Professor Shalmanese's 2 week cooking school

[Shalmanese]

Hrmm... I guess the theme for today was luxury, or indulgences.

We started off the day baking the bread and making some pasta:

Thats my friend in the background mixing the pasta dough. The bread is resting on the counter while the oven heats up.

The bread was baked:

The pasta was kneaded:

So we headed off to the farmers market to pick up some of this:

with which we made this:

and served it with this:

Wagyu Steak Frites with garlic mayonaisse and a french cote-du-marmendais. Very nice.

Unfortunately, the cheese guy at our local farmers market was on holiday and a search at 4 fairly upscale cheese places didn't reveal a single person selling truffle pecorino so we had to do without the pasta. It's sitting in the fridge right now waiting for something to be done with it. I might make it tomorrow for lunch, it should be still okay then right?

Anyway, we finished off the last of the lemon-mint sorbet:

While drinking some home-made lemonade with lemons from the farmers market:

For dinner, we started off with an anti-pasta platter, lots of good stuff:

From front to back, we had some artechoke hearts, some sun dried tomatos, stuffed peppers, 2 different balsamic vinegars (to compare and contrast). Then we had 5 cheeses, from left to right, a roy des valles which was a really strong ewes milk with a faint gym sock taste, A farmhouse chedder, a jarlsberg, a dutch blue gouda and a goats milk cheese. With that, we had some proscuitto and some of this mornings bread.

Next, we made a recipe from the French Laundry, duck breasts with corn & mushrooms. Phew, THAT was a lot of work, probably more than I'm willing to put in. We had to make a quick just from some roasted duck bones (where "quick" is less than an hour standing in front of the stove stirring), juiced some corn and heated it, blanched some more corn, grilled some duck breasts and fried some wild mushrooms in duck fat to put on top. The payoff was rather nice though:

Finally, we finished off the evening with some creme caramel:

The custard cracked when we took it out of the bowl but the taste was phenomenal. It was so light and delicate, like an eggy cloud dissolving in your mouth.

For some reason, the desserts seem to have been uniformly successful even though I almost never do them unless it's for company.

Tomorrow, we're making the pasta with some tomatos and basil for lunch, doing the pork belly for dinner with a potato salad and I have no idea what for dessert. I'm freaking exausted right now so I'm off to bed.

[Shalmanese]

What SHE said!

So Shalmanese......have you been bombarded with requests for dinner invites?

←

phew! I don't think I'll be cooking anything fancy for a LOOOONG time after this is over. I'm all fancied out. I'll be living on rice and beans for the next 3 months .

[hwilson41]

Shalmanese, I have only one question. What do I have to do to get invited to your house for a week or two ? Seriously, a great job and super photos also. I envy you and your friend and the beautiful meals. Thanks for sharing, and please keep 'em coming.

[BryanZ]

That duck looks money. Like really, really good.

[Teri Everitt]

DO NOT look at this thread when you're hungry!!!!

It's my ex-husband's week with the kids so I am away from home and I will not attempt serious cooking in the tiny kitchen where I am staying. I have been living on bread and cheese all week

[Shalmanese]

Bleurgh, today was not a good day foodwise. Just didn't feel like making anything. I guess I really am starting to get vurnt out by it all.

Anyway, for breakfast, we made some scrambled eggs and toasted the sourdough we we made yesterday, threw in some cherry tomatos and some basil:

The pasta ended up going bad since it was left on a bench all day in sweltering heat so that went in the bin. I couldn't face making any more so we just heated up some left over osso bucco for lunch with some white rice. Theres no way to make that look good so I didn't even try:

Dinner was completely hands off for me for the first time. I didn't even step into the kitchen though I did respond to questions. We made a tomato salad with some basil & balsamic vinegar:

Then a roast pork belly just with some steamed potatos:

Not very inspiring I know but it tasted good.

Dessert was just a banana smoothie and some peaches we had to finish off:

We have to go shopping tomorrow for some more stuff and hopefully I'll get my mojo back. Thinking of doing a risotto for lunch... maybe with some miso soup. No idea what for dinner, don't feel like anything ambitious at this stage but we'll see.

[Shalmanese]

Decided to keep it fairly light today as well:

Started with a plum smoothie for breakfast:

We got a fantastic deal on a crate of plums just this morning so we're trying to go through them as quickly as possible. Expect to see lots of plums popping up in the next few days. The smoothies were pretty much just pure plums thinned with a bit of orange juice and sweetened with some sugar. Very intense and the colour is fantastic.

For lunch, we decided to do the risotto and went fairly classical with a chicken & mushroom risotto:

I don't know why people don't make risotto more often. To me, it's a comfort food made with whatever scraps you need to get rid of and it always tastes fantastic.

Finally, for dinner, we returned to making soups after a long hiatus and made the famous autumn squash soup from the Cooking of Southwest France:

We cut some thin croutons out of the remainder of the first loaf of sourdough and topped it with some proscuitto and creme fraiche. I have to say, the thin croutons work far better than the cubes I'm used to making and the soup was so simple yet satisfying.

After that, we made up some gnocci and topped it with just a lightly cooked tomato, pancetta and chilli sauce. We topped it with some of the Roy de Valle cheese which was incredibly good:

IMHO at least, this one was considered a failure. Gnocci just doesn't seem to go very well with lumpy toppings. We still have some frozen gnocci in the freezer so some suggestions for some quirky sauces that go well would be appreciated.

Finally, we finished off the night with some fresh peaches and plums with some home-made yogurt and honey:

All in all, today was a relatively light and healthy day. But since I've started cooking with duck fat again after the duck confit, I can't stop raving about it. It just adds so much meatiness and mouthfeel to a dish without making it overly greasy. The duck hams should be ready in about a day or two too so those should be interesting.

Edited December 30, 2005 by Shalmanese (log)

[Shalmanese]

Looks like theres been a slight change of plans. An old family friend is staying with us for the next couple of days and he took us out to a big NYE dinner at a chinese restaurant so the cooking lessons may be disrupted.

Anyway, for lunch today, we had a sesame-chicken noodle salad:

This was made completely by my friend with no assistance from me whatsoever all the way to the plate. The recipe is from the Cooks Book and it turned out fantastic. This is definately going into my regular rotation.

Then, we had some Miso Soup:

Finally, we had a big blowout chinese New Years Feast:

Peking Duck, Crab with Noodle, Crispy Skin Duck, Soya Chicken, Sea Cucumber with Shittake Mushrooms, Mapo Dofu, 2 types of Chinese Greens & Fried Rice. Oh My!

And... Of Course:

Fireworks!

Happy New Year! Gong Hai Fat Choi!

Edited December 31, 2005 by Shalmanese (log)

[Shalmanese]

It was 44C/111F today in Sydney so we spent most of the day at the beach! For Lunch, we just had leftovers from the night before. Some crab and some mapo dofu. After lunch, we strolled down to the beach and had a really relaxing swim. I really should get down there more often .

For dinner, I made a duck & noodle soup from the leftover roast duck and chinese greens and I actually had a leg of lamb that I started the day before in the oven. I put it in before the family friends called so I decided to Low Temperature-Low Time (LTLT) cook it for an experiment. I turned the oven down to 60C and left it there for 24 hours. It was fine for all of yesterday night and most of today, keeping an even 57 - 62C but, when I came back from the beach, the temp had shot alarmingly up to 75C. My hypothesis was that, because we turned the aircon off, the ambient temperature went high and screwed over the thermostat. Anyway, the lamb was disappointing, tender, but very dry. I also roasted some fingerling potatos to go with it which were very good.

Finally, for dessert, we had some plum sorbet from the leftover plums. I fell in love with the intense colour these plums put out. And the flavour was amazing too. Unfortunately, no pictures since we were so busy getting the food out onto the table...

I think the only thing I have left on my to-do list is pizza but I have no idea when I'll have time to do that. We'll see... Only 3 days left!

[Shalmanese]

My friend managed to both simultaneously break his toe getting up from his computer chair and get a massive sinus infection from swimming yesterday so we spent most of today waiting at the local medical centre (I wish I could say this was atypical of him but it's really not). Anyway, he's off his feet for today at least so I did all of the cooking and he just watched.

We finally cracked open the duck confit from a week ago and it was phenomenally good. I think I managed to cook some pretty decent meals while my friend was here but this was the first thing I made that actually completely blew him away and left him speechless.

Dinner started with the garlic soup from Cooking of SW France:

Which was absolutely amazing. I can see why everyone raves about it now. And it's such an interesting concept in the use of the eggs. I think I'll definately think of incorporating that trick in many other soups I make. I just garnished it with a tiny bit of the duck confit but the flavour permeated the entire soup and really lifted it to the next level.

Next, was some fettucini with roasted bell peppers, sun dried tomatos, duck confit, peas & chilli:

This was pretty good but, for some reason, the confit flavour was much more muted in this dish even though it was featured much more prominently. Perhaps even the relatively short cooking time was enough to leachthe flavour from the duck and distribute it through the soup.

Finally, we finished with a "plum" of plum sorbet with home-made honey yogurt:

Tomorrow is my last full day with my friend and then we have a half day on the 4th and this grand experiment will be over.

[Shalmanese]

Today marks the last full day of this grand experiment. My friend is back to Melbourne tomorrow at 6:00pm and I have to head off to Adelaide for a week at 4:00pm so today was more concerned about using up anything that wouldn't last than any real cooking lessons.

The last of the plums got turned into yet more smoothies and also into plum panna cotta thanks to the inspiration of Anna N.

We finished off the panna cottas today:

We also broke out the Duck Hams that we started on Day 2 of the course and they seemed to have aged beautifully. We just threw together a really simple, asian inspired dish of stir fried bok choy (plus some left over greens from new years) with some sliced garlic and some udon noodles and duck ham. It worked out really well and had the feel of an authentic asian dish even though the ingredients were wildly eclectic.

Also, we made a simple green salad to finish off the lettuce and tomatos but also threw in some dukkah spice mix at the end on some random dash of inspiration and actually made the dish taste very good:

This may actually be the last food post from me since I doubt I'll have time to upload pics before I go tomorrow so all I can say was that it's definately been a blast cooking for both me and my friend and that we've both learned a lot about food during this short interval.

We've managed to produce some, IMHO quite impressive looking and tasting food for someone of such little expertise and he's come away from it with a very good foundation from which to explore from. He's starting to tentatively develop a palate and a sense of food pairings as well as developing a language for what he's tasting. All in all, I would say that it's been a pretty damn fun 13 days.

If any of you have any questions, feel free to ask them. I should be online at least once a day and would love to share what I've gained from this experience.

Edited January 3, 2006 by Shalmanese (log)

[Lori in PA]

This has been such a fun thread to keep up with, Shalmanese. You've cooked a slew of different things, but I like the "reality" of how you used the ingredients you needed to use, like the crate of plums.

[Rebecca263]

Shalmanese, such GREAT home cooking lessons! Your friend is very lucky, and I thank you for sharing with us the results of all of your work this past few week!. Also, those soups, wow.