I said WHAT TIIIIIME IS IT?

ITS FOOTBALL TIME!!! Oh, keep it in your pants you sports junkies. You wish this blog turned towards how badly the Jets lost, and how much promise the Giants may show. TOO BAD! I'm talking about tourner. Tour-who? Tourner (tor-nay), or "to turn." That is, cutting the vegetables into pretty little pieces shaped like none other than a football! (Get the football Benny!) How fitting that we learn this on the eve before the season openers.

So, how exactly do you turn a vegetable? Its really not too hard. But hard enough that it takes a lot of practice to do right. The French love to assign names to techniques and different sized cuts. For instance, we primarily turned vegetables in a 5 cm size (2"). This size was called cocotte. This is the usual size for many vegetables such as carrots, turnips, and potatoes. Artichokes can be turned as well, though not into a football shape, and when done, all that remains from a big ole artichoke is a small bowl shaped piece. Its pretty incredible that a pricey artichoke gets chopped down to a tiny 30-50 gram piece.

I would mention other sized cuts of tourner, but I don't remember them off hand. Anyhow, first you wash and peel the vegetable, then cut it down to the basic size you need. Holding the piece in one hand you take your paring knife and start making curved cuts, coming towards you. If you cut the turnip to a box shaped piece, you start by trimming the ridged corners.

Once you have a general shape you cut the vegetable, turning it a bit, and placing another cut directly next to, or overlapping your previous cut. The final piece should be a pretty little football shape, with, traditionally, 7 continuous sides (side by side, continuous from front to back, which means you made fluid cuts, not jerky, and no signs of stop and go cutting).

Sounds a little complex, but it really isn't too bad. Again, its hard to do right, and borderline nonsensical. Though, I must say, they really do look nice, and as we were told, it shows that the chef, or whomever prepared them, has learned the technique and put time and attention into the food being prepared. It is a good thing to learn.

ANYWAYS, all these good things I'm saying about this classic technique may be overshadowed by the fact that I probably tournered about 30 pieces of vegetables in 5 hours. I do believe this is quite a bit for a beginner. It was pretty soothing, but my hands were sore and red by the time class was over.

So we made a couple of dishes with our tourner. One was just a salad of cooked carrots, turnips, string beans, and peas on an artichoke bowl. Let me say, my partner was OFF HER GAME. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, vegetables should be cooked until tender. The butter glaze we were making for this particular recipe should be a blanc, not browned. Not only were her cooked veggies browned, they were by no means fully cooked. They were borderline raw. It was a little embarrassing. Further, she started to cooked the green beans a l'etuvee, rather than a l'anglaise. She ruined them, and there were no more to redo it. It was a shame to go to the Chef with our plate of uncooked vegetables, and missing an ingredient. I must say, however, that the artichoke that I turned, and the peas I prepared a l'anglaise were perfect. I would have done the string beans as well if she didn't already cook them improperly. I didn't want to say anything negative, because, well, I didn't know how to say "wake up, get with the program!" in a nice way. So I just stayed quiet.

We also had to tourner some potatoes and cook them by first boiling, next, sauteeing in oil, draining, coating in butter then baking. This was much more of a success. And they tasted really good. Really really good. I tournered pretty much all of the potatoes we used, and I think they looked great.

Also, our head chef, besides spending about a half hour helping my partner tourner (she had such a hard time getting it), he kept making these comments about classical music and this and that (my partner plays classical music). It was pretty annoying, but as she said it, any face time is good. Overall, Chef Tom is really nice, and for an ex-marine, he is less strict than one might imagine. He doesn't enforce the "YES Chef" "NO Chef" replies policy as one would expect. And he really knows his shit, which is great for us.