Things I Learned in Cooking Class

1. How to learn which produce is in season in your area. To find out which fruits and vegetables are in season, check the website of a local farmer's market. Often you can find a seasonality chart online. The Upper Merion Farmer's Market has a Harvest Calendar, for example, and seasonal recipes. We'd all love to be the kind of people who shop exclusively at farmer's markets, but in reality we're getting produce at Wegman's 98% of the time. This will at least provide an idea of what foods are probably growing naturally at this time of year, or don't poussent artificiellement as my French house mother once ranted.

2. How to hold a knife. Most people grip the knife by the handle with a fist, or with their forefinger laid flat along the spine, but for more control here is the proper technique: Hold the metal spine of the knife between your thumb and forefinger just where the metal meets the handle; grip the handle with the rest of your hand.

3. The key to perfect pie crust. Pie crust has four ingredients: butter, flour, salt, and water. The key? Very cold butter, very cold water (even put ice in it), and minimum manipulation. Use only just as much water as you need, because the water must evaporate in the oven: too much water = shrunken crust because, put simply, it prevents the butter from doing its job (Angie, I hope I got this right!). Refrigerate, refrigerate, refrigerate - if the dough sticks to the rolling pin, the butter is melting, and that's just no good.

4. Reserve some of the water after cooking pasta. To keep pasta from becoming dry and sticky, reserve half a cup of the cooking water to add as necessary during preparation. In class we made linguini with arugula-parmesan pesto (pesto means paste) and the topping was already somewhat dry. By adding the cooking water to the linguini we got an even coat of pesto and moist pasta. This is generally a good idea when making pasta, because the water with starch still in it will moisten the pasta without watering down the sauce or making the pasta too soggy/watery. 

Our supplies for bacon-wrapped chicken marinated in lemon, olive oil and rosemary and spinach with pine nuts. The name of our class was Essence of Tuscany.

I wish I had photos of the finished product, a blackberry and aged balsamic crostada worthy of a cookbook cover, but my will power and my self control disappeared as soon as I smelled it.

*****

Our head chef, Angie Lee at Sur La Table, is a career changer: she worked at NASA before training as a professional chef. Her insights into the chemical reasons for culinary phenomenons was exciting to learn. For example, here is what she taught the class about gluten. 

Gluten is like the metal framework when you pour concrete: it provides structure. As dough is manipulated the gluten, which is more like a coil than a square frame, is wound tighter and tighter. The tighter the gluten, the denser the result. Bread is kneaded and so it is very structured, whereas cake is more delicate and crumbly. With a pastry crust, you want to avoid over-handling the dough so that it can become flaky and wonderful in the oven (see tip #3).

So thank you ANGIE, for teaching a girl who will be living and cooking on her own how to make simple meals of a higher caliber!