Mission: Cook! (36 page)

PREPARATION AND COOKING TIME (ESTIMATES)

To
make the red snapper marinade, in a bowl, mix the oil, fresh thyme, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Place the snapper fillets in a suitable container and pour the marinade over.

To make the shrimp marinade, mix the honey, lime juice, and soy sauce. Pour over the shrimp.

Set aside both the snapper and shrimp to marinate for 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Prepare the salad dressing by whisking together the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lime juice, and mint. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

To roast the vegetables for the salad, toss the tomatoes, corn, zucchini, and fennel with 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Roast on a baking sheet for 15 to 20 minutes.

To cook the snapper and shrimp, heat 3 tablespoons oil and 4 tablespoons butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Sauté the snapper 3 to 4 minutes on each side, and remove to a utility platter. Sauté the shrimp 1 to 2 minutes on each side, and transfer to the utility platter. Whilst the pan is still hot add the roasted vegetables and half of the dressing to the pan and combine to make a warm salad.

PRESENTATION

Divide the warm salad among 6 dinner plates. Top with the snapper and shrimp. Drizzle the remaining dressing over the fish and serve.

Peel
the mango, cut into slices, and drop into the feed tube of a running blender to puree. Add to a saucepan along with the maple syrup, barbecue sauce, ginger, lime juice, and canola oil. Place on top of the stove over mediumlow heat. Cook for 20 minutes without letting the sauce boil, stirring occa-sionally.

Turn on the grill. Rub the fish fillets with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Place on the hot grill, skin side facing up. Brush on half of the barbecue sauce. Turn the fish over after 3 to 4 minutes. Brush with more barbecue sauce. Cook for another 3 to 4 minutes, or until done. Do not overcook the fish. It is done when the flesh springs back. Remove the fish to a utility platter.

On the same grill, brush the corn with canola oil, salt, and pepper, and grill over moderately high heat until charred in spots, but still slightly crisp, about 7 minutes. Let cool slightly, then cut the kernels from the cobs.

In a medium bowl, mix the sour cream with the lime juice, chopped chipotles, scallions, onions, and chopped cilantro. Season with salt and pepper, and serve immediately.

PRESENTATION

Place the corn-chipotle salad on each plate. Top with the mahimahi. Drizzle some barbecue sauce around the plate and top with chopped scallions.

W
HEN LAST WE LEFT OUR HERO…” (I GUESS THAT'S ME.)

I arose that beautiful morning in May out of a comfortable bed in a hotel room in Princeton. I wish I could tell you that I blinked awake out of a deep, restful slumber, filled with dreams of pretty pictures of food and messages of peace from the universe, but in point of fact I didn't get a blasted wink of sleep. If there is ever any kind of stressful event in my life waiting for me on the other side of a night's sleep, especially if it involves cooking and planning, I inevitably, without fail, do not get any.

This night was worse than most. If I have a big banquet or a high-profile event on for the next day, as I lie awake counting the cracks in the ceiling and listening to my own breathing, I can usually at least comfort myself with an obsessive review of the plans I have laid in advance, the menu, the ingredients, the timetable, the assignments for my kitchen staff, the layout of the room, the deployment of servers, the audience for whom I will be cooking, their likes and dislikes; I can use that time in the dark waiting for and seizing upon sudden inspiration for the courses I am about to create, and I have risen out of this nervous but trancelike state reasonably refreshed and armed quite often with good, new, and unexpected ideas.

Not tonight. Tonight was as pure a state of simple, blank, tortuous worrying as I have ever achieved. There was no menu to chew over, no dishes to prepare again and again in my imagination until they had penetrated into my central nervous system, no scheme for delegating tasks to my staff to review, no nothing. Tomor
row crept over the horizon and into the room through the parted curtains to reveal itself as the day we were about to shoot the pilot for my new Food Network show, now called
Dinner: Impossible!
To reiterate, the “hook” in this show, the cute little twist, is that the chef (me again) must have no advance warning whatsoever as to the circumstances in which he will be asked to cook. All I get to know is that I will be cooking and that said circumstances will be as close to…wait for it…
impossible
as the producers can make it.

One of the core values in my life is to be prepared. I will cook for you anytime, anywhere, and you can bring as many people as you like. I'll whip up a party for eight hundred without batting an eye. I was making lunches for two thousand people at a go when I was fifteen. I've cooked at military installations for six thousand at a sitting. But, for pity's sake, I always knew who was coming and when, had a sense of what they liked to eat, and always had the opportunity to inventory, lay in ingredients, and put together a plan to make sure that they got to enjoy the very best food I could deliver. As the pressure built behind my eyeballs and sinister rays of daylight insinuated themselves into my room, I could only think what a terrible, foolish trap I had blundered into: I had handed the reins of my culinary fate over to television producers.

To their credit, the producers, whom I count as good friends when I'm not lying awake in the middle of the night cursing and fearing them, had done an admirable job of keeping the secret of my ultimate destination from me. I hadn't a clue. Whenever I hinted around, they either clammed up or evilly misdirected me: “Maybe you'll be at the circus…Have you ever cooked giraffe?…How do you look in a clown suit?…Heh, heh, heh…”

Ah, to hell with it. I climbed out of bed, tired already, shaved, showered, dressed in the cool black T-shirt they designed for me (which I really like, by the way), checked out, grabbed a very large, very hot coffee, climbed into the car, and opened the envelope. Inside was a piece of paper, an address at which I was to arrive to receive my assignment for the day. I programmed it into my onboard GPS navigator and drove away.

I shortly found myself in an attractive suburban neighborhood and pulled up behind a van that held some of the production team for the day's shooting. Greetings all around, a bit of running about, lots of walkie-talkie cross chatter, then there they were in front of me, reading. “Good morning, Robert. Today, Fred and Paula are getting married…”

A wedding. At last I was on solid ground. I knew how to cook for a wedding. Maybe I could nip back to the hotel for a quick nap. I started to relax, just before the cold, cruel reality starting to creep up, first at the knees, then as
a cold shiver up the old spine. I said a bad word in my head. The wedding's
today.

I have cooked at a lot of weddings. As you know, I even did my bit for the wedding of Charles and Diana. Their
cake
alone took what felt like half of my teenage years to complete. Weddings are not only logistically difficult to accomplish, from the standpoints of quality, quantity and, most critically, timing, but you are simultaneously taking responsibility for one of the most emotionally charged events in the life of the marrying couple, especially in the life of the bride. My initial involvement in the planning for the food for a wedding can start a year ahead of time; the active prep time for a wedding is typically three to five days out, longer for the cake. Usually the bride has been seriously planning for well over a year. She has also typically been imagining this day since the first time she was read
Cinderella
at the age of three.

I heard the rest of the details. This was to be a wedding reception for more than two hundred people. I was also to be responsible for creating more than one thousand hors d'oeuvres, both hot and cold. I was not in charge of the cake, thank you, God, but I needed to make dessert as well as an original signature cocktail for the groomsman's toast. The bridal party would arrive at the venue at six; dinner would be served at eight. The bride and groom were awaiting me at the bride's parents' house down the block. The countdown clock started ticking right then.

They rushed me back to my car for the 200-yard trip, so that I could dramatically pull into the drive and stride purposefully into the house. Time was wasting. It was nearing eight-thirty already, and I still didn't know how far away my kitchen for the day was, or if I even
had
a kitchen. I did know at this point that George and George would be waiting for me. The number of things I didn't know so far outweighed the pittance I did, it was more than a bit over-whelming. I made the drive in one take and even managed the walk up to the house without falling on my face. Paula and Fred, the bride and groom, greeted me at the door and we went inside and sat at the kitchen table.

I got a read on them both pretty quickly. Fred was a genial guy who loved food and had probably begged his fiancée, Paula, to let me come in and do this on their wedding day. Paula was being as game as she could possibly be, appearing on camera for national broadcast in curlers early in the morning on the most important day of her life. He was giddy with excitement; she was potentially a nervous wreck.

We reviewed the menu items they had indeed planned well over a year ago. I could see immediately where I could add some style and flair to a good menu
that looked like it would offer me lots of material to work with. I would stick with the mahimahi because Paula loved fish. Fred asked if I could possibly come up with a beef dish. I got the sense that this was the one item he had lost out on in the negotiations. Chicken was on the menu and I proposed a roulade, a rolled and deep-fried preparation that I would stuff with spinach, sundried tomatoes, and prosciutto, if I could get my hands on them. I promised them a vegetarian option as well, and swore a blood oath that this would be the best food they could possibly imagine for their reception. I shook hands, left, and hoped that my confidence was warranted.

On my way to the car, I was handed the location for the reception, a place called Knowlton Mansion on the northeastern outskirts of Philadelphia. This put me nearly another hour's travel time away. I sped off with a cameraman in tow and a knotted stomach.

En route, I phoned Little George and told him what I had learned so far. I shaved many more minutes than I legally should have off of my travel time. I arrived at a beautiful, picturesque historic stone mansion, the cameras took their positions, and I grabbed my knives kit and went inside.