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Showing posts from December, 2017

French Cooking Class - Shellfish

The last class of 2017 was shellfish. We cooked 5 different shellfish dishes: A bouillabaisse with fish and shrimp with a potato topped crouton on top, shrimp calamari vegetable tempura, shrimp poached in broth with a cocktail mayonnaise, a tomato wine broth with mussels and garlic toast and scallops with corn ragu and salad. We shelled and cleaned a lot of shrimp, mussels and clams for this class and everything turned out great. I really enjoyed the tomato wine broth. It was light and all the shellfish in it was filling. So this was the last cooking class for 2017 and our 10 week of cooking. I've already learned a lot and my fellow classmates are fun to cook with so that makes it even more enjoyable. I'm looking forward to the remaining 20 weeks of this class in 2018.

French Cooking Class - Fish

For two weeks we cooked fish. We learned a lot about what to look for in purchasing fish and of course how to cook it. In our first class on fish, we learned what to look for when buying fish fillets or whole fish. We sauted some trout in brown butter, lemon and capers and served it over rice with soft skillet fried croutons. We also made a clam chowder and a dish with fish and vegetables baked in parchment with wine. The fish dishes were both light and filling and easy to cook. The second class, we made a flounder with mushroom sauce, a red pepper risotto, a lobster bisque and a salmon salad on crouton. The lobster bisque is very labor intensive. It's not really difficult to make but definitely time consuming. The risotto was also a bit labor intensive but 2 cups of arborio rice easily fed 12 people.

French Cooking Class - Potato

It's week 8 of the French cooking class and we made 6 dishes with potatoes. Yep, 6 different dishes and it's the week after Thanksgiving and I'm pretty sure I don't want any more potatoes for at least 2 weeks. We learned how to "turn" potatoes and make little footballs. This is an effort to make all your potatoes the same size so they cook evenly. We also made a spicy sweet potato soup, mashed potatoes, a gratin with rosemary and Gruyere, potatoes anna, and latkes. I'd say the most time consuming to make were the potatoes anna and latkes. The anna dish requires the potatoes to be sliced on a mandolin very thinly, layered around a skillet with clarified butter then baked. The latkes were made using shredded onion and potatoes on a box grater, squeezing the water out then frying. Of course a food processor would've saved us some time on the grating but we do things by hand so we learn. We also made a tossed salad with a honey mustard vinaigrette and so