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Cooking Class - NYC Series - Daniel Boulud

The last chef we're discussing in class is Daniel Boulud. Our instructor met him through friends at his restaurant and she remembers that time fondly. She even said that he gave her a tour of the kitchen. Our lunch for the class consisted of parmesan baskets with herbed goat cheese, wild mushroom and barley soup, spaghetti squash, alsatian potato gratin, marinated lamb chops with two sauces, grand aioli served with vegetables and shrimp, bacon wrapped belgian endives, waldorf salad and chocolate ginger pound cake with ice cream.  Our starters was the parmesan baskets and aioli with vegetables and shrimp. The parmesan baskets were easy, mild and tasted great. The grand aioli is basically homemade mayonnaise but done a little differently then just mixing some oil into your egg yolks. Garlic cooked in water until soft and you also poach an egg (the whites are set but the yolk isn't) and then add everything to the blender and drizzle in the oil. So a little different but th

Cooking Class - NYC Series - Amanda Cohen

Our next two cooking classes features recipes from Amanda Cohen and are all vegetarian. All of these recipes were labor fairly labor intensive. For example, our instructor, worked on drying out some zucchini for over 24 hours to prep one dish for the class as well as some others. So needless to say, we wouldn't have been able to get everything done in one 3 hour class session if we had to do all the work. We made several dishes as usual which included parsnip gnocchi with sour red cabbage and carrot crumbs, portabello mousse with pear and fennel compote, smoked sweet potato nicoise salad with chickpea dressing, butternut squash soup with butternut dumplings, Knishes, zucchini ginger cake with zucchini cream and zucchini candy with cinnamon caramel and cream cheese ice cream and the cocktail of the class was Kentucky Lemonade. This menu was really good but fairly difficult unless done in stages or unless you have 1/2 a day free to cook. For example, the parsnips needed 2 hours

Cooking Class - NYC Series - David Chang

This class featured recipes from David Chang owner of Momofuku in New York. The first cocktail was a seven spice sour which was quite good. Sake marinated with spices and a bit of citrus can't be a bad thing. We also had ramen, shrimp and grits, rice cakes with red dragon sauce, Japanese pancake and chocolate chip cornflake marshmallow cookie. We also got a kimchi started for next week's class. I think the consensus was that the ramen was great. A bit on the salty side but great. This dish actually takes 2 days to make so you're not going to making this from scratch after you get home from work. And for some reason, I didn't get a picture of the beautiful bowl of noodles with pork, veg and egg. Hateful. I know and I apologize for it but I assure you it was very good. The japanese pancake was also very tasty. It was a thin pancake full of vegetables and sauce which was quick and easy to make. The rice cake with red dragon sauce was hot and very good. Did I menti

1/2 Bath Remodel

In a previous post, I shared my DIY master bath remodel and all what I did. Now, I have to fix the 1/2 bath downstairs that I took the cabinet from. This room is simple. It has a cabinet with sink and a toilet so it's not huge (3x7') and no medicine cabinet to remove. I found a cabinet I like but its a different style than what I took out. The one I took out had a foot board at the bottom so you couldn't see the base of the cabinet. Only the most basic and not so good looking cabinets I found at the home improvement stores had a foot board and the one I like of course sits on 4 legs and has no foot board. Therefore you can see the floor under the cabinet a little. So that means I have to re-do the vinyl flooring in the bathroom. In this room, I decided to put up vinyl wallpaper like I did in the master bath and this time, I went with a distressed board look. It has some browns, cream and a hint of gray in it. And I put a fairly basic tan paint on the walls.   I d

Cooking Class - NYC Series - April Bloomfield

Our next chef we're studying is April Bloomfield. We cooked a lot of dishes once again and we liked all of them. In this class we made Devils on Horseback, a curried parsnip soup, bitter leaves with pomegranate and grilled vegetable vinaigrette, swiss chard cannelloni with fresh pasta, swiss chard with marjoram, butternut squash polenta, roasted mushrooms with pancetta, pine nuts, croutons and goat cheese and for dessert we made a sweet corn ice cream with butterscotch and caramel popcorn. I had never heard of Devils on Horseback and not sure how that name came about which is probably a pretty interesting story. These little guys are an appetizer of poached pears, prunes all wrapped in bacon. Yeah, they're sweet, salty, smokey and a little fruity tasting so you know they're good.  I think what everyone loved the most was the swiss chard cannelloni. The fresh pasta took a while to make but I would probably use the dried large shell or cannelloni shaped pasta and call

Cooking Class - NYC Series - Marcus Samuelsson

The next chef we're reviewing is Marcus Samuelsson. At the beginning of class, we go over a chefs timeline (where and when they moved from one area to another) or we read the intro from one of their cookbooks to get an idea of what geographical or cultural influences has had over their cooking. And we can see those influences in the recipes we cook that day. Our first day, we made the Yes Chef cocktail, which everyone thought was quite good. It was made with honey syrup, ginger beer, pineapple and lime juices and vodka. We made deviled eggs with chicken skin mayo. This was interesting. We made our own mayonnaise and took two fried chicken legs, took all the meat and skin off the bones and blended the chicken and mayo in a food processor until smooth. We put a bit of the puree on a plate and put a deviled egg on top and a gougere on the side. How can fried chicken anything be bad? Yeah, it can't.   The gougere was flavored with bacon, cheddar and lingonberry jam. It was