and at that point in till about mid june you can just pull that out of the grow out of the ground and use it like a week or a green onion all the way down and it's a nice mild garlic flavor ok hasn't formed any paper hoskin and so what happens is this this little of clothes that you the host that you started with that little chute is your new two new head of garlic right but it starts out this one forms another whole head of garlic with all the paper around it and then in september you pull that whole thing up and you lay him out you let him dry and then you've got garlic for the entire winter i still have garlic i pulled up last year that is still fresh and it's been on my countertop it's not soft or anything so i just i just once there once i i pull him out of the garden and i wash him awfully good and his lame out to dry and yeah there are smaller heads but the garlic still good nine months ten months later without even refrigerated i price and just as good in something like this you know if you're just going to eat chunks of cheese then the reggiano is great are you going to grade it over a result over something reggiano is fantastic but i typically use a put on for things like this  and i call it a sorrel parmesan they all eat so i go a little heavier on the parmesan and then pine nuts if you've got pine nuts if not a lot of regions in italy use walnuts stead of pine nuts for pe salt little bit of ground white pepper brown like peppers not something most people have in their pantry it's in every single restaurant kitchen i've ever worked in you don't need very much but again it's like shallots it's one of those flavors that kind of adds to the complexity of a dish without you really knowing what what is it that made that taste that way if you took black peppercorns and just took that black outer husk if you will off the white peppercorn all right where is my top now if you're going to use the past though in a maze you don't want to center too oily because menezes is an emotion and when you if you make homemade maydays you know there's a ratio there's a joke and there's mustard and there's oil and then lemon juice or vinegar asparagus fries i do about equal amounts now this is again this is going to really go bad in the fridge but because of the garlic and and the yet and that's another thing it will after a few days the flavor starts to change it just doesn't taste as fresh if you will it's always best the day you ma all right so our oil when we deep fry three sixty's kind of the magic number all right at least for anything that's kind of battered ok if you're doing maybe have gone ish like fried shallots or something delicate like that it doesn't have to be three sixty that it will actually it'll burn anything that's got a sugar content onions have natural sugar and leaks out you know it's a natural sugar but for all intents and purposes three sixty's the number you're going to look for if your battery and battered and fried items number two maintaining that temperature or close to it during the frying is important as well obviously if if three sixty's important and you put a bunch of food in you put too much for the amount of oil or for the capacity that your stove has to reheat it and the oil drops to two ninety or three hundred you're right you're right you may as well started flying at three hundred right so maintaining that temperature and you do that based on how much food you put in again depending on how much of volume and how much firepower you have under it this is an infrared thermometer so it only does surface temperatures but it's great for things like deep fryer i hate the probes they always fall over into the oil and things like that so these are very handy you can find these online all right so we all are we are there so it's three sixty's an object number one i typically do is i go to about three seventy three seventy five so when i put my food in the oil temp drops  not dropping as far under three sixty as it would if i started at three sixty but it's also not going to stay at three seventy five for more than about a second ok so you can use any size asparagus you know asparagus only needs like if you put it in boiling water it only needs like thirty seconds to cook the size and it's still going to it's crunch to it some people don't like the crunch cook a little longer you see recipes it's a cookie or asparagus super blanch asparagus for five minutes don't you're going to lose that nice bright color you can use all the vitamins all the flavor and i just you know typically they have their natural breaking point you know this is tough and this is tender if you've got the really fat ones even after you snap it some sorry sometimes you still need to peel some of that outer skin but this size typically once you snap it it's fine the consistency is right now you can see you can still see the asparagus  pot that size might do six or eight at a time obviously or you kind of put them in one by one so if you put too many about a time you put the lobster first is done and then it's hard to tell and so see it's still a three sixty four so that's perfect now too hot to start can be a problem to especially with a batter like this the oil is too hot and the spirit goes in it so violent in there the batter comes off so there's a kind of a fine line you know that twenty thirty seconds to set before you even try to touch it otherwise you might see they might stick or they might to each other or your you and then just give them a flip and again try to maintain three sixty three sixty five or three sixty two right now so at that temperature you're going to minimize the fact it gets absorbed into your co and with a really thin coating like this there's only so much oil it could absorb in a worst case scenario and the best thing to do is always shake off as much of that oil over that part as you can and then put it on a wire or rock a lot of people like to put it on a paper towel put it on a paper towel a paper towel is going to absorb that excess grease and an asparagus is going to sit in it doesn't make sense let it cool on on  these asparagus actually will stay crispy sometimes for ten twenty minutes and you can actually warm in the oven of course are never as good as when they're right out and cool just enough that you can tolerate tolerate them yes no you don't have to rush out and buy rice flour i just use that as an example of how you can play around with the finished product you could change the ratio of your corn starch and flour you could try it with regular flo all kinds of different results you can achieve this is just a really nice light combination and the idea here is to have as basically as thin a coating as possible and still have a crunchy exterior because then the vegetables really stand out flavor and texture and all that and then the battery gets in between them all that before every day right so then this is a lot of times how well i'll serve these guys and also you want to make sure when you season fried food you season it right when it comes out while it's still a little bit wet isn't the salt will stick so now if you're going to do the  so you can kind of see what they look like when they're done you know this isn't something you're going to probably make for yourself every night but it's it's you know fried food is kind of a special occasion thing or you're entertaining or in my case it's always really entertaining and and people are looking for  distinctive as i call it a distinctive dining experience they don't want just a plain old food that you can get anywhere and so allows me to be creative in and allows them to get something a little bit different and when people are paying for a service like that they typically want to indulge a little bit and really it's better to have more oil than not enough in your pot so they have room to kind of swim around and flip on oil is is good for deep frying extroversion all the oil you can very expensive because you use a lot of it and also the oil breaks down it has a lower tolerance for it for the high temperatures but in italy and spain  and then i'll put it in like a heavy freezer ziploc bags and i'll put in the freezer and it keeps for ever like that and like this or here could use probably two more so you know refrigerator freezer and when you freeze it all you got to do is run the bag under hot water for about three seconds slit it with a knife and it comes right out into your pan yeah stuff but also on three sixty's i think you need to do is what you want to do with your blossom is you want to open this up i'll just with a little pair of scissors just kind of open this up on one side like that you get the bug out of there too at the same time take that little guy  so to hold it in there and then when you batter it that'll seal but if the seams are just meeting like this and you put in a fryer it's going to be the oil is going to get in and it's going to be  if you didn't get it any brochures or you're interested there's some up there i've got some here as well for those who don't know i'm basically a private chef and i'm your personal chef if you're looking for a distinctive dining experience a large i do number of weddings now every year and what i did but what i do a little differently is if it's a dinner party i come to your house and i cook everything on site so it's like going to a five star restaurant to drink your own wine relax all my can be interactive if you want and then larger events like weddings and graduations and things like that again i cook everything on site i don't cook it carry it hold it rewarm it so it's always very fresh and i always start here at the market as far as shopping and then amend with grocery stores at least this time of year so if that's something you're ever interested in my brochures and contact information are there and thanks for coming out and enjoy your weekend