Sweet River Studios

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...

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...

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...