another cooking school week

From curry to dust bowl

 

I’m learning a lot from the exercise of cooking through one single cookbook.  One thing I have learned is how to create a sauce with simple ingredients.  Mixing butter into a liquid that has wine in it makes a sharp flavor that is wonderful.  When cooking onion and garlic, always cook the onion completely before adding the garlic, because garlic burns easily.  In this book it always states I should cook the onion till done, then add the garlic and cook for only 30 seconds more.  I cooked a vegetable curry, and the directions had me cook all the seasonings first, then add the veggies and cook in the seasonings without any liquid.  This was to bond the flavors into the veggies.  Then I added the broth, cooked until the veggies were tender, then added coconut milk.  The curry was my favorite meal so far.

 

Chicken Saltimbocca before cooking.  

My next meal was something called Chicken Saltimbocca.  I have never even eaten a meal that tasted like this one.  This is a Roman dish, usually made with veal wrapped in prosciutto and seasoned with sage.  As usual when I cook I only skim the information, so I missed that I was supposed to have whole sage leaves.  I only had the typical powdered herb, but I still really loved the dish.  Saltimbocca means “jump into your mouth” in Italian, and that is a perfect description of the meal.   To show how much I have to learn, I first had to look up Saltimbocca, because I had never heard of this dish or that word.  Next I had to look up prosciutto, because I wasn’t sure what that was.  Prosciutto is salt cured uncooked ham, specifically a cut from the hind leg of a pig.  The meat is covered in salt and allowed to dry for several weeks, then hung in a humid room for months.  The flavor of the ham depends on the breezes that flow around the meat as it cures.  Prosciutto can be eaten as is, raw, or it can be cooked.  In this recipe the prosciutto is wrapped around the sage covered chicken cutlets and then cooked in a pan.  My plan for the rest of the prosciutto is to eat it the way it was mentioned in the article I read, raw with cheese and melon.

Completed cooked meal

I don’t think I ever really enjoyed cooking until now.  I fixed countless meals for my family over the years, and I certainly enjoyed the feeling of taking care of the people I love, feeding my children healthy and nutritious meals, but it seemed like I was always cooking under a deadline.  We had to eat and clean up before scouts, or church, or sports, or whatever activity was on the list.  Cooking was just the chore to complete; food was just the stuff to eat, before running out the door for the other parts of life.  I am so much happier now, not being busy, not cooking with one eye on the clock, and so I am really able to enjoy preparing the meal.  I savor the smells, the sounds and of course, the taste.  

 

America’s Test Kitchen is so far a joy to cook through, although not ever meal has been a winner.  Last night I fixed chickpea patties, kind of like a salmon patty with ground chickpeas.  Flavor was to come with a cucumber yogurt mix on top.  I thought the meal was fair, but my husband said it was like eating dust.  My son scraped the cucumber topping off, covered it with ketchup and declared it, passable.  The rest of the night those two men joked about dust bowl meals and eating dirt.  Needless to say, we won’t repeat that one.