Tag Archives: chicken

Cooking class: the prep

As with any majorly fun event in my life, I am approaching the recap of the cooking class in installments. For those of you who are new here *waving enthusiastically*, my friend Cassia and I taught a cooking class two Fridays ago to 20 lovely women from our church as part of our Women’s Ministry series. Or was it 18 women plus me and Cassia? Who knows! Anyway, since neither of us are professional cooks and neither of us had done anything remotely like this in the past, we tried our best to ready ourselves by experimenting with recipes on our own, and then coming together to do a dry run the weekend before. But nothing could have prepared us for the fun, chaotic, exhausting, joyous, sweaty, overwhelming and wonderful experience it was going to be.

Today I bring you pictures of the prep work, which started at 12 when Cassia picked me up from work. Full of vim and vigor, we headed to the grocery store. Hundreds of dollars later, we had a cart chock full of goodies:

As you can tell, we were quite excited.

In order to fit all the groceries in the trunk of Cassia’s cute little yellow car, we had to lower the seat. And let me use this opportunity to share my favorite new expression: Cram it in the boot!

‘Boot’ is the Britishism for ‘trunk.’ It’s such a funny expression–really, you should say it out loud. You’ll probably start laughing. Cram it in the boot! Cram it in the boot!

Wow, I am seriously cracking up over here.

With me, it doesn’t take much.

Anyway! Our next stop was a lovely wine shop called Lush.

The woman working there was so helpful, and recommended wine pairings for each of our courses. I never realized you could just waltz into a wine shop and ask them to tell you what wine to get. How convenient!

I don’t know why I didn’t realize this before–after all, they are trained professionals.

By the way, check out those awesome chandeliers made with wine glasses. What a great idea!

Cassia made the final wine selections, including this lovely bottle for our ‘personal use.’

We figured we had hours of work ahead of us, and a nice smooth red would help moves things along, so to speak. After all, the cooks must be taken care of.

Lush had designated shelves full of wines all under $10–perfect!

We arrived at Traci’s house around 1:30. Since the event was scheduled to start at 6:30, we figured we would have oodles of time to spare.

Not!

Our first task was to organize all the groceries between the fridge, the pantry, and the counter, chill the wine, and decide what we needed to cook first: we needed a play-by-play game plan.

I thought we would be swimming in space in Traci’s large and gorgeous kitchen, but once the groceries were laid out, the space seemed oddly smaller. But there was no time to contemplate that, because it was time to cook! We started out by making the components for the Fruit Pizza, baking up rounds of sugar cookie dough for each lady to make her own individual pizza, and mixing up a simple cream cheese frosting.

The first small fiasco occurred when I attempted to soften a couple sticks of butter and instead inundated Traci’s microwave with melted butter. Lesson learned: microwave power varies from machine to machine. I wanted to take a picture to show you my misadventure (to encourage the whole ‘laughing with me’ thing), but my hands were covered in grease, and my Nikon was looking at me reproachfully.

Don’t you touch me with those buttery fingers! warned the 18-50mm lens.

I focused on the Fruit Pizza side of things while Cassia started to make a triple recipe of Roasted Red Pepper Soup.

I’ve never seen so many red peppers together in my life–I think we spent about $40 on red peppers alone. Phew!

And that picture only shows 15 of them–there were 24 total. Yowza.

We had six lovely birds to cook up and 1 1/2 ovens in which to accomplish this, so we planned on making 3 in advance, and 3 during the class itself.

Hello, little winged friends!

You’re looking mighty tasty. Let’s stuff this chicken with lemon and garlic.

Cram it in the boot!

While the chickens were roasting, it was time for a 10 minute breather and a cuppa red.

Traci’s precious daughters wandered in and out of the kitchen.

I took a handful of pictures of them that I can’t wait to show you tomorrow. They are the most beautiful and adorable girls–the kind of kids that make me want to have kids immediately. Kids with sprinklings of freckles like Bronagh’s and kids with headfuls of rampant curls like Ashling’s.

Traci and Jamie worked steadily as well, setting tables and making a run to the store for some paper products. Thank heavens for those paper products–there were enough dishes without ‘real’ plates to keep us busy for a couple hours after the event.

Hi Jamie! You were invaluable. And amazing. And you did a great job assembling those little recipe packets. I would also like to take this chance to dub you ‘The Dishes Warrior.’ I think you probably washed over 100 dishes. Maybe 1,000, I don’t know.

As 6:30 drew nearer, Traci and Jamie set three beautiful tables to accomodate the lot of us. Meanwhile, Cassia and I laid the ingredients out in groupings by recipe, gathering all the equipment we’d need to cook them.

We also had some problem-solving to do: where the heck are we going to put 6 roasted chickens without consuming the counter space? How are we going to make 4 batches of brussel sprouts when we only have 2 burners available? How are we going to handle the wine tasting during the meal when there are 3 separate tables but only 2 bottles of each wine?

The stove, piled high with pots and pans, girded its loins as if for battle.

Whoever uses the most burners . . . wins!

I win.

Here’s the ingredient grouping for the polenta and for the rosemary garlic lemon chicken (minus the chicken)–it looks like chaos, but a trained eye will soon see order.

My eye must have un-trained itself between then and now, because all I’m getting from this picture is confusion. Hmmmm. All that comes to mind is . . .

Cram it in the boot!

Sorry, that’s the last time I’ll say it.

If you’re lucky. Heh heh.

The counter was set with a cutting board for Cassia and me and 7 cutting board ‘stations’ for the ladies to share. The brussel sprouts were distributed among the stations, along with carrots and celery for the short, introductory knife skills lesson.

The knives were glinting, sharp and ready to be put to work.

Traci and Jamie set out snacks and finger food–have I mentioned that I eat wasabi peas like an addict?

And finally: everything was ready.

Cassia and I collapsed onto the couch around 6:15 and finished off the wine. (And technically, this picture was taken hours earlier during our breather, but the narrative demanded that it be placed here.)

“The hard part is over,” I told myself as I nonchalantly ate another handful of wasabi peas. “The women will do the actual cooking; we just have to tell them what to do. Everything is organized, we’ll just effortlessly float through the recipes, and we should be sitting down to eat by 8:30 at the latest.”

Right.

The expression ‘little did she know’ would be quite apt at this narrative juncture.

To be continued . . .

My latest culinary failures

Once upon a time, I committed to only sharing recipes with you guys that I absolutely love.

No mediocrity allowed! This means that a good amount of my ideas for posts end up getting tossed into the virtual trash. I call them ‘the eliminated contestants,’ and today I’d like to take you through a tour of those recent culinary outtakes. I’ll have you know that I’m quite the optimist when it comes to trying a new recipe, so almost every single one of these recipe failures has a complete set of step by step photos, sitting forlornly on the hard drive.

I’m feeling quite introspective this morning, so I do have to ask myself, why do I feel moved to blab about my failures right before teaching a cooking class?

Huh. You know, that’s a good question. I’ll bring it up with my psychoanalyst a few years down the road, and I’m sure that subject will help pad his billable hours quite nicely.

But let’s begin!

1) Parmesan Chicken. The photo above reflects the effort, but the spectacular results I was hoping for didn’t quite crystallize. I have a feeling Parmesan from a can actually might work better than the thicker strands of freshly grated Parmesan that I used.

2) I was very excited about this Thai Red Curry, and almost certain it would be a winner. However, the end result had a funky flavor that I have yet to trace. Like maybe I accidentally dumped in a pair of socks after wearing them 5 days straight.

I will never be emotionally OK again . . . until I redeem myself by making red curry and making sure it rocks my mouth.

I want that o-oold time Rock n’ Roll . . . the kind of curry that soothes the soul . . . blablablablablablabla days of old . . . 

Alas for the fresh pineapple that I tossed into the mire!

Poor little guy.

And now that I think about it, I am missing a pair of socks that I really loved . . . nah, that can’t have happened . . . right?

3) A glossy page out of Martha Stewart Living promised me pillowy, fresh ravioli, so I did what any normal human being would do and quickly dropped a shocking amount of money on a pound of fresh crabmeat.

Things were looking good as I mixed the crabmeat with some ricotta, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes.

Things were looking even better as I assembled these adorable little crab packages, sealed them with an egg wash, and cut them into cute little circles.

All the prep work and photos probably took me an hour, which is much longer than I expected to be in the kitchen. However, for a delicious result, I was willing to invest that time. I sang a little song of joy.

. . . old time Rock ‘n’ Roll . . . the ra-vi-o-li that sooooothes the soul . . .

And then, the ravioli hit the pot.

And they got freaky-weird.

Floppy-like. What are you doing, you horrible looking alien being? And then they hit the lemon buttery sauce, and became greasy to boot.

I tried to make them look pretty on a plate and get a good shot of them before I realized how bad they really were.

It was one of those meals that I just had to throw away. Sorry Martha. However, I did throw it away into our blue Martha Stewart Collection trash can, so doesn’t that connect things nicely?

4) Let’s go to our next candidate:

This pasta dish promised to be awesome. It’s one of my few Tasty Kitchen letdowns so far. I still can’t believe it, since this is how it all began:

With bacon.

But wrong it did go, despite my disbelief. Bacon doesn’t fix everything. It was a paramount lesson.

5) Another recipe that bacon couldn’t salvage was this mac and cheese, made with American cheese singles. I’d be embarassed to share how high my hopes were, since my search for the perfect stovetop mac and cheese has been going on for years and years.

Put some bacon on top . . . and still not great.

Though quite photogenic, don’t you think?

6) While we’re on the mac and cheese train, this recipe was almost awesome . . . but not quite. I was excited because it had a different method of making the sauce, by reducing a pot of heavy cream.

The first bite or two were great . . . and then I don’t remember what happened. But I remember realizing I couldn’t get behind this 100%.

You know what’s crazy? Revisiting these pictures is actually making me want to give it another shot.

Food photography is a powerful influence over me. Even when I’ve been burned once, it draws me back for more pain.

8) Another mac and cheese disappointment happened when my friend Alton Brown told me to use evaporated milk. Great idea, Alton! I encouraged him.

Okay, so he’s not my friend. And though the texture was great, the flavor was simply not cheesy. Alton is great, but I can’t support his mac and cheese campaign. Sorry dude.

Believe it or not, I didn’t photograph this attempt–I’ve apparently become a Doubting Thomas when it comes to mac and cheese. No offense meant to you, Thomas–I can’t wait to get to know you in heaven.

9) This Chicken Stroganoff has potential, man. But it needs more ‘oomph.’ I’ll be playing with it and hopefully presenting a wonderful result to you guys down the road, because it’s close! Though you wouldn’t believe it from this picture of a kind of greasy looking mushroom. Oh well.

10) Last fall my friend Carrie and I had an apple butter making fest.

Neither one of us had any idea what we were doing.

We made more mistakes than I care to talk about, and were uncertain what to do with the apple peels once the apple wedges had cooked down and mushified.

We tried pressing the apple mush through a strainer:

That didn’t work out so well, so we transferred it to the blender and whizzed everything. Then we cooked it in the slow cooker, however we accidentally left the cover on. Hence, the consistency of the apple butter ended up more like applesauce. So I guess you could call it an apple sauce success, but an apple butter failure.

On the positive side, we got our first experience with canning. Our journey in sterilizing jars brought us from being incompetent canners to being only semi-incompetent canners by the end! It was great. 

So let’s recap the lessons learned:

1) Experimentation is fun, and even if it goes wrong, you usually learn something. For me, it was: stay away from ravioli. And maybe I should go into the lucrative crab business. And I love my Martha Stewart trash can. Wow, I really learned a lot, didn’t I?

2) Bacon doesn’t fix everything, but you can always pick out the bacon pieces and eat those before you throw away the rest of the dish.

3) Bacon fixes everything. I’m choosing to live in denial of the evidence presented above.

4) Stovetop mac and cheese is an art. Don’t be fooled by the whole ‘it’s a kid’s food’ thang. It’s a difficult beast to master, and if any of you guys can provide me with a winning recipe for it, I will seriously cry from gratitude. I will encase my salty tears and send them to you in a vial as proof.

So please do share–do you have the mac and cheese recipe I’m looking for? And how to you deal with your kitchen failures? Laugh and move on? Cry over spilt milk? Order a pizza? Tell me everything.