Let me tell you about this salad that chef Casey Schanen of Nell Thorn made at the cooking school the other night. Not that everything else he made wasn’t amazing, but the salad was the real eye-opener for me. Here’s what was in it: fresh arugula, roasted squash, arugula pesto, and warm ricotta cheese. Yeah.

I’ve been hearing a lot about making ricotta at home, but for whatever reason I’ve never tried it. It really is astoundingly easy, and as much as I love cold ricotta, it turns out I love fresh, warm ricotta even more. In this salad it fills the same role as fried goat cheese – the warm creaminess adds to the dressing and enriches the greens – but without the crunch (and oil). And ricotta has a fantastic springy texture in the mouth that I find addictive.

So Casey heated milk, stirred in salt and fresh lemon juice, and scooped out the curds into cheesecloth. I tossed the arugula with good olive oil and salt, and we portioned it onto plates with a sprinkle of roasted orange squash. A scoop of ricotta went on top of that, then a drizzle of garlicky arugula pesto with pumpkin seeds. That was it. I would eat salad more often if it was like this.

As I said, there were a few other good things to eat. Nell Thorn bread with castelvetrano olives, house-made pastrami, and toasted walnuts, as a starter.

Potato gnocchi with one of the best damn pork bolognese sauces I have ever eaten. The restaurant smoked their own bacon for this. It was incredible.

And a buttermilk panna cotta with a topping of pears poached with vanilla bean. I may not be a big dessert person, but I inhaled this.

Classes like this are what keep us coming back to the cooking school. Local ingredients, real technique, great flavor combinations. And if you haven’t been to Nell Thorn yet, I really think you should go.

Last week we went down to Gretchen’s to help with Knut Christiansen’s latest cooking class. Once again the theme was tapas and paella, but he mixed it up with some different dishes and approaches this time. Sadly for me, a lot of this meant almonds, but I was hardly in danger of starving.

As usual, Knut did his shopping on the way down to the class and arranged his ingredients as beautifully as possible. It almost seems a shame to chop the things up to cook them.

He began putting together tapas while starting the paella, which takes time to build. The first tapa was a fresh fig stuffed with lemon-scented almonds and incredible Cabrales cheese, broiled just long enough to make the cheese bubble and soften the fig slightly. I had one minus the almonds, and it was very good, even coming from a non-fig fan like me.

Tapa number two was a skewer of olives and almond-encrusted cheese, served with a slice of hard chorizo and a piece of grilled olive baguette slathered with goat cheese butter. The butter is one of Knut’s specialties, and this batch was made by whipping butter with Drunken Goat cheese for an incredibly long time until it became rich and silken. Dangerously good.

Then we built a little salad of boiled potato rounds, boiled egg rounds, cucumber slices, vinaigrette, aioli, and a small octopus. A little tricky to eat, but great flavors. And the octopi were, frankly, adorable.

At last, the paella. Usually Knut’s paellas are focused on Northwest specialties and are not particularly traditional, but he was practicing for a competition in Austin the following day (which he ended up winning!) and took a slightly different approach than usual. This paella featured the usual peppers, olives, mussels, clams and lemon, but he used hard chorizo instead of loose, and made roulades of fresh rockfish wrapped around a piquillo-chanterelle filling.

Finally, while the guests were working through enormous portions of paella, Knut threw together a simple apple salad with almonds and tarragon. Raw apples and almonds are a double mouth-hive whammy for me, so I didn’t try it, but it seemed to go over well.

It was a late night, but very fine food.

We helped out at Gretchens Cooking School last night for the first time this season. This one was a food and wine pairing, with Jim Kowalski of Farm to Market Bakery doing the food and Renee Stark of Noble Wines providing the drink. Jim has a really nice feel for flavors – if you haven’t checked out his place in Edison I sincerely urge you to do so.

The menu for the class included green salads with tomato-goat cheese crostini, handmade fettucine alfredo with fresh Dungeness crab, and pear-ginger tarts. The salads were drizzled with a maple syrup and balsamic vinegar dressing which was surprisingly delicious, and Renee’s choice of a light French rose was a good match with the goat cheese toasts. I’m not generally a huge fan of green salad, especially when the dressing isn’t tossed with the greens, but this was very good.

I wasn’t keeping track of Jim’s alfredo recipe, as I was kept busy cranking out more fettucine, but I know it had a lot of cream.

The sauce was served over a pile of fresh pasta and a handful of crab meat, then topped with a pinch of heirloom tomato, shredded basil, and toasted pine nuts. It was just as tasty (and rich) as it looks. A Sauvignon Blanc was a very good match for this, its grapefruit flavors cutting through the cream.

Finally, slices of pear-ginger pie went out. Jim won’t divulge his proprietary pie crust recipe, but you can buy his pies at the bakery and try to suss it out. Renee brought a tawny port for this, which seemed to go over well.

If you’re interested in taking classes at Gretchens, they have just started up for the season and should have plenty of openings left. I want to make a special plug for the wine tastings – they’re affordable, educational and have great food, and if they don’t get enough reservations our favorites will be cancelled, which would make me sad.

Also, Gretchens is trying to get their Facebook page off and running. Check it out!

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.

The first course was a seared scallop on a bed of sauteed endive and turnip greens, glazed with a mixture of butter and chestnut honey and topped with parmesan curls. Chestnut honey has an assertive flavor, and it worked surprisingly well here.

Next up was a piece of seared and baked halibut, served with fluffy spinach gnocchi topped with asparagus and leeks. Wait, was there no butter on this? There probably was. [Update: There was not butter. But there was cream. - ed.]

Then came salmon. Each piece was topped with a chunk of butter and baked, so the butter sank down into the fish.

The pieces were served with a saute of thinly sliced radishes and turnips and fresh peas, along with delicate ravioli stuffed with fresh peas and feta. A lemon beurre blanc went over the top. I was full when this plate was served, but it was far too wonderful to pass up.

All this great buttery stuff was paired with wine brought by Tom, all produced in coastal areas. They were excellent, and went so well with the food that I almost forgot to notice the wine.

I particularly loved the albariño, which was fabulous with the rich halibut. All the wines did a fine job of cutting through the butter and leaving the mouth clean for another bite.

After all that, there was dessert. I was completely unable to cope with it after inhaling those ravioli, but it was very nice: buttermilk panna cotta with berry sauce. I’m fairly certain there was no actual butter in this.

It was a good class. As always, with those two.

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).

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.

Fayetta’s Down Home Chicken Sausage Gumbo

recipe from Peter Belknap

• 1 large chicken, cut into pieces
• 6 Tbsp oil or lard
• 1 1/2 lb smoked sausage
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 onion, minced
• 1 red pepper, minced
• 1 green pepper, minced
• 1 yellow pepper, minced
• 4-5 stalks celery, minced
• 2 Tbsp minced garlic
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• 3 bay leaves
• 2 allspice berries
• 2 tsp salt (or to taste)
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1/4 tsp cayenne (or to taste)
• 1/4 cup hot sauce
• 1/2 cup green onion tops
• 2-3 Tbsp chopped parsley
• file powder to taste
• 3 quarts chicken broth or more
• Optional additions: okra, oysters, prawns, carrot (I can personally recommend prawns, peeled and simmered in the hot gumbo until just done)

Fry the chicken parts until brown, remove from pan. Fry sausages until brown, remove from pan. Add oil to the drippings until it totals 1/2 cup of fat. Add flour and cook the roux until brown. Add vegetables and cook until soft. Add seasonings and hot sauce, then add broth. Return chicken and sausage to pot, cook gently one hour. Remove bones from the chicken and chop up the meat, putting it back in the pan. Add the green onions and parsley, simmer another minute or so and serve over rice. Pass file powder at the table.

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.

The filling, or hashwee, was ground lamb, onions and pine nuts with seven-spice powder. To make the dumplings, we patted out little rounds of dough, added more filling than seemed possible, pinched the dough into a half moon around the filling, then brought in the edges to make little tortellini shapes.

The dumplings get baked until just crispy, then simmered in a rich broth of goat milk yogurt with rice. At the end there’s a hefty addition of butter, mint and garlic.

The end result was a bowlful highly resistant to glamourous food photography, but really delicious.

While everything else was going on, Nahla had several large beets wrapped in foil roasting in the oven. She skinned and sliced them, dressed them with sherry vinegar and olive oil, and presented them on baby salad greens with pomegranate seeds. The combination of beets and pomegranate is so good, I can’t believe I haven’t tried it before.

And then, a batch of small chickens roasted for an hour and a half. They were rubbed with Moroccan seven-spice powder before roasting, then dressed with pounded garlic and lemon and given five more minutes in the oven. The chicken was amazing – so tender it was falling apart, aromatic, garlicky and lemony.

Dessert was a little birdsnest of shredded phyllo, baked in the oven and topped with a spoonful of creamy bread sauce, a handful of pistachios and a drizzle of syrup. We got a lot of clean plates back after this one.

The food from this class was just the sort of thing I like: tasty, straightforward, comforting, and just difficult enough to give a sense of accomplishment and festivity. And the leftovers were amazing.

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.

The main plate looked a little sparse but packed a punch of flavor. Jon made a huge vat of rich mushroom risotto, and there were two cubes of steak to go alongside a small dish of horseradish cream. The risotto was beautiful with the first red wine, a delicate Pinot Meunier from Oregon (with a beautiful hand-written label), and the steak was perfect with the next wine, a huge, kick-ass Merlot from Spring Valley Vineyard in Walla Walla.

To finish, Susan had made a sort of baked cream cheese-based pudding called Coeur à la Crème, which she claims is the easiest dessert in the world to make but is wildly impressive and tastes rather like lemon-infused marshmallow creme. We served scoops of it on pools of locally produced raspberry sauce, and Tom served up the final sip – Framboise (raspberry cordial) with a bit more sparkling wine poured over.

It was all so good, we bought some of everything.

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.

Once the skewering was under way, I got put to work making dumplings. The filling was a simple mixture of ground pork and a prebagged slaw that I zizzed up in the food processor with fresh scallions, plus a few seasonings. Huiming showed me her technique for filling and sealing, which worked quite well once I got the hang of it. I tried using the little plastic dumpling press but it outsmarted me and refused to seal the dumpling skins.

We made a lot of dumplings.

The way the dumplings were cooked surprised me: first sizzled in an electric griddle with just a bit of oil, then steamed in water mixed with potato starch. The starch had the effect of coating the bottoms of the dumplings and creating a fabulously crispy coating. Huiming admitted that this was a “cheating” sort of trick, but really effective.

To go with the dumplings, there was a fried rice with bacon and shrimp, then a simple egg-flower soup with meatballs made from the leftover pork dumpling filling. And an extra chicken skewer.

One of the perks of volunteering in the demo kitchen is occasionally getting some leftovers to take home. We had some rather successful meals off of this class, including fried eggs over fried rice, dumplings floating in soup with lots of green onion, and a totally experimental but strangely successful dish of Chinese egg noodles bound together with a garlic-lebni sauce and studded with frozen spinach and shredded curry chicken.

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.

James picked the wines, trying to go for some blends that people might not have tasted. The wineries were Maryhill, Kiona, Portteus, Cougar Crest and DiStefano, and prices ranged from reasonable to downright cheap. I liked the DiStefano Syrah and the Cougar Crest red blend best, both being typical bold, fruit-forward Washington reds. The Maryhill Chardonnay was unoaked but had an unusual citrus flavor that didn’t quite do it for me, the Kiona red was simple but had a definite rich Red Mountain edge to it, and the Portteus Bistro Red was a very straightforward table wine.

To accompany the wines, the class coordinator had planned an appetizer plate with two kinds of dip (artichoke and corn-chile), then a French dip sandwich au jus and an iceberg wedge with gorgonzola dressing and crumbled bacon. She didn’t realize until we were cooking that pretty much every single item had mayonnaise in it. Not that that’s a problem, except she had to run out and buy another whole jar.

The other downside was that everyone got so full from all the mayo that they hardly had room for the chocolate cake to follow. A very sad story. Good thing there’s always room for wine.