Where the heck have you guys been? I’ve been waiting to tell you all about the last few weeks of class but…oh….wait, it’s me that’s been absent, not you. Woops!
Well, it’s been a heck of a few weeks, where do I start? We finally moved into some more “normal” types of food in this second half of the quarter. We covered risotto and making fresh pasta, both of which I love and am convinced that I will one day be a total expert on.
We revisited our friends of the sea and worked with some flounder, clams and mussels. I had a difficult time with the mussels. As you can imagine, they’re still alive when they come in to the kitchen. You have to wash them off and clean up any beards and the fresh water from the sink basically suffocates them so their shells open up a little bit in an effort to breathe. I found this pretty hard to do. I have been dealing with chicken and beef and whole fish, but none of them were alive when they came into the kitchen. So needless to say, I did not enjoy making the mussels mariniere.
The following week I made the most delicious beef stroganoff I can remember eating. I am enjoying my temporary hiatus from vegetarianism, but I don’t plan to be an omnivore full time once I’m done with this class. I am taking advantage of the situation because the likelihood of me recreating some of these meaty dishes for myself is quite low.
We also made ricotta and mozzarella cheese – easily two of my favorite things we’ve done so far this quarter. Ricotta is the easiest thing in the world to make and as my chef said, “learn how to make it and you’ll never buy it from the store again”. Truer words have never been spoken. I already made a second giant batch that I used in a pasta dish a couple weeks ago. It was heavenly!
I also had my first total failure. I completely scorched my beef bourguignon – a dish that I had been looking forward to making and using my omnivore grace period to eat. I totally decimated it. I didn’t have enough liquid in my pan when I put it into the oven and I never checked up on in until an hour in, and by then the devastation was complete. Lesson learned: always check your oven and check your food 5-10 minutes in to make sure it’s not overcooking. It was a sad loss.
I have only three more classes left this quarter, so there is still a bit of ground to cover, but I am looking forward to a break in the latter half of this month. This schedule combined with the awful winter is wearing on me and I am ready to kick back and relax a bit!
Carrot Sticks To Your Ribs 