Spring

            We all know that spring is here. And this is my favorite time of the year cause you have all these great produce items coming into season. You have ramps, which are wild leeks. They are great to pickle so you can use them throughout the year in a salad or on a nice little pickled ramp and proscuitto de Parma pizza. Then you have fiddlehead ferns, which are the first spawn of a fern. They are great braised as a side for a nice piece of halibut or market cod. They also go well with whatever you decide to do. There is so much coming into season that it’s like a kid in a candy store for a chef.

            So at forty two we have been busy loving all the new things coming in. We have been busy in the kitchen pickling ramps so we can use them in salads and specials and on upcoming Around the World Thursdays. We made some awesome apple butter the other day. We got 8 pints and 9 quarts. So look forward to seeing it on our Sunday brunch buffets, along with the house made Strawberry Rhubarb Jam. We are planning on doing more jams and things in the near future once more things come into season. So keep checking back and see what we are doing. We are hopping to try and post some videos in the future. 

Around the World Thursday

April 16^th 2009

      Today was one of those days where you have so much going on you sometimes ask yourself how you will pull it off. Thanks to the great staff I have here at Forty Two at the Clinton Presidential Center we did it once again. We had a very successful Around the World Thursday.

      Today we where in Mumbai India, and as most people know we do not cook Indian food on a normal day to day basis so it was some what of a challenge from the start. There is a lot of planning and thinking leading up to that day. But when that day comes we are ready to go all in for it.

      So lets talk a little about how we come up with the menus. The menu writing process for the next Around the World Thursday starts pretty much the next day. So we finish one and start the next the following day. Cause it takes a lot of researching and studying to pull them off. We don’t always do things the traditional way. (If you have been to one you know that) We do one or two traditional dishes then we utilize a lot of the flavors and spices that are from that region and put a little twist to it. So that we show you how flavors of that region can go well with other items from different regions. So once we get to this point we write a rough outline of a menu. Most of the time this changes all the way up till about 4 days before the next Around the World Thursday. We play around with different things and if it is something that we are not 100% sure on we make the product and try it out. Taste it and see how everything plays out. If we like the dish then we are a go. Once the menu is good to go then we start to make sure we have all the food in house so that we can execute the menu. We use only the best produce, seafood and meat that is available.

      So lets talk about the actual day. The day of Around the World Thursdays is always the best cause it is the thrill of all your work in the past month coming together. We finish the prep that is needed to be done and get all things in a row to do what we call our dance.