Day 5

Oyster mushroom ceviche

Week 3 is supposed to be pastry week but today we made cinnamon rolls and linzer cookies.

Day 4

Today we played with the anti-griddle.  It is a cook-top that freezes instantly...mostly instantly.  It freezes things very quickly.

It was fun.  We made popsicles and ice creams and chocolate cookies.

We sous vide some portabello and made an olive oil butter for a Portabello Picatta with rosemary mashed potatoes.

We capped our day with some pickles.  I made mine very traditional.  Dill, celery seed, peppercorn and mustard seeds.

Day 3

Today we got to use the smoking gun.  It is an awesome piece of equipment.  We made some tofu last week using coconut, irish moss and cashews.  Today we smoked it.  We also smoked some shiitake.

The smoking gun is just what it sounds like.  It is a gun shaped device that uses wood chips to create smoke.  It blows the smoke through a rubber hose.  It smells like campfire.  The tofu smelled a bit like the irish moss which is a seaweed.  It made me think of my grandma's house.  She lives on a lake in Northwestern Montana.  Mmm.  Good smells.

We used the shiitake to make sushi.  It was amazing.  The rice is made from jicama.  We then made Pho with the tofu.  I have never had Pho.  Some of the other students said it didn't taste much like cooked Pho.  I would imagine that's a hard flavor to recreate raw since it is usually a meat broth base.

Despite not tasting original, it was a delicious soup.  I didn't love the tofu.

And for dessert...apple pear cumble with almond gelato.  MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.  This was delicious.  Just like a cooked homemade apple crsip.  It is serious flavor.  Love this dish.

Day 2

Remember our panna cotta from day 1?  Today we split up into teams and created our own flavors.  My team made a black tea white chocolate panna cotta with a peach moscat sauce.  It was delicious.

We then made a delicious wilted spinach salad.  It was sweet, salty and fatty.  All I would have added is some apple.  mmmmmmm.

The equipment we played with today was a very expensive veggie slicer.  We made pastas from beets, carrots and parsnips.  Then we played with flavors and made pestos.  Mine is a beet angel hair pastas with parsley and walnut pesto.

Week 2!

Day one.  Tomatoes, cheese crisps and olive oil ice cream.

Vanilla Panna Cotta

Beet Carpaccio with macadamia goat cheese and frozen lemon oil

This week is all about equipment and techniques.  We worked with the paco jet which makes ice cream and the sous vide which is an immersion circulator.  

Day 5

Friday.

Enhanced sauce.

We made a few emulsifications today as well as got some tofu and panna cotta started.

We made an apple and arugula salad to go with our macadamia goat cheese.  It had candied hazelnuts and a white wine vinaigrette.

I accidentally dropped my mandoline guard by the sink and look what I found! A plant growing out of the drain.  How cool is that little man?

Corn and mint ravioli in a tomato fondue.  I want to eat the tomato fondue with a cheese sandwhich.

Can I make a raw grilled cheese?  I will put my brain power towards it.

End of week 1.  Cheers!

Day 4

Plant based Sauces and Specialty Sauces.

Theresa tried to show us how to roast coffee beans.  No, roasted coffee beans are not a mother sauce.  That's ok though.  They are pretty interesting.  The roaster didn't like the power supply at MKOKC, unfortunately, so it didn't work.  We may field trip out to her place to see the beans in action later in the month.

Today we made a Thai salad and a green curry.

This salad is amazing.  It has coconut meat noodles and pineapple in it.  The dressing is a creamy sesame which is the perfect combination for the pineapple.  The noodles are soft and contrast perfectly with the curried cashews.  I wish I had thrown in a handful of cilantro.  I used it for garnish, but it would have been a perfect addition throughout.

The green curry was not my favorite.  I like the technique, but not so much the curry spice.  We used kelp noodles along with coconut noodles and spiralized squash.  Summer squash is in season and delicious right now.

Day 3

Tomato Sauces

Today we made a romesco and a muhammara.  The muhammara was for our mezze plate and the romesco was for some king oyster mushroom calamari.... yum.

We also, grabbed our mac cheeses and flavored them.  Then we herbed the outside and put them in the fridge.  They will be used multiple ways as they age.

The herbs I used were dill and parsley.  I also cracked a little black pepper on it.

The mezze platter.  Zucchini hummus with eggplant bacon, hemp seed tabouli, muhammara with olive and orange crackers.

King oyster mushroom calamari with tartar and romesco sauces.  The calamari was good, but I put too much oregano in my breading.  Oops!

Day 2

Day 2 was Vegetable sauce. 

We made a simple veggie stock using juiced carrot, celery and tomato.  We dehydrated our our sauces to thicken them.  Then we used them to make an amazing modern take on miso soup.  It was incredible.  The soup has chopped avocado, tomato, macadamia nuts and pine nuts in it.  

We made and plated our beet gnocchi.  Both cream sauces were amazing.  We made a quick parsley gremolata with lemon zest to add brightness to the heaviness of the cream and root veggies.  We made two different shaped gnocchi.  I like the smaller traditional shapes.

We did other things that I didn't take pictures of and can't remember.  I think we made curried cashews to dehydrate...maybe.

OKC take 2!

Week 1 was awesome.  And slow.  It has taken me some time to get back into the swing of things.  It is again an all girl class.  There are 5 of us. These posts will be a bit condensed and I will post them all at the same time.

This week we focused on mother sauces.  The traditional French mother sauces are: bechamel, espagnole, hollandaise, tomato and veloute.  In raw cuisine, they are a bit different.

Day 1 was cream sauce. We made a sage cream sauce and a truffle cream sauce to plate with beet gnocchi.  You will see these later in the program.

We made milk.  6 different kinds.  Then we tasted them to see the flavor differences.  I made oat groat milk.  Which I found surprisingly delicious.

The other kinds we tasted were Pecan, Pistachio, Macadamia, Walnut, Hazelnut and Cashew.

After we made our milks, we sweetened them.  Sweetening really changes the flavor of some of the milks.  Then, with our milks we made chocolate custard.  We used avocados as the base.  It is amazing how different each pudding tastes just using a different flavored milk.  Also amazing, it does not taste like avocado.  Yumm. :)

We made eggplant bacon (they don't do it in level one anymore) and olive and orange crackers for a mezze platter that we plated later in the week.

We started a macadamia nut goat cheese and cashew cheese to age over the month.  Something interesting with nut cheeses; you can only ferment them for up to around 48 hrs, but you can age them for a month(maybe more!).