I told you it was auction season, remember the year supply of dry sodas? Well, we get a kick out of picking one interesting item per auction, perhaps one with a story or experience. At a recent auction, I renewed our family pass to the Seattle Art Museum—which was brilliant timing as they just renovated a huge portion of the museum. It is gorgeous.

At last year’s school auction, we were nudged by our children (they let the kids drool over auction items, so they can ‘encourage’ their parents to gun for specific items—smart, eh?) to check out “shrimping for a day.” My kids want to shrimp?

We walked away with a day on a shrimp boat.

And it is May, and shrimping season has arrived. So we picked up our one-day shrimping licenses, wore layers and layers of long-johns and wool socks and shoved on our rubber boots… and got up WAY to early for a Saturday (why did we buy this again? oh yes, we spent money for a good cause… and it will be a memorable family experience…). And off we went.

And it was great. And for the sake of culinary school (couldn’t write a post without that in mind), having hoards of shrimp (80 per person, so we came home with 320) to deal with and learn to devein and clean and cook is, well, pushing me out of my comfort zone. And that really is the point, the ‘why’ behind culinary school: to push my kitchen knowledge and comfort and experience far beyond what it would ever be without school. And it all starts right about now, with all these live little buggers and their iridescent eyes, legs flailing.

Once we were home we simply had the meat in the shells and all I had to do was pick a recipe and clean ‘em. My son looked through my culinary book, while I was cleaning them, to verify the proper cleaning technique (well, I actually developed my own improper method, which will no doubt be corrected sometime this fall, at school, with yet another pile of shrimp). Because the index leaves much to be desired, he wrote up my own special little sticky note and inserted it on the shrimp deveining page.

My family is supporting my schooling efforts, one sticky note at a time.

Know what else warms my heart? My son learned how to clean shrimp, too.

Well they are friends the other days of the week too, but as it turns out Friday night was the night we invited these particular friends to dinner. I love looking forward to a night of basking in the company of good friends. It is a celebration, a happy time to enjoy one another’s company.

Of course, I like it even more when the meal practically makes itself. Whenever I make my favorite lasagna, I make two, then I bake one for dinner and freeze the second one for later. This particular Friday as luck would have it, I pulled a lasagna out of my freezer. I usually make sausage lasagna, but once in awhile I make a vegetarian lasagna. To compliment the layers of vegetables & cheese, my friend brought a pile of sausages for us to grill on the barbecue. It is a nice trick if you have a mixture of friends who are both vegetarian and non.

Because the main dish only needed to visit the oven before being done, I had time to focus on making a sampling of appetizers, a more exotic salad, and to try my hand at a new grilled rosemary flat bread recipe. To be honest, this menu would be perfect with only one or two of the appetizers/tapas and a leafy green salad (like the one I tried the other day: romaine lettuce with just fresh dill and blue cheese dressing). You could even skip the flat bread and buy your favorite artisan loaf, cut it up and offer oil and balsamic vinegar for dipping. Voila!

So invite your friends over already!

Dinner Menu
Sangria
Simple Summer Tapas
Yellow Beans w/Leeks & Prosciutto
Endive Walnut Salad
Vegetarian Lasagna (guess you will have to wait for this recipe)
Grilled Sausages

It really, really was a good deal, after all. And now that I am in culinary school, all my efforts to resist buying food-related, cooking inspired, chef advised, food-glorious books has gone… to hell in a hand basket (couldn’t resist).

That really is a funny phrase, mind you, as I find hand baskets to be not only convenient but environmentally friendly. In fact, a hand basket would’ve been perfect to carry home my new, such-a-steal, chef recommended books.

… My sin? Phenomenal, highly regarded cookbooks from well-renowned sources—at bargain basement prices. I should feel guilty paying only $14 for The French Laundry cookbook, one that I have ogled at in fine, boutique bookstores for many, many years. At $50, it didn’t even fit in the luxury budget… today I saved $34 when I bought it.

The French Laundry is a famous, famous, famous, famous restaurant in Napa valley. Thomas Keller is the chef/proprietor; he boasts a second restaurant, Bouchon (also with its own cookbook). I have not been to French Laundry, but I have been to Bouchon… twice. Just lovely: truffle fries, halibut cheeks, foie gras and forest mushrooms…

Oh, and that is not all.

I also bought: SAUCES by James Peterson (normally $50, I paid $9), Essentials of Cooking—also by Peterson, and The [New] Making of a Cook by Madeleine Kamman. This beast of a book has been recommended multiple times inside the few short weeks I have been at culinary school. I will let you know if I find it useful.

What is your current foodie read/book/weakness?

So, I went to an auction. It seems to be auction season in our part of the world, where people organize fabulous dinner events, with choice items to bid on, in the name of raising money. I wonder to myself if people are spending as much this year as they did last. The economy is a bit on edge: I went to the auction with a budget.

I spent my entire budget on one item. Well, 8 cases of one item.

I bought dry soda; it is a sexy soda based out of Seattle. It transcends corn syrup, sideswipes sweetness and ushers in unusual, savvy, urbanite flavors (lavender, kumquat, lemongrass and rhubarb). You might consider wearing shades while sipping from these clairvoyant bottles.

Their website is as hip as their sodas. I noticed they had a few cocktails on their site, many of which boasted a long list of ingredients. Never fear, my impatience is near. I just borrowed genius from a lemon drop and created a kumquat version:

Kumquat Drop
triple sec
vodka
fresh squeezed orange juice
Kumquat Dry Soda

Per drink: 1/5 fresh squeezed orange juice, 3/5 vodka, 1/5 triple sec, 1/5 kumquat soda. Shake with ice, strain into martini glass; pierce a few kumquats on an olive pick for garnish. Note: feel free to substitute fresh squeezed lemon juice for the orange, or a combination of the two… and skip the sugar rim. It isn’t necessary.

Orange you glad its a kumquat?

Kumquats are awesome; have you ever tried one? It is nature’s lemon drop candy; the candy that is so, so sweet yet makes you pucker straight to the back of your jaw. You can eat kumquats whole, though we usually slice them in half and remove the larger pits. I slice the halves and put them in my boys’ lunch. On my old site (didn’t have time to run two sites, though there is a chance I may resurrect it), Brown Bag Blues, I wrote a post on kumquats that you might find useful (click here).

My baking CHEF simplified it like this: baking is really about knowing the science behind 10 ingredients. Know these inside and out and you will understand baking. A few of these ingredients? Butter, flour, yeast, baking soda, baking powder, sugar…

I like learning little details like this. This has so much to do with why I am going to culinary school; it is a fact-finding mission. Only I traded in the spy glasses for a chef coat and a thermometer.

Another example:

I was making a salad dressing at home the other night, and a big grin crept across my face as I tossed in a measly teaspoon of mustard. Do you know why (shall I stop with the redundant questions already?)? Because I now know that mustard is magic. It contains lecithin, and is the third party that ushers in the marriage of oil and vinegar. The little ingredient that could, whether wet or dry mustard, it creates the emulsion of oil and vinegar—the mixing of ingredients that don’t normally mix. Egg yolks offer the same magic… in case you wanted to know.

By the way, don’t be alarmed if your vinaigrette dressing separates again; the magic isn’t gone, it is just science stepping in. Emulsions can be temporary (vinaigrettes, especially temporary if you don’t have mustard or yolk), semi-permanent (hollandaise) or permanent (mayonnaise).

I won’t go on, though I am tempted. Just remember, when mixing in mustard, you too are part of the kitchen-making magic. We are not only cooks, but also scientists and magicians.

Mustard Vinaigrette
2 T wine vinegar (or fresh lemon juice)
coarse salt & pepper, to taste
2/3 cup salad oil (olive or canola)
1 1/2 tsp mustard
optional: 1-2 tsp honey

Place in jar and shake like mad; OR listen to age-old, proven instructions and add the oil in a constant drizzle while whisking (also called aerating—it helps the emulsion process as well).

Some other mustard dressings around the web:

• Honey Mustard Dressing from Food Network
• Ginger Honey Mustard from Group Recipes
• Creamy Tarragon Mustard Dressing from Letite’s Culinaria
• Cream Dijon Dressing from Epicurious

How is it going, you ask?

I think I need a tag line somewhere on my site that reads: mom goes to chef school (perhaps for my own benefit). I am approaching my third week and it remains surreal. I have a chef jacket and apron dangling from my indoor clothes’ line with four tentatively placed clothespins… are they really mine?

Recently [though not surprisingly], people have been asking me: what do you want to do with a culinary degree? Work in a restaurant?

And my answer is: I am not sure what it is going to look like on the other end. And it doesn’t bother me. I don’t know if a restaurant is in my blood, though my hunch tells me I will take this culinary degree and wear it out. But the details? I haven’t a clue.

For now, I will just focus on cramming things into my brain—and yours.

For my culinary program, I take one baking/pastry class, and it happens to be this quarter. Which is why on my first post about school you saw biscuits and on this one, banana nut bread. And I cannot tell you the inner radiance of pride and joy when a CHEF (aka what we call all of our teachers, because well, that is what they are, though it has that whiff of Top Chef that makes me want to chuckle) tells you your product—banana loaf, brown sauce, glass of water with ice for all I care—is worthy of a restaurant.

Such was this humble little loaf of banana bread:

Banana Bran Bread
one large or two smaller loaves

1 cup butter
1/2 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup bran
4 eggs
2 1/4 cup flour
2 tsp bakin gsoda
1 tsp salt
1 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped pecans

Oven to 350; grease and flour pans. Cream butter and sugars (on high 3-4 minutes, seriously). Then add banana, bran and eggs (we mixed half the bananas directly, and chopped half into 1/2 inch cubes and dropped in just to blend). Sift flour, baking soda and salt; add dry ingredients to the wet, just to moisten. Fold in raisins. Pour into pans, score top of loaves with spatula dipped in oil. Sprinkle with pecans. Bake 45- 1 hour, until edges begin to pull away from sides.

My 11 year old likes more foods this year than he did last year (he recently added poached eggs and goat cheese to his repertoire; he disdained both for many years). Your taste buds are growing up, too, I tell him. And if it is a certain right of passage to maturity for your taste buds to develop, well, you have piqued their interest and even more importantly: their palate.

And besides, kids love to have opinions; and they love to share those opinions with adults… Parents in particular.

So why not give them an opportunity to decipher their palate, to navigate through flavors and textures, to think banana and avocado texture are gross, shrimp is chewy and chocolate mousse is really, really chocolatey?

And then they notice when their siblings like things other than them, and proudly discover they prefer Asian pears to other pears and are partial to kalamata olives. Maybe you should start with their favorite flavor of Kettle chips (mine adore the Honey Dijon)? And there are so many foods they still have to try, and retry, since their palates are growing up too.

The other day I was at the market, and discovered these little nubs. At almost any cheese counter, they have little pieces of cheese left over. Not worthy to stand alone, these are mere samplings, wrapped, weighed and marked: $ .57 for an ounce, $2.11 for a large chunk, $1.02 for a good taste of farmhouse white cheddar. Ultimately, for about $5 I came home with 6 different varieties of white cheddar. One was aged, one was from Vermont, others were specifically farmhouse cheddar and at least two came from England.

And I opened them, cut them into bite size pieces, marked their origins on some parchment, threw on some almonds and pears to cut the flavors and we all sat around and tasted cheddar. And shared opinions. Very, very sharp was one. Sweet and mild was another. And a third… what flavor is that? Interesting… it is the only one that says: ‘Aged.’

So we ate, and learned, and payed attention and shared. Those are the moments we live for.

I now make them in bulk. Yes, I use them that often.

And I am happy to say, these herbs have recently become my ubiquitous kitchen gift giveaway. I go through phases of kitchen-inspired gifts, trinket-y hand-outs that let people know I have so much time on my hands [cough, cough], that I hand-dipped this spoon just for you in chocolate, drizzled it with caramel, rolled it in nuts and tied it up with cellophane and a bow. It is a bad segue into ’so, what did you do today?’

All I am trying to say is, I like making thoughtful—and useful—hand-made gifts from the kitchen. Sometimes it is homemade granola, around the holidays it is most certainly peppermint bark (and you don’ t need time to make that one, you can do it between sips of coffee in the morning), limoncella (okay, yes, that one takes a substantial amount of time plus about 80 days to marinate…) and now: default herbs.

But, I am not close enough to you to hand you a fancy little jar with a hand-written card (sans calligraphy, in this case I printed out a small recipe for this salad dressing and attached it to the jar). Thus, I am giving you the picture, the idea, the recipe for herbs, some recipes that include these herbs (keep reading) and am humbly asking you to make it yourself and then give it to yourself, from me.

Wow, that saves me a ton of time.

I use default herbs in: Buttermilk Parmesan Chicken, as the Italian herbs in this Baked Omelette, instead of all the ‘other’ herbs in my Roasted Romas, and in this fancy but easy to make Eggplant Parmesan, to name just a few.

Default Herbs
1/8 cup dried rosemary
1/4 cup dried oregano
1/4 cup dried basil
1/2 tsp allspice
2 T dried thyme
1 1/2 tsp dried marjoram
1 T fresh ground white pepper
2 T fresh ground black pepper

Process rosemary in a food process, mix all ingredients, store in sealed container. 6 months.

To make the pretty jar, I just used a canning jar, cut a circle of fancy paper and screwed it on between the lid and screw top.

The first week was an eye opener, the usual overviews of ‘what you are going to learn, what you are going to do.’ You know, where you jump into class bright eyed and bushy tailed, only to crawl in to bed later, dog tired. But it was a good tired.

The photo above is a biscuit: my first recipe and kitchen experiment at culinary school.

I am tickled to pieces because I am more in my element with cooking, than I am with baking (and lets be frank, more the home cooking than the restaurant cooking where for all practical purposes at this point I would end up in a heap on the floor, buried in flying pans and fancy sauces: boy, do I have a lot to learn!). So I am particularly excited to learn all I can in my Intro to Baking and Pastry class.

Later this week, we will be making muffins and zucchini bread and I believe, rolls of some sort. My favorite part is hearing about the chemistry involved with baking. How you can take flour and sugar and butter and treat them in so many different ways to land on different results. With biscuits you barely, barely mix it and the butter stays in chunks: corn kernel size at a minimum. Just so you know; and that makes two of us.

I could go on. My other class is Culinary Concepts and Theories. Which means, we are learning about the history of cooking, the chefs who brought it to be, the brilliant minds topped with tall, white, pleated hats. So if you hear Boulanger (credited with the first restaurant in France, 1765) Marie-Antoin Careme (sheer brilliance 1783-1833), Escoffier (Grandfather of Cooking), or Alice Waters (American Culinary Revolution 1970’s and 80’s), you will know they are world-renowned chefs. There are of course, many more.

Oh, and since I learned microwaves are ONLY to be used for heating butter (tsk, tsk), I just reheated last night’s steak, onions and black beans over the stove… with a cracked egg on top… and greens under. It was yummy.

And here is a fun tidbit: the height of a chef’s hat denotes their skill and experience, their hierarchical role in the formal kitchen. Which means, my white chef hat looks more like a beret: a floppy little topper with just enough material to get the job done. I am so the peon… I figure when I am at home I should wear a hat so tall I have to duck to walk through doorways, and if I really stretch high, it brushes the ceiling. That should offset the flimsy with a bit of fanfare, don’t you think?

Perhaps you are a more accomplished green eating machine than I am. I hope for your sake, you are.

When I was a kid, I remember hearing if you ‘do something 21 times it becomes a habit.’ Is that true? I have no idea. But it does hint at the need to be purposeful, determined and persevering in the attempt to integrate healthy habits.

And it is Spring after all. Spring cleaning applies to the house and to our health: old habits out, new habits in.

I recently watched a cooking show called Good Eats. Have you seen it? It is a bit cheesy, but interesting because it is full of lots of little tidbits of information, only 30 minutes long and entertaining enough for my kids to watch. I like drilling down and learning about greens or apple pie, and/or the overlooked virtues of squash. It takes one food group or ingredient and essentially demystifies it. I enjoyed watching the one on Greens, because even though I knew much of what was shared, I learned a new way to clean greens and a new way to sauté them. I learned about a wide range of greens, and a little about their history.

And then I deliberately ordered red chard in my Farm Box. And I feel guilty if things go bad, so I knew if it was there looking me in the face I would attempt a new recipe. And I did—by morphing one of the recipes from The Farm—and the chard was great.

My husband seriously said it was the best chard he had ever tasted in his life. Now, lets not assume it was the only chard he has ever tasted in his life. To be honest, he travels a bit for business, where he often enjoys nice meals, so comments like ‘it is the best ever’ usually are compared to fabulous restaurant fare and I adequately glow at the compliment.

In unison then: “More greens, please.”

Red Chard with Shallots & Port*
Large Bunch Red Chard, stems removed and sliced (I did inch slices on the horizontal)
2 T diced shallots
2 T olive oil
1 T butter
2/3 cup chicken or vegetable broth
3 T port

Heat butter and olive oil in sautee pan over medium high heat. Add/sautee shallots for 3 minutes, stirring. Add broth and port; in 1-2 minutes, pile in the chard. Stir and let sautee for 3-4 minutes, then lower to medium and toss on the lid (frisbee style is entertaining: your kids will be impressed). Let chard wilt for another 3-4 minutes. Remove lid, pour out excess liquid (I left 1-2 T worth in pan), stir/sautee chard for another 2 minutes, then serve.

*If you leave the skillet on high instead of reducing to medium or medium/low when you place on the lid, then you will have charred chard, which by the way, is more fun to say than it is to eat. Greens will be greens until they are brown. Then they are just gross.