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 it a day unless I was really bored or was trying to impress someone. 

 

The salad with the grilled vegetable vinaigrette was okay but I couldn't hardly get any flavor out of it for the amount of work that went into it and the mushroom salad with pancetta was very good but once the mushrooms went cold, I didn't enjoy it as much. Cold squishy mushrooms is just weird. The butternut squash polenta was very good. I normally don't enjoy polenta because I never got much taste of it when I did have it but the squash and cheese added enough flavor to make it more interesting. The parsnip soup was really good. It seemed quite rich and I definitely wouldn't be able to eat a whole bowl of it.

I didn't get a picture of the sweet corn ice cream but it was really quite good. I did get a picture of the caramel popcorn on a baking sheet though. 

Our second class of Bloomfield's recipes consisted of a lamb curry, lentil and chickpea salad with feta and tahini, carrot, avocado and orange salad, roasted cauliflower and grain salad with pistachios and pomegranate, roasted and raw fennel salad with blood oranges, matzoh ball chicken soup, butternut squash coconut tart and ginger cake. And to top it all off we had roasted peanuts with rosemary and garlic with an apple and gin cocktail.

Yep, 10 recipes to cook in 3 hours and a few of them took over 2 hours to cook. Thankfully, we had a full class of 10 people to cook it all but needless to say we were all busy.

 

The most labor intensive recipe of the day was the lamb curry. We had to toast spices and grind the mixture with a lot of other spices, trim a 4 lb. lamb shoulder, brown the meat then toss everything together and let it simmer for at least an hour and a half. But the only way to learn something is to do it but for a first time try at a curry it was good.

I have to admit, my favorite was definitely the chicken soup or the NY penicillin we made from the week before, which we added matzoh balls to it this week. It was fantastic. Best. Soup. Ever. I also really enjoyed the lentil and chickpea salad. It was tasty and filling and I will definitely be making that again. The cauliflower salad was okay but it seems that once a cooked veg goes cold it's just not good anymore but that's just me. The fennel salad was okay. You really need to like fennel for that one. The carrot avocado orange salad was also good but I'd rather leave out the avocado.

The dessert that made it out of the oven during class was the ginger cake, which was really tasty. We did add whipped cream and some caramel sauce to it since it seemed like it needed something.

Our butternut and coconut tart didn't make it out of the oven by the time class was over but that's okay. We tried to get 2 desserts in since we had another dessert not make it out of the oven the previous week but looks like we're only meant to have one dessert per class. Which is probably for the best.

Here's a picture of my lunch plate and soup.