Sweet River Studios

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...

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...

Today's lunch was all about lamb. Lamb and turning vegetables. We made a lamb stew with spring vegetables as well as a chicken version for those who didn't want to eat lamb.   We also made braised lamb shank stew served over couscous and popovers and a salad. The lamb was really good and rich and the price of lamb is pretty high. This would definitely be a meat you would want to serve to impress others but it's probably not going to be in most households on a daily basis.