What’s Cooking?

Hey Kids,

Hope you had yourself a good week! My week has been pretty busy. Two of my kids had something called a literary lunch at school. This is where you pick a food item that appears in a book, follow a recipe for it if it exists, and then have a shared lunch at school. It was pretty cool, but guess who did most of the work?

That’s right, Mommy! I even had to ask them what books they had been reading and what foods appeared in them. We finally settled on A Series of Unfortunate Events and Spaghetti alla Puttanesca. Good recipe, and next time maybe I’ll get to try it too!

Anyways, as I was researching recipes on the Internet, I came across a reference to a “restauranteur”. Do you know what that means? Me neither.

But maybe you know what “restaurateur” is, minus the “n”. It’s someone who is into restaurants as a business. They own and manage at least one restaurant. Now here’s a question. Why would you take the word “restaurant”, remove an “n”, add an ending, and make it “restaurateur”?

Do you remember my blog about “pronounce” being changed to “pronunciation”? My guess is it’s something along the same lines. Try to say “restaurateur” and then “restauranteur”. Does your tongue trip over the second word? It’s just a bit more difficult to say, isn’t it? I’ve got another guess, that the “-eur” ending is French. In French it means “a person who”. A person who restaurants? Why not?

So now that you’ve got that word under your hat, let’s look at a few more restaurant kitchen words.

You know in the culinary world that a cook gets paid a certain amount, and a chef gets paid much more. “Chef” is French for “chief”. So think of it as the boss of the kitchen, or someone who cooks really well. A sous-chef is not quite as high ranking as a chef. "Sous" means under.

Another French word in the kitchen is “sous-vide”. If you’re trying to pronounce that, try saying: Sue Veed, like it’s a girl’s name. What is sous-vide? It’s a pretty cool but pretty lengthy method of cooking. Look it up and then let me know in the comments! What is it? Have you ever tried sous-vide cooking? Would you like to?

That’s all for now, Folks.

P.S. One more thing - Halloween may be over, but it's still fall, right? My FALLING INTO FALL bundle is officially out for different age groups, different printers, and different paper sizes! Go check it out under "Shop". Thanks for stopping by.