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Foodies – Hello! I still have some catching up to do, but unlike my normal chronological sequence, I want to share a very happy moment from class last week. We had a guest speaker in our CUL Nutrition class, Caleb a former MCI student and long-time employee of Colonel De’s Spices in Findlay Market. Caleb taught us a lot about spices, allowing us to taste 18 of them and afterward we had a blind draw in which we selected a spice and then had 40 minutes to create a dish featuring this spice from a choice of cod, chicken, or lentils and a few ingredients on the counter. I was very lucky to choose Ras Hanout, a spice I’d never heard of prior to that day, but which is translates roughly to “top shelf” or “top of shop” in Arabic. I got a little advice from Caleb that a sauce with a touch of cream would allow it to shine and I got to cooking. After presenting the dish below (swiss chard sauteed with tomatoes and onions, a pan-fried chicken breast and a sauce made from the pan drippings, oil (we had no butter unfortunately), flour, cream, coconut milk, chicken stock, the selected spice and a touch of salt, both Chef Caleb and Chef Galvin pronounced my dish as the “best taste of the day!” I smiled all day.
Back to catching up! A lot of cooking has been happening lately – to include Singapore noodles, a Filipino pork and sour fruit soup (from SE Asia class), Korean fried chicken wings (can you say YUM!), a just “ok” 5 grain Korean rice dish and Japanese Miso Shiru made from homemade Dashi we made in class as well. The yummy chicken wings are below:
At home, I’ve made 3 or 4 really good pizza’s (made from tomatoes, peppers and basil from my garden and homemade pizza sauce from same tomatoes) as my friend Grant has spent years fine tuning his pizza crust dough, and I’m now an official fan! In the 2nd pic below, I’m just holding the edge of the slice – it’s that crispy!
I also made a lovely spatchcocked chicken the weekend before last, which then turned into broth, and Thai green curry with eggplant (from the “other” menu at school, we have 2 teams, but I had to try one of theirs at home!). Home-made Thai curry paste (with ALL of those peppers!) also turned into a curry with cod, and chicken and broth went into my famous “healing soup” (recipe on website).
As we get back to class, last week was the middle east (still on a high from Nutrition class the day before) and I explored “Persia” (read: Iran) with a stew of chicken thighs, pomegranate and walnut paste (veeerrry interesting!), a persian rice dish with a crust called “Tahdig” and homemade pita bread for which we mixed up some Za’atar for dipping. I’m happy to say, my crust was intact and my pita actually puffed up and separated as it was supposed to do!
Bon Appetit! Have a yummy week!
Nice blog post. Lots of news. And congrats for your “best taste of the day”. It looked and sounded great. I think I need to know how to make that pita though… lets put it on the list for our next visit.
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