My brain has been taken hostage...

Lately all I can think about is food, really this is nothing out of the normal realm of things with me. But when you write about baseball on a regular basis, that usually takes up most of my 'brain' space. With the off season in full swing, my thoughts have drifted to food, school, layering of flavors and such.

Maybe it's all the reading I've been doing, but what ever it is - it's taking over my very soul. This is fine by me, but let me give you an example. I'm readying "The Reach of a Chef" by who else, Michael Ruhlman. In it he describes a rub he used at American Bounty (a CIA restaurant), all he gave was the ingredients - not measurements. And I'm setting out to work my own rub off that list. Why? Because it's intriguing to me and I gave my last bit of rub to Chef Matt who in turn raved to Chef Wendy (our VP of Academics) which was a very proud moment.

Anyways the rub calls for 'sugar', so I shot off a email to Ruhlman to ask him what sugar was used and he replied with "Regulah. But that all three would work, and by that I had asked "white sugar, brown sugar, or turbronego?" so my thought process kicks into gear. I'm going to make at least two versions, one the way it's written the book - though I've never tasted the rub but I'll give it a go. The second one, I'm going to use all three - by weight because you need to pack brown sugar.

Just to take a couple steps back, all summer I worked on rubs and BBQ sauces. And came up with a kick butt (if I do say so myself) BBQ sauce, but in "Soul of a Chef" Michael included the one they use at Michael Symon's "Lola" - I'm going to give that one a shot too - the only thing is I don't have veal stock. I do have beef stock and remouillage - so I may use that and reduce it. The recipe calls for 4 oz of veal stock, I'll take 8 oz of remy and reduce it by half.

See what I mean? This is the shit I think about at all hours of the day. Not to mention I've completely mapped out the Aps I'm going to do for New Years Eve. Every NYE the fam puts together aps for grazing all day and what not. So I've picked up some slack and I'm going to do some Aps including Wings with 3 sauces, one of those being the Lola sauce. Though honestly I think I'm driving my mother nuts, being in the kitchen so much now. I need two more sauces for the wings, I'm think maybe a traditional sauce and a Asian inspired sauce (we have a bottle of hoisin sitting in the spice cabinet and need to do something with it.)

And feel free if you have a suggestion, leave it in the comments.