Week 1, Day 2. Part 2. Cooking w/ Vegetables

One of the graduation requirements for my program is that all students must submit a portfolio of their work. Because of this requirement, it is strongly suggested that students bring a camera to class. I forgot to do that on Day 1, but not on Day 2, so here are a few snapshots from Wednesday’s Vegetables and Herbs class.

This is a shot of one of the upstairs kitchens, where we worked on Wednesday. This kitchen is a bit bigger and seems to have more useful space than our kitchen from Monday:

This is the Hungarian Mushroom Soup that my partner and I were assigned to prepare. The recipe called for a last minute addition of 1 cup of sour cream, to be used as a thickener and to provide creamy goodness. Chef S was so impressed with the color and texture of our soup that he insisted we leave out the sour cream. 

Our soup rocked. Chef helped to make sure that it was properly seasoned at the end by adding additional salt, pepper, and lemon juice to help counter-act the salty taste of the salt. We wanted the flavor enhancing effects of the salt, not the salt-taste.

This is a 24 egg frittata filled with tons of chives, basil, parsley, tarragon, and chervil, served along with an herb salad. My only complaint was that the frittata was way too salty. It also looked like a pain-in-the-arse to cook: 

Fresh Green Bean Salad with Basil, Tomatoes, and Roasted Red and Yellow Beets. I’ve never been a big beet fan…maybe it’s because they often taste like dirt. But these beets were so sweet, it was hard to believe that they actually were beets:

These 2 dishes were really interesting. At the last minute, Chef came up with a recipe for Sweet Potato Ice Cream and assigned it to a student that had never made ice cream before (that student was looking for a challenge). The dish behind the ice cream is something that is called Gazpacho Juice in our student recipe books, but the chef modified it to be more of a soup.

Both of these items were fantastic. The gazpacho was really fresh and bright and had just the right amount of heat, owing to the inclusion of a few fresh red chilies. And the ice cream was rich and smooth and didn’t really taste as strange as it sounded. The sweet potato flavor was very subtle…there was just enough of it so that you knew what you were eating, but not too much to make it taste like you were eating frozen potatoes. The Chef’s inspiration for this was sweet potato casserole, like the kind one might serve at Thanksgiving, except Chef S really takes insult to adding marshmallows on top of the casserole. To get away with a ‘sweet’ treatment of the potatoes, he created an ice cream instead. Excellent stuff all around.