Skip to main content

Cooking 101 Recap: Week III



Hi everyone! Chef Barton here with our weekly Cooking 101 recap. After a week off last Tuesday so everyone could enjoy Mardi Gras, we got back on schedule last night with session three of our Cooking 101 series. This week featured the "Garde Manger," or cold section of the kitchen.

We talked about strategies for putting together great looking contemporary cheese boards, crudité platters, fruit platters, and antipasto displays. We also prepared several dressings from scratch and everyone got to try their hand at making their own vinaigrette. The ranch dressing I made with homemade mayo came out a little thin but tasty - I think I got carried away with our housemade buttermilk!

We also tasted many different salad greens to showcase the wide differences there are of greens there are to choose from. We saw some different salad presentations with "bowls" made from baked parmesan cheese, or frico, and also created a thinly sliced cucumber round just large enough to hold some greens. Interesting presentations to think about the next time you're hosting!

This week, we also gave our student chefs the chance to win their very own Northeastern logo wooden cutting board. Two lucky students, Chef Alexa and Chef Kate, each left last night's class with a new cutting board - just another tool that they can impress their friends and family with!

Each week we're building on what we've learned from the previous weeks: menu building, stocking your pantry, nutrition, shopping, and knife skills. Next week we'll be creating stocks and sauces. Do you know what the five mother sauces are and how to prepare them? Our ten Cooking 101 students will after next week!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

4 Tips To Avoid Stress Eating During Finals

It's the week of finals and suddenly there's so much to do and not enough time to do it. With projects, papers, studying, all-nighters, and early wake-ups, indulging in your favorite (and maybe not so good for you) foods seems like the perfect way to relieve some of that finals stress. When we turn to food to relive stress, it tends to be food that comforts us and makes us feel good, which a lot of times is a carton of ice cream, a slice of pizza, or your favorite piece (or bag) of candy. The truth is, finals may not only be a stressful time of the semester but a time where weight gain occurs in stressed out students. The combination of a large amount of sedentary time studying and test taking, little to no exercise, and stressful or late-night eating is a recipe for weight gain. Another truth is that we may not even recognize that we are in fact stress eating due to being completely preoccupied. So how do we avoid this stress eating before it takes place? Here are four tips to...

To Juice or Not To Juice?

Depending on who you talk to, juice is either part of the latest health trend or on the list of things to avoid. Understanding what juice does and doesn’t offer can help you decide if it is right for you. The Up Side: Fruits and vegetables offer a variety of health-promoting nutrients, many of which are still available in the juice squeezed from them. Juices can be a convenient and tasty way to get those nutrients. Juices also offer a way to get fruits and vegetables that you may not usually eat in the whole form. For example, cranberry juice is a popular alternative to whole cranberries and a great way to get some important antioxidants. People who don’t normally eat spinach may find that when juiced with other vegetables and fruit, they enjoy it. The Down Side: With about 50-115 calories per cup, fruit and vegetable juices are not low calorie drinks. For that reason, drinking a lot of juice could potentially make weight management more difficult. Research suggests that people who dri...

Plant Forward

A New Way of Eating There’s a relatively new term buzzing around the food world that you may or may not have heard of, plant forward. What does that mean you ask? Plant forward focuses on more vegetable centric dishes with meat playing more of a supporting role. Think blended burgers, stir-fry’s or grain bowls where meat is almost like a condiment. Flavors are bold and it’s all about the dish’s deliciousness whether it happens to be vegan or vegetarian, or not. Diners aren’t interested in completely removing meat from their diets so embracing a diet that is mostly plants with some meat here and there provides a comfortable middle ground. The Challenge with Red Meat Conventional animal agriculture is resource intense and less than stellar for the environment. Ruminant animals release methane gas into the atmosphere which is about twenty five times more intense than carbon dioxide. Let’s face it, our country’s enormous appetite for beef is not so great for our health and the heal...