Archive for the ‘Cooking School’ Category
I hate meringues. I don’t like lemon meringue pie, or baked Alaska, or floating islands, and I really don’t like meringue cookies. They’re one of those trickster foods that I keep thinking, ‘hey, I’ll try it again, because surely I’ll like it this time!’ Fluffy, light, sweet, crisp, but no. Always chalky and powdery and thoroughly unpleasant.
That was until Week 17. There were a lot of seductive desserts, too many in fact, so many that I left sure of impending diabetes, but these GORGEOUS, pale pink mini-Pavlovas were the ones that really made an impression. They were subtle and aromatic and meltingly airy and everything I had imagined meringue could be. These were the reason I kept tasting those dastardly chalky lumps over and over. Fate. Read the rest of this entry »
You may have noticed that there’s been a brief pause in the cooking school series. That’s because weeks 12-14 really weren’t that exciting–poultry and beef, wet and dry cooking methods, totally delicious, but not terribly exciting. During those weeks, there were other more interesting things to write about. But oooh, boy, last week’s class was a good one. We made sandwich loaves and wheat rolls and focaccia and challa. So much yeasty loveliness. It was one of those great days that get me all full of ideas and itching to experiment.
Since class was on last Sunday, I had to wait all week long for a full day at home to proof and wait and rise and bake. The happy coincidence of the weekend is that I have an excuse for all the baking (more than my usual excuse of “I just wanted to see what it looks like if”). Tomorrow is my book club brunch meeting and I love the chance to practice the indulgent and otherwise unreasonably unhealthy. With that in mind, I made a few different recipes and tinkered with these luscious sticky buns until I thought, mmm, definitely keeping this one. Yup.
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Last week’s class was all about shellfish: bivalves, crustaceans, and cephalopods, oh my! I know it’s kind of silly, but when I think of shellfish, I pretty much envision crabs, lobsters, mussels and clams. Class was a great reminder of the huge range of deliciousness under the shellfish banner, and a bunch of interesting and useful techniques, too.
Funny story about mussels: One of my first real challenges as a recipe tester was working on a recipe for mussels. I have never been a raving devotee of mussels, but I do love a brothy pot of moules frites. Anything beyond aromatic steamed mussels though, you’ve probably already lost me. So this recipe under development was definitely outside my comfort zone–Mussel Flan. Say it with me. Mussel Flan. Doesn’t sound like a great idea, does it? But I wasn’t there to write the recipe, only to make it work, so that’s what I set out to do. Every day for about a week, I went to Santa Monica Seafood for a few sacks of mussels on the way to work. I scrubbed them 2 lbs at a time for each test, de-bearded them, steamed them, shelled them, puréed them, and swirled them ever so gently into a savory egg custard. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not going to lie, the vegetable weeks did not have me up at night with the anticipation of it all. But, in the spirit of making the most of my (boss’s) money and wanting very much to keep an open mind, I dutifully went to class for lettuce identification and made my share of vinaigrettes and cream dressings for Veg, Part I.
The next week though, for vegetable
cookery (not raw preparations) I was much more enthused, practically back up to Soups level. I went in with one thing in particular on my agenda: I wanted to know how to glaze vegetables, as in, glazed squash, glazed yams, glazed carrots. They’re like having dessert on your dinner plate, a perfect way to dress up the meal in a festive, glossy candied varnish. Holidays anyone?
The class made some killer dishes for everyone to sit down and taste at the end of class, and both weeks of vegetable instruction really gave me a kick in the butt to get more creative than my standby preparations of garlicky sautés or simple vinaigrettes on leafy salads. There was a hot spinach salad with crisp pancetta and pine nuts, and a delicious roasted wild mushroom canape on toast points with crème fraîche. Fun stuff, and it gave me some inspiration to make more out-of-the-rotation items. So now I’m trying to opt for things like sesame Asian cabbage slaw with scallions, or spinach with pomegranate, feta, walnuts and shaved onion. Of course I’m still reverting to classics like asparagus with homemade mayo or simple grilled vegetables with balsamic vinegar, because it’d be cruel and unusal to try doing without those classics.
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It’s officially soup season in Los Angeles (thank goodness)! I’ve been making buckets and buckets of soups at work–we keep them in the freezer in quart size bags, just like stock, so we make A LOT at a time. There’s been wild mushroom, sorrel, watercress, cauliflower, and even some tomato with the season’s very last good heirlooms.
At home I don’t do industrial-sized batches, more like a quart or so at a time, but I love coming home, kicking off my shoes and putting a pot on to simmer while I cuddle my puppy and have a glass of wine. These kinds of soups, the ones destined for the freezer or to be savored throughout the week, are pretty much always from the purée category. That’s because they’re thickened by their main ingredient or with something starchy added in, like potato. So, they can be frozen, defrosted, microwaved, boiled, frozen, and simmered again and nothing awful will happen. The other categories, cream soups, soups based on a roux-thickened béchamel sauce (cream), or based on a roux-thickened velouté (stock) can all do funny and not so funny things when they’re kept. No one wants mushroom pudding or tomato cottage cheese. That’d be gross. Read the rest of this entry »
I can feel my culinary brain expanding already. These classes were intense, and jam-packed with AHAH!! moments. It was beautiful! I had the fortune of being able to take parts 1 and 2 back to back instead of a week apart, since (drumroll….) I’m going to ITALY on FRIDAY!!! So I made up the class I’ll miss this weekend on Tuesday of last week, right after the part 1 class on Sunday.
Part 1 was mostly stocks: Brown stock (made with roasted veal/beef or chicken bones), white stock (same animals but blanched, not roasted), fish stock, and vegetable stock. I got stuck with veg stock, which was lame. No cleaver for me, no roasting pan, just dicing. Lots of dicing. Which, as you may recall, I’ve already been practicing.
Part 2 was mostly sauces: the roux-based (Veloute with stock, bechamel with cream), and the reduction-based (a syrup of wine reduced in the pan with shallots, combined with demi-glace for a classic reduction sauce, and a burre blanc made with the same base, but with an assload of butter stirred in off the heat instead of stock). This class was really fascinating for me, especially the discussion of demi-glace.
Warning: about to get VERY food nerdy.
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So, exciting moment–Sunday was my first day at school! I swear I haven’t been so excited to begin a class since my first day at USC. Typically of my overscheduled life right now, I spent a little too long at Surfas running an errand for work, and was almost late (even though The New School is literally across the street and down a block–pretty stellar location for a cooking school, actually). It was so great to walk in the door and see a lovely familiar face, Nealey of Dixie Caviar. Hooray for having a friend in class!
We got our textbooks, our chef coats (ooh!) and hats, and had our first lesson on knife skills and sanitation. We got an epic reading assignment, promptly followed by PTSD shockwaves from literature curriculum assignments–oh wait, that was just me. But I don’t think I was the only one whose eyes widened while listening to, “So for next time, read chapters 1-5, and 8. And if you’re feeling ambitions, well, you all should really read 14 and 15. Oh and 16.” Our instructor also emphasized the importance of practicing each week’s lesson at home. Practicing a lot. So, after class I did some back-to-school shopping. You know, binder, notebook, ruler, paper… oh, and a 10lb sack of potatoes.
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