Chinese Take Out, Made In

The kids all know and like, if not love, Chinese take out. It's cheap, it's available, it's filling, and strongly flavored. Outside the fact that it's "Chinese" and tends to be made in shops with Asian people in it, there is not too much deep knowledge going on.

I started the class with a story about my friend Sonja, a Brit who liked to travel and have adventures, and when she got married, she and her husband decided to have the trip of a lifetime for their honeymoon. They flew to Hong Kong, took a train out as far as it would go, then took a bus even further, then hitch hiked further, then the roads ended, and they hiked into the countryside, where the villages are connected by foot paths.

As you can imagine, there is no hotel, no restaurants, no running water. In the villages, you are invited to sleep in the barn of a farmer, and the village came out for a communal meal to welcome their odd, foreign guests. Sonja & hubby remember being served, with great pride, a plate of white rice topped by a whole, roasted and crispy field mouse. This was the best the village had to offer, and it would have been poor form to do anything but eat it with great smiles and gusto. Suffice to say, Sonja lost a lot of weight on her trip. And after the mouse, they turned back and headed home.

Part of the character of Chinese and Asian cooking is the use of all sorts of sources of protein and food, and nothing is wasted. Such a large country with so many mouths to feed and limited resources -- being resourceful is job #1 of the chef. Multiply that with 1000s of years to develop a cuisine, and it was inevitable something interesting would emerge.

I presented the students with smells of the different soy sauces, oyster sauce, rice wine, rice vinegar and of course stinky fish sauce, all part of the artillery that Asian chefs use to make plain stuff extraordinary.

I broke up the students into two teams -- one did the pork dumplings and pad Thai, the other did the scallion pancakes and the chicken & broccoli. There was some resistance from the students: despite knowing and loving much of the menu, the recipes seemed to be....so long and full of words. There's few things more annoying in life than taking the time to go over a recipe with a student step by step, and when it's time to get started, they first thing they ask is what is the first thing they need to do.

The pork dumplings went well, though upon tasting, adjusted with a little bit more soy sauce, sesame oil and rice wine.

PORK SHAO MAI

Yield: 60 dumplings

Pork, ground 2 lbs
Gingerroot, minced 3 tbsp
Scallions, mostly green, minced 4 each
Rice wine 1 tbsp + 1 tsp
Soy sauce 1 tbsp + 1 tsp
Sesame oil 1 tbsp + 1 tsp
Egg whites 4 each
Cornstarch 3 tbsp
Water chestnuts, fine dice ¼ cup
Thin round dumpling skins 60 each

1. Hand mix pork, ginger, scallion, rice wine, soy sauce, sesame oil, egg white and cornstarch. In batches, place mix in a food processor. Pulse to mix further, then puree.
2. Once the entire batch in pureed, fold in the water chestnuts. Chill until ready to use.
3. Place approximately 2 tsp of the filling in the center of a wrapper. Bring sides up and push/pleat sides together so that the dumpling has an “Empire waist” and some of the filling pushes out the top. Place the shao mai on a cookie sheet and cover with a damp cotton towel until you are ready to steam them.
4. Place enough water into a wok or pan so that it comes up to inch below the steamer basket. BTB. Open the steamer and arrange the dumplings in the steamer basket with space between them. Steam until meat is cooked through, about 5 to 8 minutes. Serve immediately with dipping sauce.

The pad Thai came out surprisingly well. The thing about this dish (and the Chicken & Broccoli) is that it's a stir fry -- it's pretty fast in the cooking, all the work is in the mise en place, getting all the components together.

PAD THAI

Yield: 8 entrée portions

Fettuccine-width rice stick noodle 1 lb
Peanut oil 1 cup
Tamarind paste 1 cup
Honey 1 1/3 cup
Fish sauce 1 cup
Rice vinegar ½ cup
Red pepper flakes 2 tsp, or to taste
Chopped scallions 1 cup
Garlic cloves, minced 4 each
Eggs 8 each
Nappa cabbage, shredded 1 head
Mung bean sprouts 2 packs
Peeled shrimp and/or pressed tofu 2 lbs
Cilantro, chopped 1 cup
Peanuts, chopped 2 cup
Limes, quartered 8 each

1. Put noodles in a large bowl and add boiling water to cover. Let sit until noodles are just tender; check every 5 minutes or so to make sure they do not get too soft. Drain, drizzle with a small amount of peanut oil to keep from sticking and set aside.
2. Put tamarind paste, fish sauce, honey and vinegar in a small saucepan over medium-low heat and bring just to a simmer. Stir in red pepper flakes and set aside.
3. Put remaining oil in a large wok over medium-high heat; when oil shimmers, add scallions and garlic and cook for about a minute. Add eggs to pan; once they begin to set, scramble them until just done. Add cabbage and bean sprouts and continue to cook until cabbage begins to wilt, then add shrimp or tofu (or both).
4. When shrimp begin to turn pink , add drained noodles to pan along with sauce. Toss everything together to coat with tamarind sauce and combine well. When noodles are warmed through, serve, sprinkling each dish with peanuts and garnishing with cilantro and lime wedges.
   

I never made this recipe before, and was happy how authentic they came out. One student who claimed to hate any kind of onion said that she really liked these, because the scallions were subtle.

SCALLION PANCAKES

Yield: 4 thin 8” round breads

DOUGH
AP Flour 9 oz
Baking Powder 1 tsp
Salt 1 tsp
Cold Water 5 to 6 oz

PREPARATION
AP flour for dough rolling as needed
Toasted sesame oil as needed
Scallions, thinly sliced, all white and a little green 2 bunch
Kosher salt as needed
Vegetable oil for pan-frying as needed

1. Add flour, baking soda and salt to the work bowl of a food processor and pulse to combine. With processor running add water slowly until dough forms a bowl
2. Remove the dough and knead into a ball with the heel of your hand until “earlobe soft”, 1 to 2 minutes. Coat the dough in sesame oil and place in a bowl covered with plastic wrap to rest for 30 minutes to 1 hour at room temperature.
3. Turn the dough out onto a very lightly floured board and knead until smooth, about 1 minute. Divide into 4 equal pieces and keep one covered with plastic wrap so it does not dry out. Roll out the balls of dough into 4 1/8” thick rounds.
4. Brush these well with sesame oil and sprinkle evenly with scallions and salt. Roll up the circle into a cylinder – not too tight or too loose. Pinch the ends shut. Wind this cylinder into a flat, round spiral. Press this to flatten and roll out to about 8” diameter. (THINNER is definitely better for this bread.) Keep the breads covered until you cook them. (If they become too rubbery and hard to roll out, simply cover and wait 15 minutes. The gluten will relax.)
5. Heat a heavy skillet. Add oil to the depth of 1/8”. When oil is hot, add the bread – it should sizzle. Cover and cook over moderately low heat, shaking the pan occasionally, until the bottom of the bread is golden, about 2 to 5 minutes. Check frequently.
6. Flip the bread over and add more oil if necessary. Cover and cook again, shaking the pan occasionally, until the remaining side is golden, about 3 to 5 minutes. Slide the bread onto a cutting board and cut into pie-shaped wedges. Sere immediately

We used a Thai Jasmine rice for this, and it came out perfect. Nice and sticky, flavorful, everyone agreed they wished when they ordered take out, the white rice would come like this.

CHINESE LONG-GRAIN PLAIN BOILED RICE

Yield: 10 servings

Long-grain white rice 4 cups
Water 8 cups
Salt 1 tsp

1. Wash rice well with cold water. Drain. Put rice and 7 ½ cups water into heavy sauce pan. Add salt, bring to boil.
2. When water boils, lower heat to a simmer and cover. Cook 15 minutes, no more. Turn off the heat and quickly pour the extra half cup of water in around the edges of the rice. Then cover and don’t touch, uncover, stir or move the rice or pot. Just leave it to steam for another 10 minutes.
3. Uncover the pot and fluff the rice with a fork. Fluff onto a serving platter or bowl. Try not to mash or break the grains.

This was the most complicated recipe of the day, involving a lot of mise, and several times of using the wok, cleaning it out then using it again on different components before doing the final thing. The final result was really good, but the broccoli was a little over cooked and we should of doubled up on the sauce...

CHICKEN WITH BROCCOLI

Yield: 8 entrée size portions

Chicken breasts, 1” cubed 2 lb
Egg white 2 each
Cornstarch 2 tbsp
Salt ½ tsp
2 tablespoons oyster sauce 4 tbsp
Light soy sauce 2 tbsp
Dark soy sauce 2 tbsp
Water 2 tbsp
Broccoli 2 lb
Water 1 cup
Salt ½ tsp, or to taste
Sugar 1 tsp, or to taste
Garlic cloves 4 each
Cornstarch 2 tsp
Water 2 tsp
Peanut oil 5 cups

1. Mix together egg white, cornstarch and salt. Add mixture to chicken cubes, coat evenly. Marinate the velveted chicken in a sealed container in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
2. Prepare the sauce: mix together the oyster sauce, light soy, dark soy, and water in a small bowl and set aside.
3. Prepare the thickener: mix the cornstarch and water thickener and set aside.
4. Prepare the vegetables: wash and drain the broccoli. Cut the stalk diagonally into thin slices. Cut the florets into 3 or 4 pieces. Crush the garlic.
5. Preheat a wok. Heat 2 cups oil in the wok until it reaches 275 degrees Fahrenheit. (Test the heat by placing a piece of chicken in the wok - it should float). Add the chicken cubes, and let cook until they just turn white (about 30 seconds), using a wooden spoon or chopsticks to gently separate them. Quickly remove the chicken cubes from the wok as soon as they turn white, and drain in a colander or on paper towels.
6. Drain the oil out of the wok or preheat a second wok on medium high to high heat. Add 2 tablespoons oil. When the oil is hot, add the crushed garlic and stir fry for 10 seconds.
7. Add the broccoli, sprinkle the salt and sugar over, and stir fry briefly, turning down the heat if necessary to make sure it doesn't burn. Add the 1/2 cup water, and cook the broccoli, covered, for 4 - 5 minutes, until it turns a bright green and is tender but still crisp. Remove from the wok and drain.
8. Clean out the wok and heat 2 more tablespoons oil. Add the broccoli and the velveted chicken, stirring and tossing to cook the chicken through. Add the sauce and cornstarch mixture in the middle of the wok and stir quickly to thicken. Mix everything together and serve hot over steamed rice.

Next week, breakfast foods!

Sugar All Around

Today was the first completely new lesson of this round. The semester was two classes shorter last time, and we dedicated two classes to Thanksgiving. While one could argue this lesson deviates from our mission to teach how to cook with nutrition in mind, one also must be a realist -- we eat sweets, even if our bodies don't need them to live, because they are delicious. Better to eat sweets that are made by your own hand than by the industrial complex.

Cheesecakes take a long time to bake -- after baking off and cooling the crusts, the filling must go into a hot 475 degree oven for 10 minutes before being turned down to 200 degrees for two hours, then sitting in the turned off oven for another hour. Why? It's all about getting all the eggs in the recipe setting without getting tough, to get that unbelievably silky cheesecake texture, rather than bits of cheese sitting in little granules of scrambled eggs...

NEW YORK CHEESE CAKE

Yield: 3 Cakes, 48 servings

Butter, melted 2 cup
Graham cracker crumbs 4 cups
Sugar ¼ cup

Cream cheese, softened 5 lbs
Sugar 3 ½ cup
AP Flour ¼ cup
Eggs 10 each
Egg yolks 4 each
Vanilla 2 tbsp
Orange zest ½ each
Lemon zest 1 each
Heavy cream ½ cup

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease 3 10” spring form pans, line with parchment. Bring a large pot of water to a boil.
2. Make the crust: Combine butter, graham cracker crumbs and sugar. Spread to the edges of the pan. Prick all over with a fork, bake 15 minutes. Allow to cool.
3. Increase over to 475 degrees. In a large bowl, combine cream cheese, sugar, flour, whole eggs, egg yolk, zests and vanilla and mix thoroughly. Add cream and mix only enough to blend.
4. Place boiling water in a pan that will fit on the bottom of oven. Pour filling over crust and bake for 10 minutes at 475 degrees. Reduce temperature to 200 degrees and continue to bake for 2 hour. Turn off oven and leave cake in for another hour. When done, it may look a little jiggly in the center.
5. Chill overnight.

So when the kids arrived a little after 3, instead of waiting until 3:15 to lecture, I grabbed them as they came in and started them on the cheesecake. The first tow just did the crusts, greasing pans, processing cookies, melting butter, cutting parchment and getting it into the oven. I had two teams of two each make a half batch of cheesecake batter in the mixers. It's amazing that even though the recipe is basically throw everything in the mixer EXCEPT the cream, I had to catch one of the teams about to throw the cream in before turning the thing on. During this lesson, when asked simple questions, a lot of the time I said, "The answer is in the recipe, you just need to read the recipe before touching anything."

While the crusts baked, we quickly cleaned then sat for a lecture. And being that today was about sweets, the lecture was primarily...a chocolate tasting!

To paraphrase Tropic Thunder, we were in danger of going "full retard", but I stopped myself from serving 100% baking chocolate, which is bitter and painful to eat straight. I put out a spread from 86% down to white chocolate, and two milk chocolates -- a Giradeli and a Hershey's.

Chocolate is made from the cocoa bean, the seed of the fruit of the cacao tree. It must be 'conched', or processed by grinding into a paste called "chocolate liquor". This is pure chocolate, which can be processed into bars. 100% chocolate liquor is baking chocolate, and as you add sugar, it becomes dark chocolate. A 65% chocolate content means that the bar is about 35% sugar. Chocolate liquor is basically made up of two things, the cocoa which can be processed out into a dry cocoa powder (good for drinks, deepening the flavor of baked goods) and cocoa butter, the fat of the liquor. White chocolate is not actually chocolate at all, as all the cocoa (the flavor of the chocolate) is all removed -- it's just cocoa butter and sugar.

The kids hated the darkest chocolates, too bitter and it made them screw up their faces. The darkest most seemed to like was the 50%. The two milk chocolates were a revelation for them -- they were all used to the Hershey's style of slightly sour-milk flavored chocolate, but when they tasted the other high quality milk chocolate, I really got them talking about why it was better. It melted smoother in the mouth, it was less sweet and more chocolaty in a mellow way. One put it, "It just tastes more elegant!"

As they gobbled the rest of the not-too-dark chocolate, I spoke to the importance and reasoning behind creaming butter and sugar, when a recipe calls for the butter and sugar to be put into a mixer and paddled until it's, well, creamy. Creaming allows the fat of the butter to envelope every grain f sugar, while taking in millions of tiny air bubbles that will end up in the final product. When all these millions of air bubbles get into the oven, the air expands and makes everything more light n' fluffy.

To take in air, the butter most be soft at room temp, not hard and not melted. Sugar firms it up, by just beating the butter alone you'd get very very delicate bubbles that would dissipate with the addition of other ingredients. Using vegetable shortening will get you a lighter, fluffier product because unlike butter, it's 100% fat, but then you won't get the great flavor of butter.

From here I had two students do the donuts and glaze, and two teams of two do the chocolate chip cookies. The cookies were the standard Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe, and yet the two batches came out quite different...

CLASSIC CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

Yield: about 16-24 cookies

AP Flour 2 ½ cups
Baking Soda 1 tsp
Salt 1 tsp
Butter, softened 1 cup
White sugar ¾ cup
Brown sugar ¾ cup (firmly packed)
Eggs, room temp 2 each
Vanilla extract 1 tsp
Chocolate chips 12 oz

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Combine flour, baking soda and salt in a bowl.
3. In a mixer, beat butter, white sugar and brown sugar until creamy.
4. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Beat in vanilla.
5. Turn off mixer. Gently beat in flour mixture and chocolate chips with a spatially until just combined.
6. Spoon rounded tablespoons of dough on a parchment lined baking sheet, a few inches apart. Bake 9-11 minutes until golden brown. Cool for 2 minutes, then transfer to wire rack to cool completely.

After I blathered in my lecture about why we cream, why creaming is important, etc etc, one of the two teams added an egg to the creaming butter and sugar. To the left of the pictures are light, cookie-looking cookies. To the right are smooth rock-like orbs, much tougher due to the egg-proteins developed into long strands.

I had never made donuts before, and teaching students how to make them is not the ideal situation to learn, but hey, whataya gonna do -- I don't typically bring a few gallons of hot lard to scalding temps in my kitchen to make many dozen donuts...

CINNAMON SUGAR CAKE DONUTS

Yield: 24

AP Flour 4 cups
Sugar 1 cup
Salt 2 tsp
Baking Powder 2 tbsp
Cinnamon 1 tbsp
Nutmeg ½ tsp
Butter, melted ¼ cup
Milk 1 cup
Eggs, beaten 2 each
Oil for frying
Sugar enough for dredging
Cinnamon enough for dredging
or
Vanilla glaze enough for dipping

1. Heat oil in appropriate vessel to 375 degrees.
2. In a large bowl, sift together flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg. Mix in butter until crumbly. Stir in milk and egg until smooth.
3. Knead lightly, then turn out onto a lightly floured surface. Roll or pat to 1/4 inch thickness. Cut with a doughnut cutter, or use two round biscuit cutters of different sizes.
4. Carefully drop doughnuts into hot oil, a few at a time. Do not overcrowd pan or oil may overflow. Fry, turning once, for 3 minutes or until golden. Drain on paper towels.

VANILLA GLAZE

Yield: about 2 cups

Powdered sugar 1 ½cups
Milk 2 ½ tbsp
Salt ¼ tsp
Vanilla extract ½ tsp
Butter 1 tsp

1. Melt butter then add rest of ingredients. Mix until creamy

A gallon of peanut oil met with a few pounds of solid beef lard and with a thermometer, got it up to about 400 degrees (the donuts would bring the temp down to 375). The dough of the donuts were pretty straightforward to make, and rolling and cutting was simple. The frying, on the other hand, was a bit tricky.

The quarter inch rounds pretty much expand into donut-shape pretty quickly, then you go for the color you need. We did about 3 minutes on each side, and it was clearly over-cooked -- very crunchy, almost no chew in the middle. The finesse of this procedure is to make the donuts the right size consistently (we were using a combination of round cookie cutters, and getting all sorts of shapes) and a consistent heat of oil.

The sugar was fine, but we didn't make enough glaze, which was the most popular. By the time we sat down to eat cookies and donuts with milk (the cheesecakes were cooling, will have to be for next week), the kids were coming down from the chocolate high and weren't that hungry, he he he.

Next week, another new lesson -- explorations in Asian cuisine.

Meat, it's what's for the Lesson

Once again, we had 3 hours to teach the students about the entire world of red meat. I started with asking why people are vegetarians -- answers were "don't like the taste" and "they like animals." I broke it down into two categories -- ethical and health, and would not address the 1st, as this is a cooking class, not a philosophy class. If your going to work in a restaurant 98% of the time you're going to have to deal with meat.

Health is another story. Today we were working with chopped meat, one of the most dangerous meat products out there. I explained the process of unhealthy, overcrowded cow pens in industrial farms, how they are forced to eat grains instead of hay, the use of antibiotics to keep them well, and the act of slaughtering is so fast that when the carcasses are cleaned, some poo remains. If you have a solid piece of muscle (like the pork chops we would be cooking), it's a relatively simple task to clean the meat at some point in production -- all the bad stuff is at the surface.

But if you send the meat to the grinder, all the bad stuff is mixed up all the way through. There are limited ways to make the meat clean now -- you can treat it with ammonia, but that stinks and destroys the meat's flavor. You can cook it thoroughly to kill all bacteria, but the fat runs out and you have tough, crumbly cooked meat with little flavor.

So you can do what McDonald's does -- take this crappy, cheap ground meat and add fillers to soften and give flavor to the meat, typically soy product and bean gums. And to a certain extent, that's what we'd be doing today with our meatballs (recipes here) -- adding things to the chopped meat so that it would still be delicious after being cooked at a fiery 550 degrees.

We set to work on making the meatball mix, a traditional spaghetti sauce and a sheet of polenta. Like last semester, the polenta failed -- we didn't have to to saute it, and it just looked and tasted unappealing. This time we used a big enough pot, and the pasta cooked correctly, but we let it go for the minutes on the package and was a tad too soft -- should of cut back by 2 minutes. The sauce was great, but not enough of it. The meatballs, well, Louis from the restaurant where I got the recipe recommended doubling the bread, but the meatballs came out TOO soft and mushy, despite being well done.

Lastly, I had the students saute pork loin chops in a pan, getting a nice brown fond on the meat and the pan before resting the meat on a rack, then making a simple pan sauce in the pan with wine, shallots, stock, salt and finishing with butter. The chops and the sauce went down surprisingly well.

Next week, a new lesson -- pastry.

Pizza Pizza

Pizza. It's my specialty, and today's class was just about that. We were also feeding parents, who were coming to school to fill in some sort of survey, so the production of enough food to feed about 50 mouths were also on the agenda.

Alas, this was the lesson for bread in general, so I began by speaking a little bit to yeast and gluten. Yeast are these neat little bacteria that can be stored stably at room temp, but when you give them a combination of water, warmth and food (the sugars in flour or, umm, sugar), and they eat and poop out CO2, the gas that makes things puff up when baked. That which is puffing is defined by the proteins in the flour called gluten -- the more gluten you have, the firmer, tougher hole structure the bread will have. Less gluten, you have more tender, looser hole structure like for cake or wonderbread.

The lesson was rather straight forward. Make the dough, let it rest and rise for an hour while prepping the toppings. Stretch dough, top, bake, serve. It was nice that there was a good variety of tasks to keep every one hopping, and cleaning. I brought in two pizza stones for the convection oven, but the pilot lights on the two conventional ovens were out so we had a bit of a pinch point in our production. We produced about 30 pies, some of surprisingly good quality, some of pretty laughable  looks. One student could not get the hang of stretching, and bungled 4 in a row and wanted to give up. I told her we made extra on purpose, and that she should just keep going. And she did, and the 5th was fine. I told her I wanted to smack her hard, in a good way. 

I went on a bit about how less is more, how a properly stretched pizza skin can not accept too many topping without it becoming a soupy mess when it hits the plate. I also stressed the importance of keeping the pizza peel dry, or the pizza would stick and create an ungodly mess. A few times they left the pizza on the board too long and I showed them how to lift up an edge and blow, unsticking the raw skin. Funnily enough, no one's pizza died except for the very last one, where the student built her pie on a damp peel.

Undecided what to cook next week. On the sign in sheet, got some nice feedback, tho: 

Last Minute Risotto

I got a phone call a few hours before class was to begin -- the freezer had stopped functioning sometime over Spring break, and was at about 100 degrees when discovered. Our large pot of extra-concentrated chicken stock (and the lovely fat that rose to the surface) was now a bacteria cesspool, having easily been in the danger zone for what could be a week. I suggested to my supervisor that he go purchase a few gallons of sodium-free chicken broth and a pint of either chicken or duck fat.

The fat was a no-go, so I decided to simply eliminate the kasha varnishkes recipe this time around. However, when I checked in the groceries about 30 minutes before class, there was no farro, a grain kinda central to the Farro & Sausage dish...not an easy ingredient to source at the last minute. On top of that, with 90+ degree unseasonable Spring weather, was not expecting a big student turnout. I suggested to my supervisor that we cancel, but he politely declined and suggested subtly it was up to me to pull something out of my butt....so....

Today is grains. We had the ingredients to do a simple pilaf using long grain rice, need at least one more recipe. Got all the other components of the farro & sausage.....sausage, fennel, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, stock....in the cupboard, found a couple of boxes of arborio rice: risotto! The risotto method is something that is very hands-on, and can repurpose the main farro ingredients....but I have no written recipe for the students to follow. I guess they're going to have to be real cooks, and wing it by vibe, under my tutelage....

Only three students presented themselves, making it much more possible to teach a hands-on method without a recipe. A brief lecture about what a grain is (the combination dried fruit/seed of a cereal grass) and what they are (wheat, corn, oat, rice etc), the parts of the grain (inedible husk on the outside, the bran that makes brown rice brown and has vitamins and fiber, then the starchy endosperm, then the core germ, where the rest of the vitamins and the fat is. An explanation of long grain versus short grain (light fluffy separate grains vs starch sticky grains) got us into the hands on of making a simple rice pilaf.

We made the rice pilaf with long grain Thai jasmine rice, sauteing onion in butter, sauteing the rice, covering with stock in equal amounts, adding a few herbs, then baking covered for 20 minutes. I thought it came out perfect - firm with nice chew, fragrant and flavorful, but all the students agreed that it was too tough and tasted too mild. Oh well.

To work without a recipe, I made the three students mise everything and have everything in front of them before starting -- they could not start, as they had no instructions in front of them to jump ahead. Chopped onion, chopped fennel, hot Italian sausage crumbled and browned, pound of Parmesan grated, 1 cup of arborio rice measured, sautiors and wooden spoons and stock at the ready.

We set up four pans, and basically had the three students do as I did. Olive oil in the hot pan, enough to just sloosh around to get the bottom wet. When it shimmered, throw in a fist of onion and a fist of fennel. Move around until translucent and smelly, a little salt to get it moving. Toss in one cup of white wine from a measuring cup, as pouring directly from the bottle is a fire hazard. Start stirring constantly as you toss in cup of rice, blast heat. When the wine has been evaporated/absorbed by the rice, add about a cup of stock and stir until rice is almost dry. Repeat adding stock by the cup and stirring until the grains of rice are tender enough, and a starchy sauce has formed from starch coming out of the rice and the stock. This took about 25 minutes. When we got it where we wanted, turned off heat, threw in about 1/4 pound of grated parm and about 4 oz of marscapone, and 1/2 pound of the browned sausage. Stir to completely combine, taste and season with salt and pepper. Serve immediately.

No real measurements, just looking at how your food behaves and cooking until done. One student was impressed by how it looked like rice pudding and added a bit of powdered sugar to hers, another student burned her onions and fennel a little, and her risotto had a reddish-brown tinge. The cooked wine sent a fennel-onion perfume through out the building and we had a bunch of staff stop by to compliment the students on something smelling wonderful.

Surprisingly, all three students were gaga over the risotto, eating large portions and asking, "Can you order this in a restaurant?" among other things.

Next week, making pizza for about 50 staff and parents....

Norbert Monday (Strengths, Weaknesses)

I had some crazy idea that being it's Monday, I'd try for an all-green day, but the social meal of the day knocked me out with sweets and alcohol.

Did my first whole weight-work out this morning, felt a little feeble but it was fun with the music and the Edie observing from her crib. Improvised a potato salad with stuff laying around the kitchen, then attended a baby's birthday party. Edie was feeling awfully clingy, crying every time I put her down for the first hour, but she loosened up. Good thing I love holding her! Afterwards met up with B and walked home, rode out to Coney and back. Feel good.

AM SNACK: 9am, glass of iced mint green tea

BREAKFAST: 10:30am, crispy brown rice cereal with organic dead milk, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

AFTERNOON TASTING: 12:30pm, bites of potato salad
Made a batch of potato salad for a kiddie party attending this afternoon, using stuff laying around the house. Bag of red bliss mini potatoes, egg yolks & olive oil with some mustard powder to make mayo, fresh rosemary, parsley, carrot and celery, salt, Worcestershire, some hot pepper, voila, potato salad...

PM SNACK: 1:30pm, large green salad, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: 3pm, 2 wedges of eggplant and zucchini hero, bits of industrial potato salad, macaroni salad and some of my own potato salad, 1 brownie, 1 piece of carrot-cream cheese cake, 1 glass wine, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5
At a 1 year-old's birthday party. They had a several feet of vegetarian hero and some bland sides, to which my potato salad sat with. Funny, the industrial potato salad was bone-white and was simply potato slices in loose white mayonaisy blandness. My potato salad was a rich yellow color (from the yolks in my mayo), studded with crunchy bits, herbs and the loose red skins coming off the quartered potatoes.

DINNER: 9pm, baked ocean perch, sofrito brown rice & beans, smoothie pop, water, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Got a frozen fillet of perch, sprinkled a bunch of old bay seasoning and wacked it in the oven -- before c-school, I'd be too intimidated to just cook a simple piece of fish without instructions, now it seems ridiculously easy.

Mac n' Cheese Marathon

The class was psyched for today's lesson -- everyone loves mac n' cheese, and we were going to make three versions. The point was to get them thinking about sauces. It's one thing to lecture about mother sauces (which I did, which did not elicit much interest), it's another thing to make a sauce and apply it in real life.

Mac n' cheese is not just macaroni slathered in cheese -- if we did that, and baked it, you'd get a dry, burnt, excessively lumpy mass that would congeal and room temperature to something guaranteed to back you up (at the least.) That thing that makes a mac n' cheese something more is the sauce: Bechamel, a mother sauce which is white sauce made by thickening milk with a white roux. A roux is the classic thickening agent that is made by cooking equal parts fat and flour (in this case, butter and AP.) Once we have our bechamel, we add out cheeses and seasonings (see the recipe here), then into a pan with very stiffly cooked macaroni to bake and come together.

Traditionally, the seasoning is salt, pepper and mustard powdered, and that's what we did with one version. Another version we added crumbled bacon and extra mustard powder, and a third replaced the mustard with jerk seasoning and a bunch of softened diced onion.

This is not light food, so I thought rather than make another heavy sauce dish, make a protein and a veg to make a balanced plate of food. I got one student to just go for it, sauteing a bag of adult spinach leaves. Super simple: heat saute pan, add a little olive oil, drop in dry leaves, move around until wilted, then add more until it's all in pan. Salt while cooking to taste. Stop and remove from heat when all is wilted.

The protein was "shake n' bake" chicken. Simply, take chicken breasts cut to size and dredge in a flour and spice mix, then bake.

HOME MADE “SHAKE N’ BAKE” CHICKEN BREASTS

Yield: 8 servings

Flour 1 cup
Corn meal ½ cup
Old bay seasoning 2 tsp
Paprika 2 tsp
Black pepper 1 tsp
Salt 2 tsp
Chicken breasts 8 each

1. Grease baking sheet. Preheat oven to 350
2. Combine all ingredients except breasts in a bowl
3. Toss breasts in mixture then place on greased sheet.
4. Bake for 25-30 minutes or when meat thermometer reads 155˚.
5. Rest meat for 10-15 minutes covered in foil, then serve.

Old Bay Seasoning is basically celery salt and paprika, and the final result was surprising like the commercial shake n' bake mix, only without the extra chemicals or anti-caking agents.

The kids were not impressed with the chicken -- they liked the seasoning, but it was too "dry" for them (though due to the instant read thermometer, the bigger pieces did come out juicy, the smaller pieces were a bit tough.)

However, there was universal acclaim for the spinach. None seemed to ever have a simple spinach like this, done fresh -- usually, if at all, they've had it from frozen. I think a few kids said they're going to make that at home, which really made me feel like today's class wasn't JUST a fat n' carb festival.

We also made a vat of chicken stock, which will factor in to the next lesson: grains, including rice, farro and buckwheat...