Vicarious Gourmet | Sweetened Condensed Culinary School

Synopsis: Today my team made this smoky-sweet roasted pepper and tomato soup.  It is a little involved, but it makes a big impression!  Ideally, you should have a gas stove or a grill to roast the peppers.  If possible, I suggest doing it outside, since little black flakes of red pepper skin tend to fly [...]

Soup to go, please

Synopsis: Today my team got an interesting challenge – make a soup to use up all of the spare vegetables and stock from the fridge.  This is something that every chef will face, whether in a professional kitchen or at home: the use-it-today-or-chuck-it dilemma.  How can you creatively incorporate new ingredients [...]

Baked Eggplant Parmesan over Sauteed Spinach, garnished with parsley

Synopsis: Another full day at culinary school has yielded plenty of tasty treats.  Today in particular I heard a lot more food-gasm noises than usual coming from the class, and that’s always a good sign.  We had creme anglaise bread pudding, orange-cranberry turkey slices, [...]

Synopsis: Today we did a smooth cream of asparagus soup seasoned with oregano, garlic and marjoram.  The procedure is basically the same with all cream soups, but today’s recipe is thickened with a Bechamel sauce.  Bechamel is just hot milk thickened with roux.  The nice thing is, you get the thickening agent and the creaming [...]

Turkey Cutlet, Roasted Corn Salsa and Potatoes Lyonnaise

Synopsis: Today I have another interesting variation on plain ol’ Thanksgiving turkey for you to try out this holiday – Curried Turkey Cutlets!  I liked the spicy warm flavors and the tender cuts of turkey breaded inside a crispy coating.  You can either deep-fry these suckers to [...]

Shown with Stevia leaf garnish

Synopsis: Friday was a perfect storm of sorts, since about two-thirds of our class was gone and we had about twice our normal load of work to do.  And on top of this, our substitute chef is known to be a Spartan in his teaching methods.  (Or a Nazi, depending [...]

Shown with oregano and ancho chile garnish

Synopsis: Today was mushroom-fest at culinary school!  Well, for my team anyway.  We made some cream of mushroom soup and a nice mushroom ragout.  I always shudder when I think of the gelatinous cream of mushroom sliding out of a can, but the real stuff is [...]

Synopsis: Today we made bechamel sauce, one of the French “mother sauces”.  You also might know it as simply “white sauce”.  By itself it’s not too impressive, but the interesting variations you can make from it are endless.  Try adding different cheeses and spice blends, pour in some wine or even some mustard!  You can [...]