Sweet River Studios

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...

The last 5 or 6 weeks of my cooking class focused on desserts. From classic french pastries such as eclairs and profiteroles to homemade ice cream, cakes, crepes, mousses and souffles. Unfortunately, we didn't get to make macaroons since our instructor is allergic to nuts and therefore almond flour was out but that's okay. We learned to make pate a choux dough, which is used to make eclairs and profiteroles and of course you can make them savory instead of sweet, which we did by adding cheese. We then used the dough to make a little sandwich with bacon, onion and arugula. We also made swans out of the choux dough and filled them with pastry cream and dusted them with powdered sugar.    And finally, we made churros from the choux dough as well. We fried them and then tossed them with sugar and cinnamon. We also made lunch on dessert day since it's hard to eat 8 different kinds of dessert for lunch without throwing up so we made a paella with sausages, ch...