Cooking Classes : Techniques of Fine Cooking 1

I have been meaning to sign up for these cooking classes at the Institute of Culinary Education for a while now. It is a 5 part series that focuses on the basic techniques of cooking with more of an emphasis on learning the skills used to cook the dish rather than the actual recipe. I am hoping these will be more useful to me than the latter because I can follow a recipe if I have to but the technique of doing a good roast or proper poach is more difficult.

Anyhow, I started this past Wednesday and so far so good. We had about 2.5 hours of lecture, 2 hours of cooking, and a half hour to eat. We covered a lot of basic concepts since it was the first class such as equipment, food safety, and chopping before going into the specific techniques for that session which were blanching, vinaigrettes, emulsions, & sautéing. After going through the techniques in with lecture & demonstrations we split up into groups of four and made the following:
- seared lamb chops with a compote butter topping
- diced potatoes sautéed with persillade (minced parsley & garlic)
- hot & spicy vegetable soup
- creamy shallot vinaigrette with champagne vinegar
- blueberries macerated with maple syrup

Other groups made pretty much the same thing except they replaced the hot soup with gazpacho (which I liked better), they did a different vinaigrette, and did a different macerated fruit dessert.

The class is going to go every Wednesday, but I am actually going to have to skip this week because I have a friend in town and will make it up in a few months.