Adventures of Detective Hahm, Part II: Tread Lightly

(It is very important that you read part I of this post if you want to have any idea what is going on in this one)
                                                                                                                                                                        

    The barely lit cigarette falls from my mouth as I sprint down the street back to the station, stopping every few hundred feet to catch watch my breath. *Wheezing* "it'll take forever to get a cab all the way out here" I thought. 20 minutes later I arrive at the station. Joyce, with her back turned is locking up the building. She turns, looks at me, out of breath and sweating profusely. Horrified she says, "I thought you went home to rest...did you just run here detective?" "Joyce...we got Mr. Gray.." *out of breath* "...its...all connected...him...Global Pala..." "who's Mr. Gray? Detective you really should lie down, you look like hell. When was the last time you slept?" "There's no time to explain, I need to get back into the office". Joyce lets out a subtle gown. "I'll put a pot on for ya" she says while shaking her head. "No you go home Joyce. It's late, I can make the coffee myself". "I'm not THAT old, detective" she replies sheepishly. "Besides, you keep smoking and not resting the way you do and in a couple years you'll look older than me!" I force a smile as she lets me into the building.
    Rushing into my office I sift through the files I collected on Global Palate after meeting the mysterious woman while hiking a few months back. Suddenly it hits me, the strange woman  was trying to warn us about something. She wanted us to find out about Global palate. *talking out loud to myself* "Where is it? Ah-ha! Here we go, global palate." *skims file out loud* "global palate, farm-to-table...does not use purveyors blah blah blah, grows own livestock and produce for the restaurant. That's how they do it! They skip the middle man and use the meat Mr. Gray was stealing from the grocery store. By getting the meat free global palate keeps labor and overhead low, turning everything into profit!" Joyce returns with a cup of piping hot black coffee. "This goes against my better judgment giving you coffee at this hour because you really need to rest, detective". "I appreciate the concern Joyce, but I'm fine." "Well I won't disturb you", she says before closing the door behind her. *picks up the phone and dials* "Stonewall, were going to dinner undercover tomorrow night...no don't ask questions. I got a big break in the grocery store case. I'm gonna bust this thing wide open and your going to help me". A half hour later Joyce finds me asleep at my desk with an unlit cigarette in my mouth.
    In the morning I am startled awake by a hand on my shoulder. It was Leah, a junior detective I recruited last night for the global palate dinner. "What were you talking about last night? Something about an undercover dinner?" "Close the door, I'll fill you in..." *The rest of the station goes about their daily business and I breakdown the case to Stonewall*

    That night Stonewall and I drive to Global Palate to check things out. "I'm checking to see if we're being followed. I think we're good for now" I say before sitting back in the passenger seat. "The part that I don't understand is, why Global Palate? They've been doing good business for years" Leah questions. "Yeah...dirty business. Mr. Gray was stealing prime cuts of meat for the restaurant so they could get it for free and sell it all for profit." *Perplexed* "But why?" "That's what we're going to find out..." We drove down a dark, narrow road until Leah spots the sign for the restaurant. "Look! There it is". We pull into a small drive way with a garage and a backyard. "You sure this is the place?", she asks. "It looks more like someone's house than a restaurant." The porch was decorated with white Christmas lights and the main entrance had a red velvet curtain that gave way to the main dining room and bar area. A server approaches and asks if she can help us. "Reservation for two, its under the name Stevenson" "right this way Mr. Stevenson".
    After our server discussed the evening specials she handed us a menu before tending to other guests. "Refer to me as Mitch while we're here, ok?", I whisper to Leah. "Mitch Stevenson? That's your cover? You might as well said 'cop' when they asked for a name..." "I don't have all the time in the world to come up with clever undercover reservation names, Leah. Just roll with it! Now order something before we draw attention." *Our server returns* "Have you had a moment to look over the menu?" "Yes we have." I ordered a turkey pot pie and Stonewall ordered a baked ham with potatoes. We agreed to share...to make it look more real.

    During the meal I observed the servers and bartender go through a swinging door that lead to the kitchen. Briefly, while the swinging door was open, I caught a glimpse of the owner, Kelly Banks, shaking hands with Tim Ryan--the president of the Culinary Institute of America down the road. "Oh my God. Leah, she's shaking hands with Tim Ryan!" "What?!? Do you think he's involved? What if its just a coincidence? He may not know what's going on" "Oh he knows, he's a part of it all." "How can you be so sure?" she questions. "I just know. Call it a hunch, call it a cop's intuition, call it whatever you like. He's involved."
    After we finished eating Leah lowers her head so others won't hear our discussion. *Whispering* "Alright, so he's involved, maybe not. But SHE IS. Lets take this place while Tim Ryan is here!" Leah cocks back the hammer of her gun under the table,  "If he's clean he'll see who he's really doing business with; and if he is involved...well that's killing two birds with one stone. Its a win, win!" "Leah, we must be patient, and for chris'sake put that gun away! This thing is bigger than we could have ever imagined. We have to start building a case now. We're only going to get one shot at this thing so we have to make it stick." "If we come out, guns blazing yeah well stir things up, but how long can we hold them? We got nothing on them! They'll walk the next day. Its a chess game Leah" "I don't play, CHESS", she replies sharply. "Alright, its a game of cards. We have the king, but we don't know what they're holding. They could have an ace in the hole." *Confused* "So how do we find out what they have?", Leah asks. "We check, and check, and check, and let them throw all the money in the pot. When its the right time we raise and take the pot!", banging my hands on the table. *Guests look in our direction and our server returns* "Have you decided on dessert?" "We'll just take the check" I reply. "Sure thing, Mr. Hah...Mr. Stevenson. I'm sorry, I must have confused you with someone else..." We pay the bill and I turn the receipt over. *Writes: "Keep up the good work..."* "What are you doing? I thought we were undercover?", Leah inquires. "Did you miss that back there? 'Sure thing Mr. Hahm'? They already know who we are. Ya see? They're starting to reveal their cards already..."

   
    Back at my apartment I start to feel dizzy so I sit in front of the television to clear my head. The room starts spinning, and everything becomes blurry. "They put something in the food" I say to myself. I could just make out a dark figure standing in the doorway before everything went dark....

Adventures of Detective Hahm, Part I: High Regard

   I started this post back in November after a hike with my buddy Zeth (read Sympathy For the Devil post to here all about it). We met a woman towards the summit with 3 dogs, and stopped to chat. We told her we were CIA students so she talked to us about a farm-to-table restaurant operated by a CIA grad called Global Palate. I began the post later that day saying I wanted to see how long it would take to finally eat there and finish the post. Last night I finally ate at Global Palate with Leah aka "Stonewall Jackson" so I was going to go into detail about my failed attempts to eat there (some days they were closed, others they were doing renovations on the place) and the meal we had, but decided to scrap the whole thing and switch things up a bit. I wrote a short story (fiction of course) about me being a detective instead. It deviates from my usual postings in a big way but I'll still describe the restaurant and meal in detail so read this segment and Part II for full analysis. Hope You enjoy....

Cool view from atop our hike. What a day...

Pleased to "Meat" You, Part IX--Sudden Death

    I have gathered the world's most elite squadron of game show hosts for our meat class's epic game show showdown with the PM class (try saying that 5 times fast). It's day 9 and today we had a review day in one of the classrooms instead of our usual meeting place--the meat room. Chef Elia told us we would be playing a review game against his PM class (I call them PeeMer's) so it would mean bragging rights against our fellow friends and foes. Chef asked us if we have ever played a game where you ask questions and choose someone from the opposing team to answer it (you obviously go for the weakest links here). He continued on, explaining that it was a new game he just learned from another teacher so when he asked me if I've ever herd of it I smartly replied "yeah we played it in high school" rather than taking the wind out of his sails by telling him it has been around since I was a small child...
    The night before our group had to come up with 2 questions each, which we posted to the group's Facebook page to prevent everyone from asking the same question. Since it was review we had to keep the answers somewhat easy but you'd have to be an idiot to assume the PM class was not conjuring up impossible questions. We came up with a few 4th quarter stumpers as ammunition because we were going to war dammit!

Bulletproof

     The game gets underway with each team racking up points off of the easy questions. Then they started getting hard. Chef Elia waited patiently while each person answered and if they got it wrong he would fling a tied green side towel at them like a grenade. It started off as a quiet friendly review game but as the clock ticked away things started to heat up. My friend Brad from the PM class chose me for his impossible 9 step question on the entire sausage filling process. Chef Elia sits down next to me duel-wielding 2 green side towels and says to me in a calm voice: "if you really wanna be my pal, you'll get this one right" I don't know this! There's 9 steps!! I give my first answer, "ANNTTT, wrong!" and am hit over the head with side towels in a drum-like fashion. Touche Bradley...
    Towards the end, the PeeMer's begun to pull away, taking advantage of our every missed opportunity. Green side towels were hurled throughout the room as students banged on their desks and roared over the other team's missed question. Every point was crucial. One kid from the PeeMer class uttered amongst the commotion "this is supposed to be review, not who can stump who" but it only fueled the chaos. Time was running out and we were down by 3 big points. Every possession, and every turnover needed to be manufactured into points for our team. If a question was answered incorrectly it could be saved to be asked again. Although no one was supposed to help each other, everyone sneakily discussed the wrong ones so they could become automatic points in the future. 
    The end was near and we had just gained momentum from Eric's epic dominance over Brad's impossible 9 step sausage question. This was it, we were now down by one. The next few rounds would go back and forth with neither team gaining points. One of my questions from earlier came up again and I had to choose who was going to answer. Everyone had discussed this one on the other team so I was basically laying it up for them to dunk in my face...I picked a kid who was looking straight at me, "LETS DO THIS!". With no hesitation the kid said, #109B (it was #109D) and the class erupted! This was the game saving block our team needed! The tables turn to us and we convert, tying the game with a buzzer beater...SUDDEN DEATH.

    The class left the room while Chef Elia conjured up the final question. Upon returning he told us to choose one representative from each team, and whoever got it right would be the winner. We elected Stonewall Jackson (Leah, one of my fellow Dream Team members) to take the final shot. Chef flipped a coin and we got to go first. It was do or die. Chef asks the question and Leah answers to the best of her ability...dead silence blanketed the room. "That's correct".

 Sorry PeeMers...

Pleased to "Meat" You, Part VIII--Abe Froman

"My how the turn tables"

    If this series were a horror movie usually this is were it starts to get too absurd and loses much of its fan base except for 80's movie buffs, and stoner college kids (woahhhh its like the killer is a metaphor for how as a society we are killing the economy...that's trippy man!), but I know my loyal fan base will stick it out till the end (I always have to watch till the end to see how it all unfolds, no matter how intolerable). We had a pretty awesome class today because we got to make sausage!!

My mom is going to make an "Osborne Cox" joke in the comment section I just know it...

    I started off the day with slicing open vacuum sealed bags with Anthony at the purge sink (purge is the blood/juices in the bag) before our class fabricated the scraps to obtain the proper fat to lean ratio needed for our breakfast sausage production (the ratio is 70% lean meat to 30% fat by the way). After we were done, Chef Elia gave a quick demonstration on how to use the sausage machine and the proper method for feeding the sausage into the casing. When he demoed the breakfast sausage he made it look ridiculously easy. Once the long 20 foot casing was filled with sausage meat, Chef Elia pinched, twisted, and spun the long sausage into a chain of link sausage like he was under a time constraint for Iron Chef. The man could move. Each sausage was linked off perfectly giving way to a long linkage of uniform sausages. "I love this shit" Elia proclaimed while masterfully linking the sausages. "Somewhere between heaven and here there's a layer of this stuff" he said with a fat grin on his face. Now it was our turn...

Pleased to "Meat" You, Part VII--"Viva la Dream Team!"

"Come at me bro!"

    Ahh day 7, the half way mark, and the last day of swine. In class today Chef Elia broke down a primal pig loin into various parts--the tenderloin, and boneless centercut loin. Chef showed us how to remove the spine section of the loin (includes the chine bone, and feather bones...BUT YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT!!). After fabricating and denuting (removing the fat and silver skin), chef showed us how to remove the spine and ribs from the loin before tying a roast and slicing loin chops. Our production for the day was to do exactly that. We took a 15 question quiz (I only got 2 wrong), and before we begun fabricating chef came around and felt everyone's boning knives. He grabbed my friend Leah's (his favorite student by far) knife before grabbing mine. No one knew what that meant so I assumed it meant he wanted to show the class what a sharp boning knife looked like (I sharpened my knife the night before). He grabbed 5 knives in total, took a picture of them on his station and told the class to listen up. This was my moment to shine I thought. "These are 5 of the worst boning knives I have seen. If they're not sharpened properly tomorrow I am deducting points!" Well that sucks, because I JUST SHARPENED THEM 5 HOURS AGO!!! I talked to him after class and explained to him that I just sharpened my boning knife so I was unsure why he picked mine to include on his shit list. Turns out I wasn't sharpening the knife at the right angle on the stone which caused it to feel duller on one side. Being proactive, Leah and I took our knives back to the meat room after class and had Lena (the MIT for the class) demonstrate the proper technique on an oiled stone. We watched her do it, and duplicated her sharpening motion. The finished product was much superior to the knife chef looked at in class. Its crazy that I have to sharpen a factory sharpened knife after a week of use but that's the breaks.
    While Chef Elia lectured he brought up a slide of an absolutely butchered pig loin after the spine was removed. He looks at everyone and goes, "if anyone presents me a loin like this, just get out and don't come back again. If we are this far into the class and you cannot do what I show you then you don't deserve to be here, and you should reconsider your career choice all together..." Everyone was on high alert after that.

"Don't F it up, children!"

    My station partner, Zeth and I grab a centercut pork loin (the ends are removed which makes it different from the primal loin if you were wondering...hence "centercut"). We took turns breaking down the loin into the usable parts and setting aside. I removed the tenderloin, he worked the spine to free the chine bone, and I finished it by removing the feather bones before we pulled the whole spine free. Next we cut the boneless loin in half vertically to yield 2 equal pieces. Zeth's job was to fabricate and tie a roast, mine was to fabricate, denute and get the loin ready to be sliced into chops. Your station partner is crucial because you get graded as a team. If you have a slacker you are going to suffer big time. Luckily Zeth and I are a part of the "Dream Team" with Leah aka stonewall and Tim. Usually our group leader Eric makes the teams balanced with 1 or 2 strong students paired with 2 students who are not doing as well. In meat class, however, the teams were formed alphabetically so it was by accident that the "Dream Team" was formed. My team is stacked because we all work well together and can kick ass individually.

Were taking home Gold, Silver, and Bronze...if they made a diamond metal we'd take that too

2012 Dream Team: Leah aka "Stonewall Jackson", Zeth, Timothy aka "Mr. Bay Area" (yeah brahh), myself, MJ (he had a 5 day tryout to get on). If you ever wonder why they call Leah stonewall then your already dead...

     Zeth and I finish our production early and present for grading. Overall we did extremely well until he looked at our chops. The chops were supposed to be in the 3-4oz range and a few of are's were just under 3oz. I thought they were still fine but chef gave us a lecture on skimping the customer so he was hard on us. Its tough ya know? To slice off that many cutlets by hand and have them all weigh the same. We're new at this, naturally a few are gonna be a tad under (it could have been worse from what I saw in class). He seemed to be tough on everyone in that department so we were ok. In fact, I would go as far as to say we were one of the better teams in the class today. Zeth, we killed it today buddy! 

Pleased to "Meat" You, Part VI

War pig: "Dibs winner"

   It is going to be difficult to write anything that can live up to the picture above. I don't wanna say that I am a Microsoft Paint guru, but its pretty darn close. Day six was significantly better than the day before (see part V of the series to find out why). I'm always a bit weary when I say I have a good day because the next day I could go right back to being the mayor of shitsville. In kitchen class, like sports, or anything for that matter, you have to find a groove. You have to hit your stride at the right moment to carry you through to the next class. I can fabricate and tie a roast beautifully but my slicing and cubes still need improvement. I asked my chef today if I could get in the meat room sometime this week after class for some additional practice and he said absolutely. The key is practice of course, which can be difficult because its not like I can just go to the grocery store and pick up a huge pork butt and break it down in my dorm kitchen. I mean its possible, but not really practical since I have no pots or anything to cook with...
    We had to breakdown a Boston butt aka pork butt today and bring up a tied roast for chef to grade before we diced the scraps into 1 inch cubes. He was really happy with my roast and the tie job I did (much needed improvement from yesterday). My meat cubes were meh, nothing bad, but not standing out either. I try to gauge how I am doing in the class compared to my classmates everyday.I can say that I am happy where I think I stand amongst my peers. There's a lot of really great cooks in my class so I have to remain on this level and hit my stride at the right moment. Its a mental game as much as it is a physical one. You cant get too down on yourself if you have a bad day. Just keep the pace and when you see the right opportunity, make a break for the lead. Think of it like horse racing: the horse that breaks out in front right away seldom finishes the race first. Its the horse, an rider who sits patiently with the pack before exploding out in front right before the finish. Textbook move right there.
    Now I am full aware that its a team effort, because part of our grade is a group grade, so if people mess up its on all our asses. There are stronger cooks in the class who consistently do good work and there are the less fortunate. I come off as a funny, laid back person but if your the person standing between me and the finish line I will eat you alive...

"Business McBusiness"

    This post isn't really that funny nor does it pertain to food but since its Culinary Institute related I am going to post it anyway. When I said this post wasn't going to be funny it was after a minute or two of laughing out loud to myself in my dorm room about the name of this post. I won't name who said it, but basically this person was super drunk and when asked what he majors in, he replied with "Business McBusiness". I guess its an inside joke and normally I hate inside jokes when I am the outsider but you can appreciate the comedic value. For the record, I am not friends with this person, its just someone I went to High School with (why am I explaining this to you? I don't care...)
    The title is relevant to what I am writing about because I finally got my shipment of culinary business cards in the mail. I even went as far as to buy a metal business card holder for when I go out to dinner or meet a professional I think will help at some point along the way. I know I know, I am a college kid who is unemployed so a business card means next to nothing. So what, I ordered 250 of em. I figure, worst case scenario I can make it rain in the quad and hopefully 1 or 2 important people will pick one up; most likely a cop, on his way to issue me a ticket for littering...

"The perp was picked up for litterin'. I checked out his alibi an it dont stick"

I wasn't kidding when I said I ordered 250 of em...

"I'm not a businessman, I'm a businesss...man!"

"Peter Hahm? The Culinary Institute?"

Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark...

    As useless as it sounds for a college kid to have a business card, here at the CIA you never know who your going to bump into and strike up a conversation. It's not odd to spot Emeril Lagasse roaming around our plaza, or other important people walking the halls of Roth. Its good to be ready. I'm promoting a brand now. Peter Hahm, Inc. Pleased to meat you...