yeah yeah as a chef i mean as not being a chef i mean it was over the top you know architecture of course food and an art and whatnot but as a chef it was it was like an aha moment for me and i wished i had the opportunity twenty thirty years ago although i may have altered in a probably a positive way how i cook but i also cook the way i cook because of the path that i had right so but from here on forward on abuse and a lot of butter so just a quick note to you know it's it's interesting that i can talk the whole hour about butter i just did a butter actually butter tasting in class at th center for the arts last week but are in europe if you have not been it it's like a revelation it's it's so different than what we buy in the grocery store here unless you're buying  a european style butter and i'll talk about butter a little bit more a little bit later but if you do want to research go online butter is not bad for you the one thing i realized in all over france but i was in paris i mean they butter french butter which is higher in butterfat than our butter and bread every day and it's a very healthy population and there's a lot of research in the last few years butter is not bad for you it doesn't cause bad cholesterol it doesn't it actually doesn't make you gain weight fat actually good fats are good for you ok people been eating better for thousands of years and there was no there was no not no but the the circumstances of heart attacks and coronary disease and all that has only increased over the years we've been the butter for many many more more years and that right so of course it's all moderation but i'm going to use some european style butter i'll talk about butter a little bit later so don't be afraid of butter but i still love all all too so i thought springtime in michigan doesn't sound quite like springtime in paris but being that i was there and the markets you know are two three times a week people shop two or three times a week at the market for dinner that night it's just a whole different culture  so i thought i'd i do some of my favorite dishes that i've been doing for years but the fricken say isn't something i really have done that often across through today i've been doing for years and i when i was in the restaurant business about fifteen twenty years ago one of the servers was from france and when i finally decided to put a cloth to say on the menu she said you nailed it that this is just like what i grew up with is really not too much different then a stew or a braise if you've braised a pot roast or you student deal except africa so you don't brown the food doesn't cook as long usually more tender cuts of meat like chicken ok so we're going to do it with spring vegetables now over the nine year and your recipe i'm not going to use today because it's not all here and i didn't want to go to the grocery store i was tired and leave this morning person it's not market  so i am going to take what they have i mean if you have three ingredients for franco say that's fine spiritus mushrooms those two alone with a little bit of garlic make a nice because a so the process of my water ever comes to boil and i almost forgot i need to i need to save some of that water so the key to a really nice vegetable focus say is in the cooking of the vegetables ok sure you could just start cooking in the pan and start adding vegetables and simmer all together but different vegetables cook in different amounts of time so if you want to preserve the flavor of the vitamins in a color you really need to prepare each one on its own so certain volves maybe another twenty minutes of time but in the end  i think you're going to be much happier with the end product and then as far as finishing it you can have a brothy for this a you can have a thick focus a can have an in between you can have a butter based you can have a cream based and it's really up to you if you do to even use a little flour and make it a rube aist so it's a little thicker and you could do that as well there's really no hard and fast rules so maybe you will do this while we're waiting for that water to which is equal amounts of modern flour that in and cook together everybody knows what a best mill is right that smells milk that's then usually you sweat some onions and then you add your flour and then you add your melting and you have this thick like it's  and send it out with a little more stock they keep talking little boil eventually so ok so there are certain vegetables that will want to blanch ahead of time because they take a little longer to cook like carrots potatoes all right and then there's obviously other ingredients like asparagus spring onion spring garlic peas things like that that don't require really any pre cooking because they cook in a matter of a minute or two ok so it's almost they're almost there we're going to we're going to plant your potatoes you could cook those from scratch in the pan if you could i'm really thin because by the time they sweat and you have the stock they'll be cooked through but for the sake of ease if they're already cooked just to the point of being tender then you know it is thrown in your reheat in them things like carrots may have different size carrots when you cut you just want to try to keep the sizes of the piece the same so they all go in they all cooked evenly right so there's a  cut in french technique called cut and it's also known as a roll cut and it gives you kind of a neat shape it's always fun to have your vegetables cut kind of differently instead of everything in the same you know cube or dice or shape so if you just cut on a diagonal and then you roll your carrot and you bisect that previous slates you get these little kind of rounded triangular but we can cut carrots this one's a little big right so we can just cut that one and half and we can kind of mimic the same thing even if it's been cut in half i have a great idea anybody here know how to develop apps what if they sent some kind of satellite up that has a really strong mir that could could zoom in on another just with the camera zoom in on this and then  if anybody does that please please give me some royalties or something hey we're boylen all right so any plans vegetables so and wind so this is kosher salt i know it looks like a lot because it is more than you probably would normally use you want the water to taste salty not like the ocean but still it's definitely salty that's going to help season and flavor the vegetables it's also going to help set the color and a green vegetable all right potatoes you'd usually start with cold water and bring it up to a simmer but it's i mean not in the world if you just throw them in and and then we've got some hot ice water that makes  so does it take just a couple minutes because it cut fairly small and we've got to potatoes and get some asparagus everyone knows by now asparagus and snaps at its natural point so when you buy it and it's it's already snapped it's probably already snapped kind of at the tender spot sometimes you get the thicker asparagus from about here to here it can be a little fibrous so you can either just peel out away or you can to snap it again you can save you have a bunch of these see these and just make some asparagus soup literally and when vegetables are in peak season and have all their flavor especially green vegetables like asparagus and peas you don't even need stockings use water long as you season it s little bit a little bit of butter cream at the end you remember fat fat carries flavors when you eat foods carries a flavor throughout your mouth so anything with a little butter or a little cream or little bit of olive oil it's i've got some peas fresh we rationally thought out although not very often you find fresh peas even at the market so frozen acceptable i mean really most frozen vegetables are picked up at their peak rightness right and then there with the technology today they're flash frozen they're almost as good as fresh as long as you don't overcook  then we make our vehicle say you know this is traditionally this is kind of the type of saucepan you would use i'm going to use something a little bigger well sorry city hall and none not going to put regular onion because i've got spring onion in spring garlic you don't i've only found spring garlic here at the market maybe once or twice who has a garden who has a garden but doesn't really plant much in it who doesn't have a garden but wants to plant something super easy ok so when you take a head a clover gerlach you know sometimes you see em start to sprout all you do either at the end  and then about four weeks ago even though it wasn't really spring this is what i have had and now i've planted more since then so i have a whole bunch of this in my garden and what happens and you can see here you see this right here that's the original clove and if i wait another week or two when i pull this out this will actually be decomposed into the soil and this is spring garlic or also known as the first day of summer the green garlic has no longer spring so you'll see this on restaurant menus either springbrook garlic or green garlic milder it's a nice mild garlic flavor you can use the whole thing that's like a green onion yep so all i do is cut the end off and then even with like a scallion i'll usually peel off those bottom two because batter really good that way to all right but you know usually usually don't shock in ice water you just take them out and let them kind of dry wise they look really nice to see the inside oh and have a little bit of butter because butter adds flavor and you want design about a medium heat again we're not we're not trying to saute we're not trying to brown the food at all the latter spring garlic in our spring onions the asparagus we can literally just stirrin towards the end all right so we're just going to sweat those you don't want to see what i'm too long it was only a color let's see i'm used to having so many other vegetables and if you had leaks your leaks could go in with the iranians if you're doing mushrooms you could what i would probably do is do your butter or oil put your mushrooms in cooking mushrooms for three four or five minutes you know render out some of the juices and then dump him out put them on a pla you don't have to use the butter but it definitely makes it better and so on like a braise or a student cooks for you know hours either with a lid on low he or you put boil it in put in the oven for two or three hours a spring for a spring or a fall or winter vegetable for it to say it's pretty if you want to do not plan to anything you could you just east stirring and cooking quite a bit longer for the carrots and the potatoes to get cooked through in which case you tell them you you know much smaller much thinner all right and then a little salt this is coated who uses kosher salt to cook with ok so coach it always looks like more kosher salt but it's twice as course as table salt and so i using half as much as you would be a matter of fact years ago i was doing a class at a williams sonoma and somebody said how come table salt has twice as much sodium as kosher salt he said well it doesn't out twice as much salt or sodium and it has twice as much sodium per teaspoon because a teaspoon of kosher salt the same as a half teaspoon of table salt so if you measure it out it's two to one being done or done in season and again always season sees season progressively beginning the middle and the end and you're through out a lot more flavor a lot more complexity i haven't used this analogy in a while so maybe if you you probably heard it before if you take a pot of beans and you start to cook them and they become tender and then you season the pot of beans you've done just that you season the pot of beans but you have in season the beans if you add the salt as soon as the beans start to soften or if you're using a stock or even a water make sure the stock seasoned season before the beans start to absorb all that season liquid now your seasoning the beans it's the same thing with food ok specially anything starchy so you can see right now it's you know it's kind of watery and a soupy if you wanted to achieve a thick kind of a thick frickin say without adding really too much butter or  fat of any sort then after you sweated your vegetables you could sift in or sprinkle in maybe a tablespoon to two tablespoons of all purpose flour over the top and cook that in with the vegetables for like two minutes that cooking that for a couple minutes helps kind of cook the starchy floury taste out of the flour then when you add your stock make sure it's cool because if you have a hot stock to hot ruut lumps up so add some room temperature or slightly cool stock to your pan and  in gently so you don't mutilate the vegetables and then you'll instantly have a thick sauce ok and then if you want to do it with just a little bit a butter a little bit of cream then you can do that too all right and then for fresh herbs i mean right now parsley chives tara gone and all these nice delicate herbs are in season sage and rosemary are to my sage my sage plants doing really well i'm going to say the sage or something else and with chives and green onions and things like that the further up you get the less tender it gets right so if i want to cut like a little longer pieces i'll do that at the tips and then as i get down to the base i'll do more of the mince and then you get kind of different sizes shapes and pieces in here as well you can do any my personal favorite specially now is butter so we'll start with just about a tablespoon and a half this is an african say for probably three people so tables have tables been per person that's not even close to getting to be crazy and then what you want to do is make sure the butter's cooler or really cold make sure it's not warm or it tends to just melt and separate  as you start in as you add stir it in keep the pan moving and that'll help it almost a fire with your stock and then of ac and then if you want to if you want to thicken your sauce a little more take your vegetables out if you've got you know a little bit of bit of everything you can see it all and then what you can do is take your your juices that are in here your stock in your butter and turn that back on high heat and it should reduce down in thick enough don't go too far or the bottle separate out and will be oily and then you can also add  i know it's really mean for me to taste when you can't  and then once that's big enough will put a little bit more on top p you just pull the string down there nice and round kind of diameter my finger maybe a little bit more plump usually about eight or ten pieces in there so it's a good thing to give somebody and you want to give him something new for a while but you know frozen peas are already blanch and cooked so they're tender if you don't plant your fresh peas long enough they're going to start kind of dry they're see the difference so what you've done is you thinking that you've also concentrated all those vegetable flavors in there so you can have a much more flavorful sauce any questions on that it's super simple and it's you don't have to have all those vegetables i just kind of put down everything that's going to be available i'd say in the next couple weeks and probably most of the summer you know in the  winter you know or the fall months and mix it up a little bit all right so it's going to have the most flavor it's going to thicken up really nice going to cost you a bit more but it's super good if you've never tasted fresh cream this is about fresh as you can get without this taken straight from the cow because you have to pasteurize and whenever you buy cream or milk in the grocery store for the most part it's all it's all pasteurized or ultra pasteurized the more pasteurized it is as an ultra the more the higher the heat they use so they're able to kill the bacteria that could cause a problem not will but could much quicker right so there you know and in the commercial industry like that they don't want to they want to get this stuff passed risin on the shelf as soon as they can to psych and a good aged wine taste better and cost more than a wine that they make in a bottle right because they're sitting on it and that takes him and tori so a good four hundred fifty for an hour instead of maybe one hundred eighty five for ten minutes ok so to make crime fresh all you do is take some fresh cream and warm it up to about room temperature about seventy degrees there's an infrared thermometer of anybody whom already done of course being out it room temperature itself and then you need to add some sort of acid or culture to it to get it kind of thicken and change its flavor so there's different ways you could use yogurt you could use but make sure it's good yogurt fresh and sweeten it and what be in it for dessert i like to make a lemon juice lemon juice also makes it yes i've never done it with kiefer yeah let me know  about a tablespoon per cup of cream so you need to know room temperature tables you know lemon juice per cup you can use wine juice if you want to all right and then you'll see it's already thickened up michael reduced i think in the cream a little bit right just by the temperature and acidity it kind of coagulat there that it's not going to go bad all right partner a fridge and then the next day it's it's basically ready  the next day you've got what's like kind of sour cream right it's thick and you'll notice too i don't have regular cream but if you put regular cream next to this this one's a little yellow or most organic creams the cows are grass fed and so if you buy cream that's got a yellow tinge or butter that super yellow that's usually because it's from grass fed cows not grain fed cows and that's a good thing because there's a lot of health benefits to fat we have all this left here  and that's what i'm going to do with what i'm just going to use a tablespoon in here and then the rest all wet and that's what will go on top of the actually i think i've never needed for to say would come fresh i think that would probably be my go to first option even over butter because it's got that little bit of acidity that there's no acid in the vegetables so that you can see the color  it just lighten it up a little bit and then you can reduce down almost like a cream sauce you get it you can get really sick if you want thick enough that it coats the vegetables with nothing left in the bowl oh yeah oh yeah all right so any questions on  if it's angles and ice cold or fridge it's not got not going in and out all the time a couple weeks yeah it's not going to go bad where it's going to make you ill or sick it might just get kind of an off stroganoff like sour milk gets so i've got this on high he just want to show you how nice and think you can get it you see that now that sausage is down on the vegetables now when you eat as you need the vegetables you can have a lot more of that concentrated flavor in that sauce so i would actually i would use that way add that crim fresh then it would be quite a soupy but if you want to soup style that works too all right so here's a really cool thing about cultured butter that i are cultured i'm sorry come fresh so the butter in and paris was as those of you that have been there you really don't go there without at least some point having butter those of you that have been to paris you remember the butter just kind of jumping out of you know it isn't so good so in america butter is typically cream and it's turned right some salt or no salt and in america for it to be butter it has to be eighty percent butterfat so it all starts with the cream creams got to be at least eighty percent  butterfat in order for you to have butter that ends up being eighty so it's usually much higher than that but the butter is going to be eighty in europe it's going to be eighty two percent to be called butter two percent doesn't sound like a lot but two percent more butter so if it's not that one there's others out there this just came out it was ironic i got back from paris in a week or two later i went lakes comes out with european style butter so now there's but if you watch this goes on sale for like two fifty once in a while there's no reason to buy a regular butter if you can get european style for the same price right and then there is a one called organic valley  and then there's actually trader joe's has probably the best european style butter of all of them i've tried and it's made in brittany which is where the best butter is in the world are made the best butter that i had in in paris was at a three star michelin restaurant at lunch and it was made by this guy who's world famous in brittany it's like handmade and it was i talking to our about how good that butter was but i won't so it was probably eighty five percent butterfat right so the more butterfat in a list it if it's more than eight it's going to say because they want to promote that it's going to say so but here's the thing about butter and in france most of it's cultured if you know what that means so cultured butter so the butter there is like man it has so much flavor it was almost some of it was like eating cheese right it just had such great play it was so creamy so what they do is a is a take the cream and they culture it in other words they just made crim fresh right and then they churn the crim fresh in the butter you see oh i'm going with that so way back before pasteurization the milk the cow the cream float to the top they'd take the cream they'd set it out and they let it naturally the cultures in the natural bacteria start to sour it which would the thicken it so that that was automatic come fresh and then they turn that into butter nowadays they take that cream and they pasteurize it so it still has a lot of that flavor ok and then they added some kind of culture to it whether it's organic buttermilk which is what i use just what i make in butter instead of adding lemon juice yeah some good quality buttermilk if you've never had fresh butter milk even if it's been pasteurized get some it needs market they're going to crazy if you guys all go in there but it's you know it's expensive it's like seven seven fifty for for a pint of buttermilk but if you taste it side by side to what most people buy at the normal grocery store by the half gallon it's night and day so you use that and some of this good cream it's about a third of a couple buttermilk to court let it sit out overnight it gets sick for the refrig and then there's a whole process to making the butter go to the right temperature and you whip it so long and then you turn it but it's it's incredible it's incredible it's incredible so know about water but anyway so so that's the key cultured butter me to basically take that come fresh and i you turn it into cream and so it's got that a little bit of acidity and little more depth a flavor all right so dessert anybody had called today for for dessert before so when i say cloth of today if you grew up in france you would say oh i love cherries because it's true traditional club t is based on cherry season and it's exclusive club today is basically it's a cake white flying like batter kind of a cake in custard batter that's basically poured around fruit in a in a ram plate or whatever and baked and so baked around the fruit and makes up around the top of the fruit it originated in france with cherries traditionally you don't get the cherries because they say when the  pits start to warm up it adds a complexity to the club food day i've never done it with cherry fits  but usually sweet but certainly soured be great in here because coffee hates batter has a lot of sugar in it it's a fairly sweet dessert so sour cherries would be really really nice in here so it's basically like a pancake batter right so you've got your  dry got your dry and you've got your wet so the dry  right and then baking powder so far anything is pancakes right a little bit of salt a food processor with the sugar and if you want to use vanilla bean which i highly recommend when you feel free to pick it up and smell it whatever you probably can't see very well but these little teeny anybody almost microscopic individual caesar the vanilla bean seeds there's millions in there and boy do lengthwise and then you flatten it out with your knife and you just scrape those seeds out don't try to take them out with your finger because they'll just stick to your fingers and then you'll have to lick your fingers and banalities can be pricey right now there are crazy there are the crops got wiped out i don't know hurricane or what couple years ago in vanilla went sky high i used to buy like at costco you can buy a pint of n l extract it's good that they're going to extract you to be six ninety nine now twenty five dollars and has been for like six months sugar in there aren't going to get quite as fine can do that in a blender as well if you don't want to use your food processor all right so we've got all right all of our dry right here's that up really good then we've got some whole milk but a little goes a long way so don't put too much are you not going to taste anything else all right and we're going to mix those two together here is what's great about this dessert few things one it's quick to you can make this three days ahead put in your fridge and you can bake fresh foods each day three that is great it's a great way to use if you want to do one big one in a glass plate is you could do that little bit of sugar the ruby if you're going to be cooking something that doesn't cook for a really long time then i use to cut the rhubarb into smaller pieces so it so it's sure to to kind of melt into the dish and then we've got some huge strawberries i haven't even walked the market today are there any strawberries out there yeah sometimes a couple of them bring them in  yeah i think they pick them up at my or on their way here so just put your fruit in there now the recipe does say to let this rest about a half hour in but you know why you might want to do that so that big we're gluten right so when gluten which is the protein and flour comes in contact with water it forms a lastic network of proteins that makes things stretchy and tough for example that's why bread rises in the oven because you needed this dough which is entered to mix the gluten in the water and you've got this like web like structure now that can trap all the carbon dioxide and whatnot from the east and allow  when you don't want something that structured in a pancake or a wall for a muffin or anything like that so you always want to use a lower gluten flour you don't want to over mix it and even if you do mix it best to let it sit because what happens is that gluten will relax anybody made pizza dough before and then they think it's ready to roll out and they roll it out and it goes and they go like this and it goes right the gluten is not relaxed right don't just need to sit at room temperature longer rise a little more just relax and then when you put it down should be able to roll it out ok so by letting this rest any glue that we've developed because of the the water content in the melt the water content the eggs if you're using convection three twenty five three fifty if you're not using convection three fifty maybe three seventy five it depends if you want a little golden on top but because it's based batter eggs do not like intense heat right what happens those that size takes about twenty minutes you'll see i'm kind of you know they'll puff on the edges in the center will kind of come up and then you know they're done you could use a toothpick and your finger you know they're springing like a pancake  and that's it you can bake those in the morning leave them at room temperature and serve them at night they're best if they're a little bit warm so you can his policies back in the oven they're usually just eaten right out of here you know if you're doing some kind of fancy dinner and you wan you want to play in a because you sugar them sometimes you can pop them right out it depends a lot on on how much fruit if you've got lots of fruit a little batter not enough battery hold the fruit together it's kind of  ballpark but i think they present really nice that way pie would probably take maybe thirty thirty five minutes you just have to kind of watch it maybe the twenty five minute mark and see ok still pretty battery in the middle ye do i don't i think you'd be ok yeah if you had any more flour maybe just bike a couple tablespoons but the almonds don't really create much structure it's more of a garnish if you will just add a lot of full so i usually just the batter comes about halfway up the fruit and then it bakes up you know kind of even with the top as you can see here you know like the strawberries i put that into these i you know you can just see different versions of these were big stride varies so i just oh it's great with blueberries i think one of my favorite i mean cherry is great but blueberry peach it's really really good and then for the crime fresh everybody knows how to whip cream but ways and if you're working it you're going to get it think again as well so so a little bit of powdered sugar and today feel free to have questions afterwards come on up i have some brochures i have some brochures up here business cards that kind of tell a little bit more about me and what i do but primarily  i was in the restaurant business for twenty three years and fine dining in california and in boston in napa and whatnot and left the business about fourteen years ago and have been a private chef ever sense what does that mean it means  i have a lot of regular clients maybe they have homes here from chicago and the army come in and do dinners but what my dinners are all about is bringing the five star kind of restaurant dining experience into the comfort of your own home so i bring a server with me i cook everything on site because everything to order pretty much just like in a restaurant and it's usually market i start by offering a market tasting menu usually three or four dirge and then anywhere from five to eight or nine courses more courses smaller the portions hence tasty menu and so you get to kind of enjoy this really fun tasty market inspired menu in the comfort of your own home drink your own wine now i also do catering weddings larger events like that and i also hold cooking classes private and group and team building in my comfort of my own kitchen which i when we built our house ten years designed for that type of thing so  it's a nice large space in an easily accommodate about eight people for hands on class and fifteen or twenty for a demonstration such such as this so if that's ever of interest that information is there and with that thanks for coming in and enjoy this great weekend