Hi blog buds!
Happy Sunday! Fall is DEFINITELY in the air – it’s 47 degrees this morning! But it’s going to be another gorgeous Colorado day with a high of 80 degrees. The leaves have been turning and our lawn has pretty much gone dormant but I found even more blooms on the rose bushes yesterday! Our trees here seem to go from pretty fall colors to bare in NO time. One day of high winds and they all blow away. I miss the long daylight of summer, but I’m enjoying the cooler evenings now that I’m spending a LOT more time in the kitchen.
This week was our first homework assignment that included some cooking at home. Prior to this we’ve mostly had a lot of reading. We needed to create or adapt 3 recipes for one mealtime. I chose a lunch menu.
My homework recipes included:
- Ginger Curry Sweet Potato Soup with Apples and White Beans
- Indian Spiced Quinoa (recipe will follow soon on FitFeat)
- Cucumber Shallot Salad with Minted Yogurt Dressing
Then we needed to prepare one, write about our experience cooking it, including any changes we would make next time. We also had to include a page on the nutritional data, and a page on the health benefits of some of the ingredients. It took me a surprising amount of time, partly because I felt the need to prepare all three, partly so that I could get some practice and partly because I haven’t written ‘real’ papers for school in almost two decades! 
My mise en place:
Practicing my mirepoix:
And some mincing and chopping:
My ‘trash bowl’ for vegetable pieces that don’t get used. I turned these into homemade veggie stock later that evening:
Finished meal (obviously I was NOT practicing my presentation skills!!):
My ‘soup’ actually ended being more of a purée but the taste was great.
The lecture topics covered this week were:
- Foundations of Cooking
- Safety & Sanitation
- Knife Skills
I made it through knife skills with NO cuts! We all did, luckily! During that class, a mobile sharpening company called Rolling Stone came by to sharpen our knives (and let us shop inside his cool store on wheels).
Then we got busy cutting all sorts of things: garlic, onions, carrots, celery, avocado, oranges, leeks, sweet potatoes, red peppers, kale, fennel. We learned all sizes of dice, julienne, brunoise, batonnet, bias, triangle, mince, pasting and much much more…
Our stations:
We quickly learned that a blister will form on our forefinger where we need to build up a callus. 
I’ve never cut so many things in my life. It was a ton of fun though!
While we were busy being instructed on the knife skills, our Kitchen Manager was busy making all of these things into our lunch as we finished each step.
We had:
- Gingered Carrot Leek soup
- Raw Kale Salad with Avocado and Oranges (and a tahini-style dressing)
- Lentil & Quinoa for our protein source
- Curried Sweet Potato fries (baked)
- Guacamole with Mary’s Gone Crackers
The buffet spread:
Still a lot of SHARI food, huh? I am LOVING the food we eat there. I haven’t had a single thing that wasn’t right up my alley!
Next week we’ll be working on Stocks, Soups, Stews and Sauces. The next homework increases the recipes to 5, and we need to include costing and recipe scaling in addition to what we did for the first homework assignment. I’m already thinking of ideas for the recipes!
Random Fun:
I put out a FeatTweet about the Wall o’Spice after I wrote that blog post, and AARTI herself commented on it! That was so nice of her because if you follow her blog at all, she’s insanely busy right now. And it made my day! More celebs should be that cool! I knew there was a reason we were totally rooting for her to win. Thanks Aarti!
Click here to find me on Twitter!
Well friends, I feel like I’ve had you reading FOREVER on this post! Sorry it’s so long! Thanks for making it to the bottom of the page if you stuck with me that long! And I promise to provide the recipe for the Indian Spiced Quinoa in one of this week’s posts.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
– Shari B. =)
