THE GURGLING COD

Taco Night with the Waban Navy* was good.

 

My partner The Cinetrix is an alumna of Wellesley College. Like many northern schools, their rowing team comes to Clemson over Spring Break to train. We met the team last year, and this year we had them over for dinner. All 44 of them. I like cooking for a crowd, but this was a challenge. What follows are some thoughts and reminders I am putting here, mostly so I can find them next year. 

I learned a lot about myself. Getting a little better at asking for help helped me to understand how I need to get a lot better at asking for help. I had trusty sidekick, LG, who was able to show up about t-minus 1 hour from when the rowers arrived. It would have been great to have more help sooner. In general, when I am cooking/entertaining, I need to be much more proactive about tasks I can delegate, and asking for that help. If you have ever been in my house for a meal that I have cooked, you have probably asked "can I do anything," and I have told you no, even as I struggle to dot the Ts and cross the Is in a timely fashion.

When you delegate, things go differently than when you do them yourself. If you ask someone else to chop scallions into 1/2" sections, they might be 3/8" or 5/8" - your meal will still be fine. I got a timely text from a friend about not sweating the small stuff, which empowered me to run the 2lb of radishes through the slicer on the food processor, instead of doing them by hand. Did the Waban Navy arrive, see the irregularly cut radishes, curse my name, turn on their 44 heels and go to Taco Bell instead? They did not. 

More generally, if you are an amateur cook who likes to entertain, it is worth putting yourself in the position of your guests. You are using your time, your talent, and your treasure to make something nice for them. They get to buy a bottle of wine or something instead of plan, cook, and clean up a whole meal. If it is not perfect, that's ok. You are not a 3 Michelin star chef; you are a person having people over. 

Some random thoughts on feeding 44 hungry student-athletes- ymmv based on sport/gender composition, season, etc. 

The veggie items got hit hard and were gone soon. I made a tofu chorizo, and vegan black beans. EVERYBODY hammered the roasted sweet potatoes. I have never cooked for a crowd and had to worry about bringing home leftover sweet potatoes. When I was at Costco, I grabbed a big thing of cherry tomatoes, which just vanished. 

I had seltzer available, but some folks just want water. Should get a big thing of spring water for next year. (Not fair to ask Blue to drink the water they were rowing in all day.)

There were leftovers of both animal proteins and the non vegan pinto beans. People went light on the salsas I made, and used less Valentina, etc, than I would have guessed. I bought 8 approx 2lb packs of fresh tortillas, and used 5 1/2. At $1.49/lb and the potential of homemade tortilla chips, I am not mad about paying for that insurance. The tortilla place is about 35 minutes from my house, and I should have asked someone to pick them up, bring them ca. 30 min in advance, and include them in the meal. B/c of work schedules, I had to fetch them earlier than I would have liked, so they were not as warm as could be, and I lost an hour+ I could have been using to get ready.

I was emboldened to embark on this taco night b/c serving tacos at the elementary school international festival went well. As a process question, it's interesting to consider where control over the experience passes from the cook to the eater. In a full-service restaurant, the plate arrives in front of the diner, and the diner can determine only what order they want to eat the things on the plate. A buffet would be at the other end of the spectrum. Somewhere in the middle would be what we might call a "bar" - a baked potato bar, a Bloody Mary bar - you get the basic ingredient, and you can fix it up how you like. When I did the elementary school tacos, it was a bar. We handed the person a taco w the one protein on offer, and they added the toppings/condiments they wanted. There were a few combos that mad me say "you are wild for that," but pretty much every taco looked like I would expect, and how I would fix it for myself. The rowers really chose their own adventures, from what I could see. (W/ the caveat that I was not monitoring, or commenting on what people did or did not eat, b/c I am not the Food Police.) More generally, people will do what they want, and if they don't plate the meal like you drew it up, that's fine. If you want everyone to have exactly the plate you want them to have, open a spot like Hawthorne. 

For the carnitas, I used the same approach I used for the bo ssam tacos, which was to roast whole butts, let them cool, save the juices, skim the fat, shred the butts, and reheat w/ the juices and some salt and pepper. With more time and focus, I would have applied more of the fat to the top of the pan of shredded pork, and allowed to crisp in an oven. 

Anyway, if you ever get a chance to have Wellesley Crew over for dinner, you totally should. 10/10, no notes. Also, one of the rowers was clearly Ed Reed in disguise, b/c they left the damn place cleaner than they found it. 

*Wellesley College Crew's Home Waters are Lake Waban. 

 

Bo Ssam Tacos for all my friends

Last year, my friend Margaret invited me to the international festival at the local elementary school. I had a great time, and indeed such a good time, that I asked if I could run a table this year. The good folks at RC Edwards elementary were kind enough to let me participate, and after some deliberation, I decided to go with Bo Ssam tacos. In retrospect, it was a choice that offered a number of technical challenges, but I am pretty happy with the outcome -- people seemed to enjoy, and, critically, the Cinetrix and I will not be eating bo ssam tacos for the foreseeable future. I wanted to write a little bit about the process, both to keep a record of how I did it, and to think about what to change for next time, and also to invite the input of dads and uncles of all gender expressions and identities. 

The ask was for 150 servings. Doing some asking and some weighing of actual tacos, they come in at around 2 oz of protein. So that's just shy of 19 lb of finished bo ssam. I got 4 picnic shoulders, which added up to somewhere around 26 lb of fresh pork. The shoulders were skin-on so that's an immediate loss of mass. They are bone-in, too. I should have weighed the finished pork, but I did not have an appropriate scale. Also, I ended up with some, uh, burnt ends when I reheated, so, not all of the pork was fit to serve. 

The main aforementioned technical challenge was keeping all of that pork warm -- and at a safe temperature to serve -- in the hallway of an elementary school. The school staff was very handy with extension cords and power strips. I have two crock pots, and more pork than fit in them. I preheated the crock pots, put as much reheated pork in them as would fit, and put the rest in an enamel casserole. 

The other hot challenge was keeping 150 flour tortillas warm enough to be pliable. A little tinkering indicated that 20 flour tortillas, at 3:00 in the microwave, with wet paper towels on top and bottom and in the middle, wrapped in aluminum foil, and tucked in a small cooler with the other packs of tortillas worked like a charm, and much better than I had a right for it to work. 

The cold challenge was the keeping the sauces at safe temps. I made the sauces David Chang calls for to accompany his bo ssam recipe, plus the toppings for the Hooni Kim/Sam Sifton bulgogi sliders. If you are scoring at home, that's ssamjang, ginger scallion, kimchi and kimchi puree on the Chang side, plus scallion salsa, spicy mayo, and cuke kimchi. It is possible that seven condiments is overkill, but I am hard pressed to know which one I would drop. I pretty much quadrupled the recipes in the Momofuku book, or the NYT recipe, and I have quite a lot of leftover of some sauce, which is not such a bad problem. 8 quarts of stuff at fridge temp pretty much fills up a regular cooler. If I had had to hold it for longer, I would have put ice on the deli containers, but it was a pretty narrow window of time, and the sauces were still cold enough on the way home. 

There is a lot of great food at this festival, because there are a lot of talented and generous folks from a lot of different places. One good thing about working at a STEM school is that we get graduate students and faculty from around the world, and they bring their cooking chops and traditions with them. There were a lot of great choices, and when demand slackened, my crew (1st, 4th, and 6th graders, in shifts) and I decided to cut prices from 10 tickets to 6 tickets, or from $2.50 to $1.50. We did sell out, which was my main ambition. Based on the number of leftover tortillas, we sold about 100 tacos, so I may have been too generous, or I may have underestimated the various subtractions along the path from gross to net. 

I am not going to lie - the path I chose was a lot of work -- the closest H-Mart is 80 miles away, and I had to hit up a BJ's in another remote corner of GA for my shoulders. I am still digging out from the messes I made. But it was a lot of fun, and I can't wait to do it again.