Butter and more....

This past Saturday class was a very stressful class for me. I hate making presentations and speaking in front of a group. I also had a lot of competition. The two other presentations were really great. Sarah! Your soup was great, the flavor was wonderful and the rib meat nice and tender. I am sorry though; I could not bring myself to eat the tripe. I have had it before and there is nothing about it that I like. And Catherine your curries were quite good; especially the chunkier one. I went through a vegetarian stage many years ago and played around with a few different types of curries and Indian style vegetable mixtures. Your presentation made me miss cooking with those flavors.

The cooking games we played in class were very thought provoking. We had to cook with a mystery beverage. My group worked with a port. As Marcus mentioned in his blog the food we made was great. The ingredients we had to work with helped. The chops were great quality meat, the herbs fresh, and the mushrooms beautiful. Since I stopped working in kitchens I almost never get to cook such incredible choices of foods. We fashioned an almost classic dish, veal chops with a port wine cream sauce and sautéed chanterelle mushrooms with tarragon and thyme. Anya sautéed the chanterelles with tarragon and thyme perfectly. She seasoned them well with butter and the herbs. I could have eaten a plate of those alone. The flavors worked well together. Jonathon did notice our perfectly cooked green beans were out of place. The more I think about it; he was right. Even the green was a bit too bright; an orange sweet vegetable might have gone better with the dish.

Our next task was to bridge the flavors between a Rosemount Shiraz and another food. We chose smoked ham with carrots that we served with dried prunes in a shiraz reduction sweetened with a bit of brown sugar. The results were very interesting. It looked very ‘70s’ American Cookbook. We could have served it with a jello mold and slaw. The flavor was not bad, the reduction worked well with the carrots, but it was a bit overpowered by the smokiness of the ham.

Besides our veal chops which was my favorite dish, I thoroughly everything that the class made, but if I had to pick a favorite it would have to be the soup with Gruyere cheese. It was a rather odd combination of flavors – but it really worked!

An interesting site....

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1077295

And maybe this will help explain? We did cover some of these subjects in class.

www.fst.vt.edu/extension/enology/foodwine.html