Vocabulary Lesson #3

Today's discussion covers one notion that is both applicable in the home and in the restaurant, and the other is used mostly in restaurants, but can be used in a home setting.

The first term I've used many times already in this forum: "nice", as in "that would make it nice," or "we're trying to make nice food from our meager offerings in the fridge."

This is actually a mostly specific word about the quality of the food and it's relative proximity to the fine cuisine of the fanciest restaurants. People in New York understand fine and nice, but they have a more developed sense of snobby eateries and food culture. It doesn't all have to be duck confit croquettes (which, in reality, would probably be considered going too far) to be fine and nice, something I learned at the most serious restaurant I worked in Manhattan, you can do regular things, season things, local things in a style that's nice.

That's the basic premise of this entire sight, really, to make nice (fine cuisine) food using what's on hand. Using brown sugar, soy sauce, and nicely cut mirepoix you can make a nice Asian flavored stir fry. This may not be a dish you could serve at Grammercy or Savoy, but if you made a ball shape out of rice and spooned the mix nicely over the top on a large record-sized China plate, you could pull it off. Mostly. Like art, sometimes it's in the attitude. That's the idea anyway.

Peeling carrots, potatoes, and asparagus is nice. Even and uniform dicing of vegetables is nice. Keeping similar sized objects throughout a dish is nice. (Don't get me started on mashed potatoes versus potato puree.)

In restaurants, well, fine dining kitchens anyway, nice is the adjective thrown around angrily (where lacking) or proudly (in the affirmative) when the food is being inspected on all levels.

The next topic is something we used to say with frequent regularity: "easy money".

It typically is used to describe a large pending order that will be easy to accomplish and therefore, can be considered logically, easy money. As in, "We've got this big order tomorrow, but it's all spaghetti and Caesar Salad, so it's easy money."

This came from the $10 million a year corporate experience, as a sliver of that business is the takeout.

We started using it more regularly, but only in similar settings, like when there was something that had to be done and if it were simple in execution, however long winded that simplicity may be, it could be called easy money.

In the home, I've begun to call certain dishes easy money, dishes that are simple to make and can be a kind of home-nice.

More than in food, "easy money" can be applied to many different things, and I'm going to attempt to bring it into more common usage in other industries.