Caltech

Mexican night!

Sorry for the long absence. I have been busy with midterms and other classwork (yes, even as a senior I still occasionally get some work). Last week we had Mexican food night, widely considered by those in my group and the rest of the class to be the most delicious day so far. Among the dishes we prepared were chicken in traditional chocolate mole sauce (Tom uses guajillos here, which are a bit harder to find countrywide and less hot than the adobo I usually use to make mole at home), and seafood enchiladas, which were the biggest hit, although very mild, as well as your standard chicken enchilada filling. But I promised pictures, and pictures you shall have.

When we finish our bit of the cooking and are waiting for the TAs to take over and finish the bit involving ovens, (all our TAs are undergrads who have taken the course before and spend hours before and after prepping ingredients and cleaning up), we can relax in Tom's awesomely appointed living room. Below is Tom's dog, Murphy.

Behold the man himself, Tom Mannion, who gets his hands dirty almost every class.

A pot of baked beans the kitchen staff was making for the vegetarians in our class to accompany the meal.

This is Gilberto, a member of the CDS kitchen staff who cleans out dishes for us. Without him, we would never be able to get stuff done on time, and he is the real power behind the cooking class.

For the mole recipe, we had to deseed the guajillos and toast them in the pans very briefly. They tried doing so over open flames and apparently it went badly. :(

Here you see the front living room of Mannion's house, where we all gather at the beginning of class to hear lectures about cooking technique and practice and eat our delicious creations afterwards.

And here were our results for that class, you can see the mole on top and the seafood enchiladas on the bottom.

I hope to join you next when Stephen Hawking vists us for Indian food night!

Sustainable Smorgasbord

This past week we cooked probably the best meal so far, in my opinion and my group's as well. Sustainability of ingredients and simple cooking techniques was the theme of the evening, so careful consideration was given to the ingredients contained in the recipes. A recipe at the end containing two varieties of persimmons was actually removed from the cooking queue for the night because one was out of season and would have to be flown in from Japan.

The main courses were duck breast with blueberry sauce (which took over an hour to boil down the blueberries and wine), sauteed mushrooms, several large rockfish rubbed with dill and lemon and grilled whole, and candied pears. Sadly, I did not have my camera with me this time, but the two most photogenic moments were when Tom walked around and flambeed everyone's mushrooms with armagnac (similar to cognac, but from the eponymous location) and when we learned how to caramelize sugar for the pears. In the former case, the flames reached almost as high as the ceiling in the cooking area! We finished our part of the cooking (as the rest of the food often has to go in the ovens in the kitchen inside) about 9:30 or so, and spent the next 45 minutes or so relaxing in Tom's well=appointed living room watching big-screen TV and taking turns in his legendary full-body massage chair.

I've committed an unforgivable sin by leaving you to imagine all this, and I promise pictures next week.

A Taste of Caltech

Hi, prospective culinary students! If you've been looking to burnish your skills as a sous chef, you've come to the right place at Caltech!

OK, maybe not really. But when you've had your fill of math and science a select few of us can don chef hats and pretend we are instead spending four years of our lives learning to be Gordon Ramsay or Bobby Flay in Tom Mannion's legendary Cooking class. Every term, a lottery is held for the 30 or so spots available, as the class is always oversubscribed. It takes place in Tom Mannion's house on Hill Avenue, right across the street from President Chameau's residence. Tom Mannion, in case you have not already heard the wonderful things about him is the Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs, which you can translate as Dean of Awesome, and is basically in charge of having students' backs and making sure they have a fun time here. He introduced this class because he felt that Techers would need to entertain in the future when they grow up (Pshaw!) and should be acquainted with proper cooking and dining.

But before I go any further let me introduce myself. I'm Noah, a senior in Ruddock House majoring in chemistry who has just returned from a term abroad at Cambridge University through Caltech's study abroad program. In fact, I filled out the lottery form online while at Cambridge on a lark not thinking I would get in.

Bachelor pad that Mannion's house is, the entire lower floor as far as I can tell is given over to supplies for the cooking class, with two rooms and the basement as pantries, as well as an ultramodern kitchen.

In the first class we attended we learned about all the different utensils we could use and made some simple things like salads, and helped President Chameau out with some lawn grooming by picking all the excess tangerines from the trees in his backyard, which we then put in the salad. (As admitted students, you will all get to loot the tangerines as well when you are invited there for dinner as part of your first week as frosh.)

This week, we were learning about different tastes and flavors, so we were given little numbered trays of foods ranging from prosaic to exotic, such as plain yogurt and kumquats. My group was particularly fascinated with something called a tapenade, which we had never heard of before. Tom spent a while discoursing on the five fundamental tastes, sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (Japanese concept roughly corresponding to the taste of MSG), and how to use them in cuisines, for example that one should use sour to counter something too bitter. We then had to create little mini-dishes to show that we  could balance flavors properly.

When that was finished, we went outside to the main cooking area to try and cook main dishes, such as poached salmon fillets and mint-rubbed lamb chops, using what we had learned. Tom Mannion's backyard, to your left in this photo, is often the site of many campus get-togethers where all the undergrads are served lunch, for example on Ditch Day.

Well, that's all until next time, when I hope to provide you with pictures of deliciously arranged soups as tomorrow is "Stocks, Sauces, and Oils". And we're told Stephen Hawking will be joining us for Asian food night on Feb. 18, so I'll be sure to have my camera out then!