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night of butter

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

The theme for Casey Schanen and Tom Saunderson’s class at Gretchen’s last week was ostensibly Seafood with Wine Pairings. If you ask me, the real theme was Butter.

This was some of our mise en place – see that pile of butter pats on the plate? We used most of that over the course of the evening.

We put together an appetizer plate for the guests so they’d have something to nibble on right away. There were fresh radishes and turnips, Nell Thorn bread and rosemary crackers, all being dunked into an amazing dip of butter whipped with green olives. Yes, it looks like guacamole – but it ain’t. Caution is advised, as this stuff is addictive.

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Tags: butter, cooking classes, fish, food & wine pairing, Gretchens, seafood

April at Gretchen’s

Friday, April 30th, 2010

In addition to all the other stuff we’ve been doing this month, we’ve helped out at three different classes at Gretchen’s Cooking School: Peter Belknap’s class on the food of Marseille, an all-Malbec tasting with Renee Stark of Noble Wines, and tapas with Knut Christianson. Lots of chopping, lots of dishes, and some fabulous food and wine. Here are some pictures showing highlights from the various classes (click on the images to see more info at my Flickr account).

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Tags: cooking classes, Gretchens, wine tastings

kept alive by gumbo

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Sorry for the radio silence this past week, but for the last eight days I’ve been out of commission with the nastiest cold/allergy/something-or-other I’ve ever had the displeasure of suffering through. Hack, cough. I’ve been eating, but for several days I completely lost my sense of taste – a distressing state of affairs.

Early in the week, Jon and I were signed up to help with a cooking class taught by our friend Peter. I felt that the customers might not appreciate my coughing into their food, so Jon went on his own, and he came back laden with fabulous leftovers. The class theme was Southern food, in particular New Orleans-style, featuring shrimp fritters, cornbread and chicken-sausage gumbo, and there was more than enough food for everyone. I lived off of that gumbo for the next several days, it being one of the few things that could penetrate my personal fog.

If you’ve managed to catch the crud yourself and need some hot soup full of pork fat, or if you’re just in the mood to celebrate Fat Tuesday with a little gumbo, here’s the recipe.

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Tags: cooking classes, Fat Tuesday, food for invalids, Gretchens, leftovers, soup

cooking class: festive Lebanese food

Monday, December 7th, 2009

More dumplings! This was a class on Lebanese home cooking, with a focus on festive dishes for the holidays. Nahla Gholam, one of the owners of the fabulous store Mediterranean Specialties in Bellingham, demonstrated three recipes: sheesh barak, beet salad and roasted seven-spice chicken.

Sheesh barak, lamb dumplings in yogurt soup, is a very old and traditional dish. It incorporates some of my favorite flavors in the whole world, so there was basically no chance I wouldn’t like it. Making the dumplings was a little tricky, but Nahla insisted it was almost impossible to mess them up (ha!). The dough was just flour and water and very stretchy, which helped us recover from our mistakes.

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Tags: cooking classes, Gretchens, Lebanese food, middle-eastern food

wine tasting: some good stuff

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

We can always count on Tom Saunderson, Young’s Columbia rep, to bring good stuff when he does a wine tasting at Gretchen’s, and he definitely didn’t disappoint this time. And the food wasn’t too bad, either.

We started off with a bang, with flutes of sparkling Riesling from Pacific Rim Winery, and an assorted plate of goodies including scallops, shrimp, green onion gougères, green salad and blue-cheese-wrapped grapes rolled in pecans. The following wine, a 2007 Willakenzie Pinot Gris, went beautifully with the food but almost everyone had cleaned their plates already.

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Tags: Gretchens, wine, wine tastings

cooking class: Chinese food

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Last week at Gretchen’s we helped out with a class on Chinese cooking. Presented by Huiming Hsiao, the daughter of Taiwanese restauranteurs, the food was heavy on the pork, light on the vegetables, and extremely yummy. I’m hardly going to complain about too much pork. Besides, there was also chicken and shrimp.

Most of the food was served at once, but we started the guests off with a curried chicken skewer. Huiming brought the boneless chicken thighs pre-marinated in a lively blend of star anise, Sichuan pepper and curry, and all we had to do was skewer them and stick them in the oven.

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Tags: Chinese food, cooking classes, dumplings, food stuffed with other food, Gretchens, pork

wine tasting, with extra mayo

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

The new season at Gretchen’s Cooking School has been going for a while, but we just had our first volunteer night last week. It was a wine tasting featuring Washington State wines, brought in by James and Brian from Dickerson Distributors.

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Tags: appetizers, dips, Gretchens, wine, wine tasting

cooking class: evening in Tuscany

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

The day after I got back from the conference, we were scheduled to volunteer at Gretchen’s Cooking School. I was so exhausted I was afraid I wouldn’t make it through – fortunately, even though the class was by Peter Belknap, it wasn’t too much work to keep up with. He was doing Tuscany (each of his classes focuses on a different country), and the food was very straightforward and rustic. He didn’t dirty nearly as many dishes as he usually does! And I can absolutely guarantee that nobody left hungry.

The first course was a salad of oil-packed tuna, cannellini beans and mixed vegetables, with a dressing of mustard, vinegar, mayonnaise and the oil from the tuna cans.

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Tags: cooking classes, Gretchens, Italian food

holiday wines & appetizers

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Our latest event down at Gretchen’s Cooking School was a wine tasting with wine rep Tom Saunderson. The theme was holiday wines, and the food (prepared by us and Susan, the class coordinator) was a selection of appetizers: mostly finger food, featuring plenty of cheese.

There were six wines: four whites and two reds, which made for a different assortment than the usual. A lot of people do forget about white wines in the winter, but this was a lovely assortment with a wide variety of flavors.

Malibran Prosecco: one of the nicest Proseccos I’ve ever had. Bright, fizzy, and fabulously drinkable. We bought some.

Ponzi Pinot Gris, Willamette Valley: we have a bottle of this at home from the last vintage. It’s incredibly tasty and clean, with a bright grapefruit aroma. …Continue reading holiday wines & appetizers

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Tags: appetizers, cheesy goodness, Gretchens, wine tastings

cooking class: a dinner for fall

Friday, October 17th, 2008

We did our first volunteering of the season this week at Gretchen’s Cooking School. The chef was Don Shank of the Rhododendron Cafe, a nice place out on Chuckanut Drive in Bow. The Rhody has a gimmick, of sorts: each month they feature a different theme or ethnicity, so the menu is constantly changing. They also close every winter so the owners can travel and keep their sanity – the secret to the restaurant’s longevity. Not a bad idea, really.

The focus of this class was seasonal food, especially local, so it featured cabbage, squash, apples and cheese. The weather’s gotten really chilly this week, so it was great to have all the warm, sweet flavors. Don brought lots of extra squash and some branches of Chinese lanterns for decor.

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Tags: apples, autumn, cabbage, cooking classes, Gretchens, squash

Food on the Brain

Is it wrong when all your conversations end up about food?