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On fire! |
Location: currently So Cal
Registered: May 2002
Messages: 1179
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Hi Lenny. Sorry I didn't sent the email yesterday. I decided to post here for everyone to see.
I know the cooking school stories have been rare lately. I can't remember the last one I posted but I think it had sonething to do with cakes. That was a while ago. Since then we've done custards, ice cream, sorbet, a plated desserts with really fancy sauces. For our dessert project they gave us a "mystery box." Actually it was a list of three ingredients and we had to include them as featured ingredients in our dessert. My ingredients were strawberries, vanilla, and ginger. I made a tower out of finely diced strawberries, vanilla flavored pastry cream, and ginger-sesame wafers. I finished it with a balsamic-honey gastrique (vinegar and sugar reduction sauce)and a vanilla-ginger sauce. mmm-mmm good.
Last week was sugar and chocolate week. We did sugar centerpieces and chocolate truffles. I had two partners for the centerpiece. We made a gingerbread house with a poured sugar crescent moon in the background. The moon kept cracking and breaking, but we finally got it to work. The coolest centerpiece in the class was the "huka-smoking caterpillar" from Alice in Wonderland. That team did a really good job with it. Another group did Moby Dick rising up out of the water getting ready to swallow two gingerbread seamen. It looked like a third grade art project, but was still quite eye-catching.
My daughter's birthday was Wednesday. We decided to have a small dinner for her and a birthday cake last night. It was nearly a disaster. My wife and I were supposed to go get our income taxes done in the morning, but ended up staying all day. We left after 7 hours of waiting. The tax lady was late getting to her office. We arrived at 9 am and they told us she wouldn't get there until about 12:30. She didn't arrive til almost 2. She doesn't take appointments so it's first come first served, or so we thought. We were the second people in line. What we didn't know was that the lady in front of us had put her entire family on the list in front of us, five different people needing their taxes done. Finally we decided to leave at 4pm because I had promised my daughter dinner and a cake and we still had our shopping to do.
Anyhow, dinner consisted of fillet mignon and shrimp. I made garlic smashed potatoes, put a bacon-wrpped fillet on top, then a little sauteed spinach, topped with 2 huge shrimptails staning on end. Three asparagus spears were leaned up against the whole thing in a sort of teepee shape and it was finished with a port wine reduction and butter sauce. The cake was a three layer devil's food with whiped cream icing and stuffed with blackberries and blackberry jam filling. We forgot to buy birthday candles because we were in a hurry, but my daughter enjoyed it anyways.
My granddaughter (almost 2 1/2) is "cooking" now, too. My wife took her to the store and she saw a toy microwave oven and she wouldn't leave without it. She began screaming for her to buy it saying she wanted to "cook like papa (that's what she calls me)." We now have a constant supply of plastic pizza which she tells us is "hot" when she takes it out and blows on it.
((HUGS}}
Think good thoughts,
e
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