From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Clark’s enthusiasm for drawing people to the table is engaging. Colorado Kitchen now often has a line around the block, and Clark thrives on being her own boss. The emphasis on family adds a personal dimension to this memoir about both comfort food and commitment to success.”--Publishers Weekly
Gillian Clark is a nationally known chef who runs the popular Washington, D.C., restaurant Colorado Kitchen. She is a commentator for NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered and has been featured on the Food Network as well as in The Washington Post and The New York Times.
"A refreshing mix of the elevated world of haute cuisine and the down-to-earth perspective of a working mother." --Booklist
"FRYING PAN is an easy, inspirational read." --Washington Post
Book Description
Out of the Frying Pan is an empowering memoir that traces Gillian Clark’s rise from a beginner to a top chef. But managing a kitchen also taught her about parenting. With a wealth of experience and wisdom, and a healthy dash of humor, Gillian now shares her life’s recipes, from the solutions she cooked up for parenting challenges to her favorite culinary creations.
In the prime of her life, Gillian Clark abandoned the corporate world to pursue her passion---making mouthwatering food with fresh, homegrown ingredients. When she became a single parent with two young daughters, though, Gillian had to reconsider her dreams. Moving to the country and running a small, artisanal farm were put on the back burner---supporting her family had to come first.
But Gillian’s drive to make delicious food was relentless. She finished her culinary degree, survived the tedious prep work of her first cooking job and the difficulty of training during the day and raising two girls at night, and confronted the challenges of working her way up from the bottom in a profession where only the strongest survive.
Beating intense odds, Gillian is now head chef and proprietor of the successful and popular Colorado Kitchen, which is ranked among the top 100 restaurants in Washington, D.C. This puts her simple café in the company of the city’s finest dining establishments.
Touching and joyful, Out of the Frying Pan rivals any parenting book and is also chock-full of more than forty delicious recipes, from her first “soup of the day” to her family’s Sunday brunch waffles---even the pink medicine placebo she whipped up for one of her daughters.
Her inspirational advice on how she raised her daughters while never giving up her dream is a gem for parents and foodies alike and will fit at just about any table.
About the Author
Gillian Clark is a nationally known chef who runs the popular Washington, D.C., restaurant Colorado Kitchen. She is a commentator for NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered and has been featured on the Food Network as well as in The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
They say the experience of your first cooking job never leaves you. Outside of the culinary school sanctuary is where the real learning begins. In the first kitchen the new cook has to learn to turn the craft perfected in the classroom into the job. It is in this first workplace where passion has to produce a paycheck. The lessons learned there, the processes, the tools gathered to help make it through the night, resonate louder than the classroom note taking. The habits of the first kitchen are forever imbedded in your culinary vision. Are plates clean and centered, garnished with sprigs of chervil? Or are they busy with bâtonnets and brunoise?
My first kitchen was at the Prince Michel Vineyard restaurant—a restaurant attached to a well-known winery about forty minutes north of Charlottesville, Virginia. It was spanking clean, enormous, and air-conditioned. The plates were generous fifteen-inch rounds with three-inch pink rims trimmed with gold, and served as a canvas for talented Chef Alain Lecomte and the visiting chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants in town for special events.
Bright red steamed lobster glistened with drawn butter. We used the tip of a paring knife to balance three beads of caviar around a sprig of chervil for the salmon canapé. The food came together on the plate with order, focus, and precision. Duck breast rested, then was sliced paper thin and fanned alternately with paper-thin slices of peach.
Chef Alain Lecomte taught me that food was beautiful. I watched him as he examined a purveyor’s seaweed-covered lobster, swollen-eyed fish with gaping mouths, or scrawny, wrinkled squab. He picked out the diamonds in the rough. Then he’d teach me to painstakingly eviscerate and clean them for him. Chef Lecomte could simmer the flavor and collagen out of a fifty-pound box of veal bones. With yolks, wine, butter, or this bone-fortified water, he would make a sauce to send that fish or squab into the dining room and make believers out of everyone. We could almost hear the dining room erupt in applause when, after the dessert course, Chef wiped the sweat off his face, buttoned the top button of his coat, and pushed open the swinging doors that led out of the kitchen.
For the most part, I was turning vegetables and doing other prep work. I carved carrots, potatoes, and zucchini into eight-sided bullets that not only cooked at the same rate but gave plates a fussed-over look. My first few attempts looked more messed up than fussed over. Even when I thought I’d carved a decent pound or two of potatoes and carrots, Chef would examine the bucketful of my labors. After regarding them very seriously, plunging his hands into the water and letting potatoes and carrots fall through his fingers, he would walk over to the stove and empty the entire contents into a big pot of boiling water. My clumsily carved vegetables disintegrated into what was to become the soup du jour.
After a few weeks I was good enough at turning to be awarded the task of sectioning citrus fruit. Until I got this right, the chef used my knife to make a point of showing me how to separate the peel from the flesh of an orange. If his orange came out perfectly round and skinless and mine did not, it wasn’t because of faulty equipment. Chef, who was French, would mumble “Tziz naht ze knife,” as he held the blade close, examining it from tip to riveted handle.
When service began I was usually a nervous wreck. I tended the convection oven and responded with a start when the timer rang. One busy Saturday night I had no idea that the towel I used to grab the baked-to-order lime soufflé from the convection oven was damp. “Guilliaahhnn,” Chef was shouting, “the soufflé, put it here, hurry, hurry.” Steam was bubbling through the towel. But I carried the soufflé to the tray slowly and put it down carefully so that the lightly browned top stayed high above the rim and didn’t collapse. The server smiled and raced through the swinging doors. When Sian saw the blisters bubbling through the skin on my fingers and palm, she brushed them with her much smaller hand. “Mommy,” she pronounced, awestruck by the sacks of water in my fingers, “what did you do?” I felt kind of silly telling her and her sister that I was carrying a hot soufflé across the kitchen even though the hot dish was blasting steam through the towel and it was burning me. “Why didn’t you just put it down?” Magalee asked. I told her that I just couldn’t. “There are some things you just can’t put down, or drop,” I told her, trying to explain. “People are counting on you.”
It was an invigorating and invaluable time, but after nearly six months I realized it was also time to move on. I needed to work closer to home. My commute was nearly eighty miles each way. At night on the way home I’d set my cruise control on ninety miles per hour just to catch a glimpse of my two daughters before they fell asleep. I also needed to support both of them—not to mention myself—and graduate from making five dollars an hour as a vegetable cook. The little vineyard restaurant was an opportunity for me to learn, and it helped me realize that cooking in a restaurant was what I really wanted to do. But, as a single mom and sole supporter of our family, I needed to move quickly up the ranks. I didn’t have the luxury of learning on the job for years before moving up.
In all my time at the vineyard restaurant, I was never allowed to be at the stove during service. My heart swelled as I watched Chef making art, but standing close and handing him plates was no longer enough. Watching him work was exhilarating and frustrating. I’d never know if I could do this—if I could make food do what he made it do—if I never burned my hands on a ladle or got my chef coat dirty. I had to find a line-cook job to see if I had the talent or skill to do what I wanted more than any big marketing contract or advertising campaign. I knew that if I hoped to one day become a chef myself, I would have to earn that right with hard work and exhausting nights on the line. If I couldn’t hack it, I would have to find something else, maybe even give up on my dream.
Having worked in the corporate world for years, I was certain that to get to the top I’d have to get into a high-profile restaurant where the chef’s reputation would help open doors for me down the road. But I couldn’t just toil under a famous chef. I needed a job that would allow me to support my family. I not only wanted to move to a high-profile restaurant, I wanted to skip a step in the process. Most restaurants want a cook to have done at least a year at the garde-manger or salad station before becoming a line cook, but with a move to the more prestigious hot side of the line, I could get both a career and a pay boost all in one shot.
So with eleven years in marketing communications under my belt, I crafted a resume that convinced Chef Susan Lindeborg of the popular Morrison-Clark Inn to put me on the grill station. Lucky for me, she was shorthanded at the time. It was a real break, but it was time for me to put up or shut up.
Susan Lindeborg was making beautiful food at the Morrison-Clark Inn. It was all over town. There were great reviews and magazine articles. Her knowledge about the raw ingredients all of us work with was unparalleled. But she had a passionate respect for the spring pea as well as for the lobe of foie gras. When a cook working the line with me made the polenta with so much butter and cream that the corn pudding tasted like scrambled eggs, Susan turned red-faced and didn’t quit lecturing until a fresh pot of water had started to boil. Spring peas arrived one day, and, boy, was that sauté cook in trouble when he presented her the special to look over and the peas had been blanched and blended into a glossy pastel purée. “What did you do to the peas?” she shrieked.
Her devotion to food was matched only by her devotion to her staff, from the pastry chef to the dishwasher. A towering figure—she stands about five feet eleven inches tall—she was concerned with all of our lives and careers. I don’t think I realized how tough she was until I saw her cleaning the lid that covered the reach-in cooler at the garde-manger station. I had looked away from the catfish I was browning when I heard metal clatter against metal. Blood was spurting from the gash along the length of her thumb. Without a word Susan headed for her office. She came back and pitched in plating salads and desserts when we became busy. Her thumb was wrapped tightly in the masking tape she kept in the first aid kit.
Every member of the staff feared, respected, and loved Susan. Sure she’d shout our ears off when we did something wrong. But if she came by when I was reducing the rabbit stock with a little bit of bourbon and broke the glossy surface with her index finger to taste it as I incorporated the butter and it met her expectations, I earned her signature pat on the shoulder. We all strived for that.
Sweat poured from my brow the first minute of the first day I settled into the hot corner of that kitchen. Gas jets on the grill heated lava rocks to about 400 degrees, cooking almost everything I’d learned in cooking school right out of my brain. The sheer intensity of the heat in combination with my jittery nerves made for unforgivable errors. I was an incompetent marker; instead of the neat black squares decorating my T-bone, there were multiple brown and black diagonal stripes. I was slow and disorganized.
My home-cook instincts were in the way. Anyone could tell that I hadn’t spent very much time in front of a professional stove. Everything near the stove was branding-iron hot....
