Farm To Table - Viviane

It's Sunday, we're here at the Farmer's Market and I'm here to check out a few ingredients to make a menu that's inspired by travels I've taken in my youth. At Vivienne we're working with classic European and American cuisine. I really rely on great product and the Farmer's Market is, you know, a central part of that philosophy because you really can't make nice food unless you're buying the best ingredients. So the dish that I'm going to be doing is inspired by Moroccan food so obviously we're going to put some of your dried fruits in there. Yeah you can really tell because usually when you go to the supermarket and you buy dried fruits it's kind of stale and musty but these have a great floral quality. What I love is there's such a huge and vibrant food culture. It's really great to see people coming out to the market and supporting all this great food and all the great producers that are coming from the local area. You can just pick up anything and everything that's, you know, fresh and great. I'm here at F&F Farms and I see all these beautiful cultivated mushrooms and I really think I want to use some of these in my dish. These are gorgeous greens, they're going to be perfect. Thanks a lot, Fred. All right. Thanks a lot. Thank you. One of the great things about the farmer's market is you find all these surprises and today we have lodge bread. So I understand you guys make everything at your own bakery? Yeah. And you got some really special breads today, huh? Yeah, totally. So I sprouted rye, 100% dark mountain rye, sprouted rye berries that we sprout in-house. We ferment them with the buttermilk that we also make in-house. Just really great loaf all around. Beautiful. All right, thanks. Yeah, thanks brother. Thank you so much. We've got some great product. We're going to cook a few dishes inspired by my travels as a youth. The first dish we're going to work on is a Moroccan spice chicken dish. We're going to braise it with some aromatics, some Moroccan spices, some onions, some garlic, and finish it with dried fruits and some chickpeas. So the first thing we're going to do is season up our chicken. Now, whenever I'm doing a braising dish, that's a long process. It's kind of low and slow and uses a lot of moisture. I want to use a cut of chicken that's going to take up the flavor and that's also going to stand up to the long cooking time. So in this case, we're using chicken thighs. I'm using a blend of grapeseed and olive oil. And so that gives me a lot of flavor from the olive oil, but it also gives me a high smoke point with the grapeseed. Right now, I'm going to let the chicken do its thing and we'll keep paying attention to it as we go. In the meantime, I'm going to start working on cutting my onions and my garlic for the rest of the dish. Let me just give this a quick turn. And you can see we've got that nice golden color on the chicken. And a lot of that has to do with having the right amount of fat in the pan. If you don't have the right amount of fat in the pan, you're going to steam your chicken and it's not going to get the color that you want. Now we're back to the onions. I'm just going to go right into the saute pan. You'll notice there's maybe a little bit on the side that's not quite finished. What I like to do is just lean that chicken right up on the side of the pan and let it finish searing off. To my mix of onions and garlic, I'm going to add some coriander, a little bit of cumin. I'll throw a whole bay leaf in. And this is a little bit of saffron powder. I'm just going to give that a quick saute once again. And I'm just going to go right into the pan here with all my aromatic vegetables. I'm going to add some chicken stock to the pan. So we're going to turn our heat up. I'm going to add some chickpeas. So the last part of this dish is to add some of the dried fruits and some of the olives. So we've got some really beautiful dates from the market. One of the things about buying dates from the market is they're so fresh. You can see how tender and soft these are. And that sugar just forms almost a syrup inside the meat of the date. So I'm just going to cut those down into some slivers. This morning we picked up a few raisins and a few dried blood oranges from McFarland Farms. I'm going to add these in. I'm going to give it a quick stir. We'll add that parsley right at the end as well as a few olives that we picked up at the market as well. And those olives will give nice brininess and a punctuated salt flavor. So we're going to plate this up. So here's the final dish. Moroccan spiced braised chicken thigh with some dried fruits and olives. So we've got some beautiful halibut from the market. This is a wild fish. It's really flaky, very mild. It's going to take up the jerk marinade really well. So one of the things I want to do is take off the skin. Now since we're going to be frying, we want to make sure that the fish cooks quickly. And one of the ways to do that is to cut it thinly into what we call tranches. And the way that I cut a tranche is I angle my knife, secure the fish, and just come down at a bias. So for the marinade we've got a couple items. The first is going to be some sliced onion. I've got a Fresno chili. And I'm just going to throw everything into my marinating bowl, seeds and all. I'm going to add a little bit of garlic. For the last elements of the marinade, I've got a spice blend of Jamaican allspice, cinnamon and clove, which I've ground up, the juice of one lime, and some about half a cup of soy sauce. And then I'm going to add pieces of the fish. And once we've got in the marinade, we're going to let it sit for about 20 minutes. So now we're going to start the braised collards for this dish. In this case, we're going to use some onion, some chili peppers, a little bit of garlic. And lastly, here we have some anchovies. So I'll add those first. Next, we'll add in our garlic. And I'll add those in. So for the anchovies, I just want to smash one fillet with the flat of my knife. And I'll add that right in. Now you can see we've got all our aromatic vegetables in the pan. And we'll just toss that to incorporate. The next item we're going to work on is our collard greens. So one of the ways to select your greens properly is to look at the cut stem. If the cut stem is dry and desiccated, you know that they were harvested a long time ago. In this case, Fred from F&F probably picked these up no more than 12 hours ago. So they're going to be super fresh. So now that we've got our collards clean, we're going to cut them down. So the technique I use is to stack all my leaves. I roll it over. And then I do slice right through it. This is called a chiffonade. And the reason why I'm cutting my collards this way is because I want them to cook very quickly. So the smaller the pieces are, the faster they're going to cook. I'm going to put a little water in there. I'm using about half a cup of water. We'll season with a little salt. And we'll cover that up and let it steam. Our fish has been marinating for about 20 minutes. And in that time, it's really absorbed the flavors of the aromatics. So now we're ready to cook it. In this bowl, I've got a little bit of Wondra flour. And Wondra is a mix of all-purpose flour and a little bit of rye. Again, there's no need to season because we've been marinating in soy sauce. So there's plenty of seasoning there. And I'm just going to get a nice even coating of the flour on all the fish. We're just going to let that cook over medium heat for a little bit. And while we're cooking that, I'm going to finish up my braised collards. You can see that they're still nice and green because we've cooked them very quickly. I'm going to add a little tomato paste. I'm going to turn the heat up and just kind of stir that tomato paste in and give it a quick little fry. Meanwhile, our fish is cooking to golden brown. I'm just going to give that a turn. So now you can see with the collard greens, we've turned up the heat. And that tomato paste is really incorporated in and it's starting to caramelize at the bottom. That's really all we're looking for. I'm going to turn off my heat on that. I'll add a splash more water to bring up some of that caramel. We call that in French cuisine, we call that fond. And that's a lot of flavor in there. And you can see I'm sort of cleaning the bottom of my pan. Now there's a big difference between being burned and being caramelized. So you really want to make sure that you're smelling it the whole time and you're not getting any of that burned flavor. You should get a roasted tomato flavor. And I think we're just about ready to plate. So I've got a little bit of towel here. We're going to pull the fish out and blot it on some towel. So the greens, we're just going to go nice and easy and spread that across the plate. We'll just set the fish on top of that. For the finish, we're just going to add a few wedges of lime. And there we have it. Jerk marinated fried halibut and that's served with braised collard greens cooked in the style of Callaloo. First thing I'm going to do is saute my mushrooms. So we've got a nice hot pan. You can see the mushrooms are sizzling. I'm going to add a little bit of salt. That's going to help extract some of the water. Now that I've got my mushrooms with some nice color on them, as you can see. Before I add my onions, I'm going to add about a teaspoon of butter. We're going to use a little bit of bacon here as well. So I'll just add maybe five or six pieces. The next step is to add some cabbage. So we've added our cabbage. I'm going to give this a little toss. And again, we're going to re-season with just a little bit of salt and a little bit of pepper. I've par-cooked my potatoes and just a little bit of salt and some simmering water. We'll add those to the pan. I'm going to add a little bit of water. That's going to help it braise. And finally, I'm going to add some whole grain mustard. You can see all these great colors. It really makes for a beautiful presentation later on. While that cooks, we're going to work on our chicken cutlets. The first step is going to be regular flour. The second is egg. And then finally, we have our breadcrumbs. The reason why I like to use chicken breast for this application is because it's going to be a fast cooking application. Unlike the braise we did earlier, we're going to be really quickly pan-frying the chicken. I want to make sure that during my dredging process, I'm shaking off the excess flour. Then we're going to go into the egg. And finally, we're going to move to the breadcrumbs. I've got some hot oil ready to go. And we're going to lay this into the pan and let that cook. Now, in the meantime, we're going to go back to our cabbage. To finish, we're going to add a good quantity of butter to this. And the butter is certainly a little bit fattening, but it's also got a lot of flavor. And it's going to create a nice glaze over all our vegetables. We've also got a nice sizzle going with our chicken. I'm going to give this a quick turn. And we've got some great color. It's cooking up really nicely. I'm going to turn my heat down a little bit so the chicken cooks through. And we're right about ready to plate. I'm just going to place the chicken right on the plate. I'm going to give it one last seasoning on the crust. You can see all the colors of the potatoes, the beautiful shapes of the mushrooms. And then we'll finish with chives right over the top of everything. And to finish the meal off today, we're going to do sprouted rye bread. We've grilled with some butter, some strawberries, creme fraiche, and some honey.