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About Siletz news / (Siletz, OR) 199?-current | View Entire Issue (March 1, 2001)
TRIBAL MEMBER NEWS Grocery Store Great Place to Plan Meal The $10 Gourmet by Jim Boyd, The Register Guard in Eugene, Ore. (reprinted with permission) Challenge: Jack Strong wandered the aisles to come up with an inexpensive meal. Jack Strong, the chef de cuisine at Adam s Place in downtown Eugene, shopped at grocery stores near his home in Eugene’s Santa Clara neighborhood for the ingredients in this $10 Gourmet meal for two. The menu features boneless pork loin chops stuffed with chopped apples and apricots, a salad of citrus and red leaf lettuce, and a dessert of ripe Bose pear served with a lemon-flavored custard sauce (called sabayon in French or zaboglione in Italian). The $10 Gourmet is a biweekly Keith Garrett Garrett Promoted at Fire Department Tribal member Keith Garrett has been promoted to lieutenant with the Siletz Valley Fire Department. Additionally, he was named Firefighter of the Year for 2000. Being a lieutenant means more responsibility, “ Garrett says. “We go into a fire with the hose or search crew and report to the incident commander. We're responsible for the interior attack of the fire.” share their menu-planning ideas with home cooks by creating a meal for two that costs no more than $10 (excluding staple items). Strong bought most of the food at the Santa Clara Albertson’s because it’s the grocery store where he usually shops. However, to save a few cents and stay within the $10 budget, he picked up a can of Libby’s Island Apricots (chopped apricots in a pineapple- flavored syrup) at the Grocery Outlet, a discount market on River Road. Strong said he created his menu as he shopped. “I was just trying to go with what I could find in the store,” he said. “I pretty much kept an open mind. I didn’t really have too much of an idea of what I was going to do until I actually walked in there. I probably spent about an hour or so inside of Albertson’s just walking around taking a look at what they had.” Strong said his original idea for the stuffing was to combine apples with cranberries because cranberries are in season now. “But cranberries are a little spendier than I wanted to go,” Strong said. “They are about three bucks for a bag, and I really only wanted half a cup. So I decided to go with the apricots. That was only 69 cents for the can.” Strong describes himself as “the last surviving member” of the original kitchen staff that opened Adam’s Place almost five years ago. A graduate of the Lane Community College culinaty program, he started as “the pantry guy” and dishwasher there. He worked his way up through the cooking stations to where he is now, owner Adam Bernstein’s lead chef and kitchen manager. Strong demonstrated several interesting cooking techniques as he prepared the meal. For the salad, he peeled an orange by first cutting a slice off the top and bottom and then slicing off strips of peel from top to bottom around the orange. He removed all the orange segments by slicing next to membranes that separate the segments. That left the orange’s core, which he squeezed with his hands to obtain juice for the vinaigrette dressing. Nothing wasted. For the chops, he demonstrated how to cut a pocket by first making an inch-deep incision at one end of the chop and then carefully inserting a knife into the middle of the chop to enlarge the pocket. For the sabayon, he demonstrated how it can be made in a stainless steel bowl heated directly by the burner of an electric stove instead of the normal way, over a pan of boiling water. No matter which heat source is used, the bowl must be removed from the heat periodically so the eggs don’t get so hot that they scramble, he said. Beating all the time in a figure- eight motion with a wire whisk, he would put the bowl briefly on the burner, then remove it before the bowl got too hot. “This is really easy to overcook if you’re not paying attention,’’ he said. “But it’s fairly fast, and it’s a simple dessert that I think anybody could do.” (See Jack’s recipes on page 12) nr Jack Strong, chef de cuisine for Adam 's Place in Eugene, prepares the base for his lemon sabayon. Garrett also is a swift water rescue technician. He has just a few hours left in his Firefighter I class and plans to take EMT classes next year. Garrett started fighting fires while working at the Department of Forestry. His supervisor was Ted Erdmann, a captain with the Toledo Fire Department, and it was Erdmann who suggested that Garrett volunteer for the Siletz fire department. That was two years ago, and the now 20-year-old Garrett continues to make a fine career for himself. March 2001 □ Siletz News □
