The Year I learned to Embrace Food

This year I learned to embrace food. I learned to feed my body what it wants. Sometimes it wants healthy vegetables dishes and sometimes it wants gooey, gunky, buttery plates of food.
I started this blog a little while after I had decided that I want to learn how to cook.
I knew a bit about cooking but never thought that I could learn so much in one year.
I started my journey with random cooking classes until I realized that I was lacking techniques. I took two classes at the Art Institute and learned the fundamentals of cooking. Yes, it was extremely expensive but I learned that everything could be made from scratch.
Chef Paul Redman taught me all the basics and from then on, no yeast, no dough and no amount of work could stand in my way( he and his wife Helen have a really nice blog).
I learned to appreciate the allurement of seasonal produce, to relish at the sight of fresh herbs and to detect great meal components from a mile away.
I learned how to throw dinner parties without getting stressed out.
I took up yoga which taught me how to appreciate life, to meditate and most of all breathe which I can't believe that I didn't know how to do before.
I met some great chefs this year, went to fascinating food events and most of all learned to absorb any info that I could find about food. I got my appendix out this year which is not as bad as it sounds.
I also got engaged and married to the love of my life.
Thank you readers for your comments(yes, you Twinkies dad) and emails. I am grateful for all the support.
Whooo! What a year!

Michael Ruhlman at the The Art Institute of Seattle

Michael Ruhlman visited the Art Institute this week to answer the culinary student’s questions and sign copies of his new book, The Elements of Cooking. Michael charmed the students with his direct personality, his culinary experience and his sincerely straightforward manner of sharing his food adventures. He made a strong point about salt being the most powerful ingredient in the kitchen. This he discovered from a conversation with Thomas Keller. He explained that one must know how to salt and when to salt. Never did I realize that such an important part of cooking is also the area in which I am the weakest. I am definitely lacking salting capabilities at this point. He kept sharing personal experiences with a passion that could only inspire one to get off their behind and write, write, write or cook, cook, cook.
After such a whiff of inspiration, what does one do first? He also answered personal questions about career choices individually asked by the students in line. He answered with sincerity and made sure to stress that if you want to be a food writer then you have to write everyday. I ran home to decide whether I should write or cook. I decided to read his book which inspired me to write and cook. Each page is filled with so much information that a bubble tea straw wouldn’t be big enough to slurp it up.

For more about this experience, read the Wine Wall.

My Posts This Week

Another week has gone by really fast and I attached a list of some of the posts I wrote in my other blog. This week was special because I taught my first cooking class.

If you are looking for something to do today, then check out the healthy living fair.
I wrote about it in this post.

Need something nice to make today. Try my bruschetta recipe.

Last Minute Cooking

I woke up yesterday with a migraine.I decided to pull myself out of bed to a yoga class. I figured it might help. It did help for a few minutes but then after yoga I went to bed for an hour. Then I realized that I have guests. I sprang out of bed and started cooking. The guests have little kids so I made my favorite meatball recipe. Every kid and every adult seems to love this recipe. The recipe calls for matzo meal but I used Panko bread crumbs instead.
I made white rice to soak up the sauce. I made a salad. I made a pasta with peas, corn and cream. I boiled some fresh corn on the cob from the farmer's market. I almost forgot. I started the meal
with bruschetta. The bruschetta was made of tomatoes, olives and onions. As for dessert, I made meringues, covered with homemade peach gelato( no ice cream maker required) and topped it with fresh fruit.
I made all this in about 3 hours, except for the ice cream which I made the night before. Things went fine and the guests enjoyed. What I learned from all this....
If you put gummy worms anywhere near the kids then don't expect them to eat too much food. I also learned that even easy recipes can be made for guests!

Five Things I learned Since I Started Cooking

1. Mise en Place
As a French speaker, it is an expression that I understood right away. Mise en place means putting everything in place. This is the entire organization of your workplace before starting to cook, including chopping all your ingredients and setting them up in little bowls or neatly organized on a big chopping board. This means to saute or do anything that it says to do in advance. This way when you start cooking your recipe, you do it quickly and effectively and you don't end up burning one thing while looking for another. It's one of those cooking terms that you probably hear all the time on cooking shows but have never really paid attention to.

2. How to Chop
For many this is the most tedious, time consuming task to be done in the kitchen. I used to cut my salad in all different shapes and sizes, which made it not only unsightly but hard to eat. You need to take a class and get a good chef's knife for this(see number 3 for a better explanation). If you are going to invest in any cooking class it should be a knife skills class
because there are certain things you just have to learn hands on. There are also many sites that can help.
Click Here to Learn How to Chop an Onion
Most people hate cutting onions, but learning the onion cutting technique can make chopping them a lot of fun. I have heard from quite a few chefs that chopping onions is their cutting preference.


3. Get a Good Chef's Knife. This is probably the one thing that any chef or instructor has recommended to me. Yes, you have to spend a lot of money for this! Of all the things that I bought for my kitchen, this is one investment that I feel that I got the most use out of.
The brands that I have been recommended are Henckel or Wustoff but I am sure that there are many out there to choose from. A good knife should cost anywhere between 30 and 100 something dollars. There are better ones of course for more. Just make sure to take good care of the knife and never ever for any reason in this world put it in the dishwasher.

4. Don't Get Fancy on Your Friends. Picture this scenario. My friends are over for a dinner party. I decide to make homemade pasta. I make it in advance. My mise en place is ready and I am ready to toss the pasta in a pan for each one individually. They are waiting, they have already eaten the appetizers and are practically eating the furniture. Then, I realize I don't have enough plates. So I serve three people because some is ready and then continue sweating and grunting obscene swear words while trying to make the rest of the pasta. In the end, I join them after they have all finished eating and my sweating forehead and flustered cheeks reveal that this dinner was not as much fun as it should have been for me. Keep it simple. Make whatever you can in advance because when you have a dinner party, that's what it should be, a party. Even for the host.

5. Your Ingredients Count. If you are making quick meals for dinner just to feed the starving kids or find no pleasure in the act of cooking, then ignore this. I have come to the conclusion that Parmigiano Reggiano is not just a flashy name for a type of cheese, cheap olive oil is a lot of the time tasteless and fresh herbs really do taste better than powdered spices.
It's unrealistic to buy everything fresh all the time but spices like fresh rosemary, basil and thyme go a long way. When I do buy spices, I prefer to buy them at specialty spice stores or in bulk because you never know how long they have been sitting on the shelves of the supermarket.

Risotto Therapy

When I first started cooking, I looked for easy things to make. I obsessively watched Rachel Ray, trying to beat her at her 30 minute meals. Then I discovered the gracefulness of cooking, the art of it , the dance of it , the whole idea of focusing all your love in one place. You might think I am a freak but cooking has become a pleasure that I can afford to do endlessly without feeling the tiniest speck of guilt. This is of course as long as I don't eat endlessly.I realized I was hooked when I made risotto for the first time.RI- SOT- TO.The word rolls off my tongue softly and gracefully like when Nabokov chanted the word LO- LI- TA, in his controversial but extremely brilliant book.At first I just heard about Risotto. People would say : "Oh it's delicious but it's so much work!" The first time I made it, I had no idea how it was supposed to taste. I started with the basic, Risotto a la Milanese.The yellow, saffrony, creamy rice came out perfect the first time. ( This never happens to me!)I felt like I was eating a pot of gold.So for all those people who tried to scare me into making instant rice, you are missing out on something in this world. Risotto only takes about 30 minutes(including prep time), but a meaningful 30 minutes where all you do is focus on this one beautiful masterpiece of golden porridge-like, pasta textured rice.This is your time with your Risotto. No answering phones, No checking emails and no distractions.So... The next time you feel stressed or overwhelmed with work. Two words , Risotto therapy!
The technique in risotto is to have one pot of stock on the stove on a simmer so that it stays hot and to cook your rice in another pot by adding one ladle of hot stock at a time to your rice. Then, stir, stir and stir some more. Homemade stock is the best but if you are not ready to put that much effort into it you can use cartons of stock too. Just try not to use those cubes of soup powder, they taste really bland and are usually infested with M.S.G.The only inconvenience with risotto is that is tastes better when it's piping hot and just made. This is a bit more complicated for restaurants to make perfectly since it requires individual attention. This is one of those foods that taste just as great or even better when you make it.
So get some Arborio rice(the rice for risotto )and have some relaxing time with this creamy new friend.
Risotto A la Milanese Recipe