My "tasting" plate at the end of the day. As in every class, after we are all finished cooking our assignments, we arrange all of the dishes on a table, prepare a small taste of each, and discuss the components of what we made.
Sauces are one part of cooking that take finesse and accuracy. Measuring correctly, stirring appropriately, heating evenly, and many other skills go into make a smooth, "napee" sauce.
From top left to right: leek and onion coulis, roasted red pepper coulis, curry sauce, and mushroom sauce
In addition to these, we also made beurre blanc, yellow pepper coulis, turnip coulis, carrot & beet "marinara", almond sauce, corn hollandaise, and 4 different pestos (mint/pistachio pesto, parsley/walnut pesto, basil/walnut pesto, classic pesto).
A couple of things I loved about school today -
1. the colors of the sauces vibrated with creativity and flavor
2. the taste of some of the sauces was extremely fresh, simple, and surprising
3. the use of creativity and theory to make health-supportive, delicious options for normally unhealthy sauces - for example, corn hollandaise, made with corn puree and red chile pepper instead of traditional hollandaise, which contains egg yolks and butter (and lots of it).
One last thing I'm constantly learning is how to make use of every part of our ingredients. After juicing carrots and zuchinni for the infusions, our teacher took the fibrous pulp that was extracted and made cookies out of it! Mixing the okara (the fibrous portion) with maple syrup, currents, cinnamon, almond flour, and a few other spices, she created delicious, seasonal, and health-supportive cookies that were outwardly crisp, yet inwardly soft, and were extremely tasty! Genius way to feed small kids carrots and zucchini... Though the left over okarad does not contain all of the nutrients that a whole vegetable does, it's THOUSANDS of times better than processed, bleached, chemically-braised, and nutritionally-fortified white flour.
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