Serious Foodie Day 2

After a crappy day at work I came home, uploaded and organized some photos and took a half hour nap before heading out to my cooking class. My day wasn't really crappy, well I guess it was, but for no particular reason. The first half of my day was spent in a workplace safety seminar, the second half of my day was spent trying to find things to do in the lab. When I'm busy the day goes so quickly, when there's nothing to do an afternoon feels like an eternity.

So tonight we started off making a beet salad. We learned different cutting techniques and how to make a vinaigrette. While we were making the salad, we started poaching some salmon. I'm definitely going to do more poaching, gives such a nice, moist meat. We also learned about different types of salmon and the wild vs. farmed opinions of some of the top chefs in town (ex. Feenie). When the salmon was cooked we reduced the poaching liquid and added it to the salmon and put it all in the fridge to chill. We ate the salad with some white wine and watched as the chef (whose name is Tony) made macaroni and cheese. Actually it was shells with cheese because shells hold more sauce. The sauce was delicious, we first made a roux, then a bechemel sauce, to which we added the cheese. So many little tricks and tips to making a nice creamy sauce. This one started with bacon and had chopped onion, celery, jalapeno, some paprika and some cayenne pepper. Very good. So much better than any mac and cheese from a box, but that's not hard to do.

We ate the mac and cheese and watched how to assemble our salmon dishes. We made rillettes - mashed poached salmon with the poaching liquid and a touch of smoked salmon for flavour, topped with guacamole, then finished off with some sour cream with horseradish. This was all pressed into a mold so when the mold was removed we had this nice, little, colourful stack. Drizzle some infused olive oil around the plate and top with a couple grape tomatoes and fresh ground pepper. Very tasty.

So last week I made my broth from the lamb roast bones Catherine gave us... this week we've got beet salad, mac and cheese and salmon rillettes all lined up. :) I think I'm going to spread those out into three different meals. Gourmet cooking at our house!