Escargot-ing to start this thing off right

This is a new thing that I'm going to start up. Maybe it'll take off? Who knows, but it will be fun for me in the long run. I'm really starting this to keep a log of my daily dinners, and to make myself accountable for making dinners from scratch instead of buying take out all the time. You would think as a chef I would be making dinners all the time at my house, but in all reality once I get home I'm so beat that all I want to do is hang out with my girlfriend. When I was just a line cook I feel like I had a lot more time to plan things out for when I got home. Now that I'm in a management position I have a lot of other things to worry about, and even though I'm working predominately mornings, most of the time I have to stay past when I'm supposed to leave anyway. I feel like this will help me keep track and make it a little more fun to cook if I can make more content for this.

Today's dinner is a special one. Black and white Lumache with snails, crispy maitake mushrooms and fermented basil pesto. All the pasta was hand rolled, laminated with squid ink dough, and a normal white pasta dough to get a dual color effect. They are supposed to look like little sea shells! Hence, why I made this pasta with escargot. The basil was fermented over the course of 3 days just to get that lactic zing. I was just using a brine solution, but looking back at it, I should have just vacuum

sealed the basil with some salt to make it's own brine and maybe it would have been more basil-y. 

The snails were just simmered in garlic and herb butter until they were tender. Snails are finicky, they either have to be cooked really quickly or over a long period of time. I remember back when I was touring France, I had snails for the first time. I thought I wasn't going to like them because back then I was not really into fish and snails are similar to fish in a way I guess, but I was totally wrong and I'm glad I had a chance to try them. To this day they are still some of the best escargot I've ever had. They were covered in butter and garlic and cheese, still in their shells. They had the tiniest little forks I have ever seen to eat them with, and I wish I had two trays of them. 

The maitake are probably one of my favorite mushrooms to eat. You can have them prepared in so many different ways. I also like that we can go out into the woods and find them if we are lucky. Just last year my friend and I went out and found around 15 pounds of different edible mushrooms, and we cooked every single one. There is something cool and mysterious about finding and cooking your own food. I've always been interested in seeing how many things I can find around me in the woods to cook. Even things like making root beer out of sassafras roots that we picked ourselves (even though it might be a little illegal because you can make LSD or something out of it). The maitake in this dish are just fried in a super low grapeseed oil, until they get nice and crunchy without being burned. Remember to salt them!

As for a sauce, I just made a butter pan sauce to lube up the noodles so they wouldn't all stick together, and when you eat it you mix it up with the pesto. Butter pan sauce is really easy to do but hard to master for some, I learned it from working at a restaurant that makes all the pasta by hand. First you start off with the butter in the pan and then throw your cooked pasta in there, make sure to get plenty of that nice pasta water in there. Swirl the pan around with the heat on medium until the butter and water emulsify and thicken slightly. The starches from the pasta water should help out a lot. 

Plate it all up and grab some nice herbs to garnish, I have fennel fronds in this one. There you go! nice homemade pasta that looks and tastes awesome. If you would like the recipe, or any advice on anything cooking related please let me know! Thank you so much for reading, we'll be back at it again tomorrow.

-Dinnertime Daily