Category: cooking classes

For the love of pie.

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Rachel Willis taught a pie baking class at the Charlottesville Cooking School that I was lucky enough to assist with last Saturday morning.  I had assisted with her cake baking class last winter and knew she was amazing.  I knew she had won a pie baking contest last fall, so I was intrigued as to what her pie secrets were.  I consider my own pie skills fairly decent.  Granted, I can’t hold a candle to my mother’s pie making ability, but I have gotten to the point where I’m pretty convinced her skills are a gift that cannot be learned.

I learned from Rachel that while that might be partially true, there are skills that can be learned.   I’m just going to go ahead and gush about how amazing that class was.  I thought I knew a lot about baking a pie.  Holy Moly did I learn a lot about pie.  How to do a crust.  How to roll it out (okay, I knew that was my weakness). How to do a lattice top pie AND make it look easy.    Different thickeners for the filling. Different flavor additions.   I’m still sort of absorbing all the knowledge I took in.  I haven’t had time to bake a pie yet with my new knowledge, but I am definitely looking forward to apple pie season in ways I have never looked forward to apple pie season.  And I LOVE apple pie.  It is my chosen birthday dessert, as long as it’s homemade to my specifications.  (Different late harvest apples is key.)

So the class.  She had the students bring fruit to make their own pie – sort of Iron Chef of pie baking classes.  There were blueberries, apples, peaches & cherries.  (Some of which were combined).  She greeted the class with a rhubarb custard pie with some orange accents.  Even her experiments in pie are amazing.

She started by teaching us how to roll out the dough.

While she was at it, she demonstrated a lattice top pie.
And how incredibly easy they are to do.

I feel a lattice top pie kick coming on.

She had premade dough for everyone’s pies, of different varieties.  After preparing the filling for pie, everyone rolled out their selected crusts and got the pies in the oven.  The idea was that we’d sample the pies everyone baked.
Once the pies were in the oven, she demonstrated how to make a crust.
And then everyone got to make a crust to take home, as well as their remaing pie. 

She works half her fat in at one time, then works in the remaining half. That’s what the dough looks like once you’ve worked in the water and before you dump it into plastic wrap to let it sit and chill.  Totally different from how I do my crusts. 
Her crusts are so much more flakier than mine and now I know why.  It’s not just one reason, it’s several.
I wish I had more pictures but about this point in the class my camera battery died. I have no shots of the various blueberry, peach, cherry, apple & blueberry pies that came out.
We sampled them all and they were good.
I did however, get a shot of the chicken pot pie Rachel made for lunch. 
And that was pretty darn tooting amazing too.
Part of why I love assisting with classes at the cooking school is because of the knowledge I walk away with. This class was by far, the most informative class I’ve ever had there.  Rachel is a seriously superlative baker.  She knows what she’s doing and she can explain to you the how and why of certain tricks.
I was most impressed with how she had her class use glass baking dishes.  I swear by my aluminum ones, but she even has me rethinking the usage of glass dishes.   Rachel, you really should teach more baking classes.  I could definitely use some help with my cookies next. 

Bread & Butter.

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This morning I taught my first official canning class at the Charlottesville Cooking School.  I’ve taught countless friends how to can so that part wasn’t new.  I’ve assisted with numerous classes at the school over the years, so I felt comfortable in that space, but the part where I stand up in front of complete strangers and be credible about something?  That part had me nervous.  As did the part where I make sure the class was structured so that we got everything done in the amount of time scheduled for the class. Somehow I managed to pull it off though. 
We canned tomatoes and zucchini bread & butter pickles.  The class had been advertised offering cucumber pickles, but last week as I was walking around the farmer’s market, I had a heck of a time finding pickling cucumbers.  It seems the heat this summer fried just about every farmer’s crop that I talked to, causing the lack of them at my local farmer’s market.  I know from experience that regular cucumbers don’t pickle nearly as well as the pickling variety.  They will still make a fairly decent bread and butter pickle, but you can’t rush the soaking step.  As I couldn’t find a recipe with a soaking step shorter than 3 hours, the time allotted the class was 3 hours, well, I realized I was going to have to make a substitution if I was going to send my students home with a jar of pickles that I knew was going to be good.  So, after reading up on pickles, zucchini pickles it was!

After all, I didn’t want their first pickle experience to have a sub-par result.  I’ve made dill pickles that haven’t turned out and it stinks to put a bunch of work into something that you end up throwing out.  They were all taking the class because they wanted to learn to can and I wanted to make sure they enjoyed it.

I promised my students that even though we didn’t make the cucumber pickles, I would share my recipe with them.  The recipe I use is the one my mother used, from an old Ideals Family cookbook, published in the early 1970’s, although I have seen this recipe elsewhere as well. 
Bread & Butter Cucumber Pickles
(from The Ideals Family Garden Cookbook)

1 gallon cucumbers
8 small white onions
2 green peppers, shredded
½ c. salt

Syrup
5 c. sugar
1 ½ teaspoon turmeric
½ teaspoon ground cloves
2 Tablespoon mustard seed
1 teaspoon celery seed
5 cups cider vinegar



Wash but do not pare cucumbers. Slice crosswise in paper-thin slices. (You will be well paid for this seemingly tedious task. A slicer might be easier, but be sure the slices are paper-thin.) Slice the onions thin and cut the peppers in fine shreds. Mix the salt with the three vegetables and bury 1 quart of cracked ice in the mixture. Cover with a weighted lid and let stand for 3 hours, then drain very thoroughly.

Meanwhile, make a pickling syrup as follows: Mix the sugar, turmeric and cloves together. Add mustard and celery seeds and vinegar. Pour this syrup over the sliced pickles. Place over a low heat and paddle occasionally, using a wood spoon. Heat the mixture to scalding, but do not boil. Pour into hot sterilized jars and seal by processing for 10 minutes.
Let stand at least 4-6 weeks before cracking open.  The longer they sit, the better they get.
I don’t remember the yield on this recipe, it’s been a year or two since I made it and I don’t have it noted.  I think it makes somewhere between 7 and 9 pint jars worth. 
Happy pickling!

Along the way.

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I have lined up another canning class to teach this summer – a pickling class in August for Market Central.  In talking it over with the folks there, we thought it might be fun to do different types of pickles, maybe even some fruit pickles.  Admittedly, I have wanted to try pickling some fruit.  If you have been reading this blog for some time, you might have noticed I tend to pickle pretty much everything in sight.  I am utterly fascinated by the process of pickling and I happen to have a husband who likes pickles, so it’s kinda win-win. I thought it would be best if I actually pickled some fruit before I marched into a class and taught it, so that you know, I might appear as if I know what I’m doing. 

So I called up my friend Melissa and borrowed her copy of “The Joy of Pickling” yet again, with an invitation to come help me figure out how to pickle peaches.

Melissa came over and held my hand on the watermelon rind pickles the first time I did them – I like having her come over and help me when I’m doing something new in the canning realm.  I’m so glad I had her over for the peach pickles, she definitely helped me get myself organized, get down to business and get the job done.   She made sure we followed the recipe exactly, even measuring out the peaches to the weight called for in the recipe.  She also tried to ensure we used the proper equipment, another thing I tend to overlook.

I have learned the hard way that when pickling, you really need to use ‘nonreactive’ pots.  Which means stainless steel. I might have a few hard anodized pots that are slightly scarred from pickling & jamming adventures.  I didn’t think I had any stainless steel pots left until I remembered a huge stock pot that seems to have found it’s way into the sandbox.  It didn’t start out as a sandbox toy, I think it was a piece of camping equipment that was stored in the basement and since the gang of girls that hang out around my house think that pretty much anything in basement is up for grabs, it somehow found it’s way into the sandbox.

I needed an extra large bowl, my big orange plastic one having gone missing (I seem to recall it being borrowed by a certain wee one that lives here for some sort of project.  I’ll have to check the tiki hut to see if it’s there as it’s not in the sandbox.  She’s lately started dragging things down into Brian & Betty’s yards, building forts there too.  It really could be anywhere on the block now that I think about it.  Hmm….)Thankfully, I was able to grab a punchbowl to use as a spare large bowl.  It’s good for your various collections to do double duty I think, and as they are large and glass, they are excellent for pickling.  I keep those out of reach of little hands, which is why they haven’t been moved into another location.

I also realized I have no empty half pint jelly jars on hand.  I have no idea what that’s about. I swore I had a case or two down there.  Thankfully, I did have a few empty cases of pint jars, so we used those.

This morning I felt the call of the thrifts, thinking I might find myself a new stainless steel pot.  The one I rescued from the sandbox holds about 20 gallons or so (okay, not really, but it’s the biggest pot in the house) and honestly, I have nowhere to store it upstairs, which is how it ended up in the basement and then the sandbox. So off I went.

I totally scored today.  I found a new springform pan to replace mine, which has a dent in the bottom thanks to one of the neighborhood kids and their hijinks (it sounds as if my kitchen is regularly raided as a toy box, but really, it’s not.  The springform pan has been like that for a few years now.  I’m slow to replace things, can you tell?) as well as a preforated baguette pan and a Julia Child cookbook, Julia Child & Company, which was apparently the companion book to her show in the late 70’s.   Good scores, all of them.    But those were not my best scores. 

My best scores were a pair of Land’s End pink suede boots and a pair of red cowgirl boots, with room to grow for a certain girl’s foot.  Her face when she saw them was priceless.  She has always refused to wear anything matching with me, but red cowgirl boots?  Watch out world, we’re gonna have matching boots. 
There were also punch bowls galore at every thrift I went to today.  It was hard to resist them, but I did.  I think three is enough, don’t you?  I never did find a new stainless steel pot.  The one I have works for now, it’s just, huge. 
Oh, and the peach pickles?  7 pounds of peaches yielded exactly 4 pint jars.  Not a whole lot.  I got some half pint jars today and did another batch, as there was a bunch of brine left over and I didn’t want to waste it.  They have to sit for at least 24 hours and I don’t feel like opening one of my 4 large jars tonight, so I can’t report on the taste.  Two batches of pickles didn’t make a dent in the half bushel of seconds I picked up out at Henley’s for a song yesterday, so I also canned a half dozen pint jars of plain peaches and whipped up a pie this afternoon, because yesterday’s slightly underripe peaches were today’s about to be overripe peaches when they sit in a box in your un-air conditioned kitchen and it’s 90 something degrees outside.  Also exactly why I felt I needed to can AND run the oven today because honestly, the house didn’t feel like it was 90 something out there today.   I can report my pie crust definitely acted as if it was too hot to be making a pie, but I perservered anyway and made it work.  It’s not pretty, but it’s pie.

Housekeeping Notes and Other Stuff.

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I’ve done some housekeeping on here.  I changed the comments settings, taking away word verification and moderation.  There was a stretch in which I was receiving some snarky and rather insulting comments, from someone who wanted to remain anonymous which seemed to have stopped.  I don’t mind snark, but own it, you know what I’m saying?  I’ve realized from commenting on other blogs what a pain the new word verification settings have gotten to be.   Some of you have thought blogger has been eating comments lately, but through the magic of the internet, they’ve shown up and been published.  Well, the ones I know about.

I’ve changed some things around on my side bar too.  I hadn’t updated my blogroll in quite some time, so I added a few new ones. My friends Ryanne, Julia, both of whom are new bloggers and quite entertaining.  I’ve also added Suzicate’s “The Water Witch’s Daughter”, which I find inspiring.   Suzicate, I’d love to go winery hopping with you next time you’re in Nelson.   There are a slew of other blogs I read, so I hope to be better about swapping them out a little more frequently on my sidebar. 

The conversation on Facebook that sprung out of the link I posted to my canning class yesterday led to it being restructured a bit.  Instead of tomatoes and peaches, I’m going to teach canning tomatoes and pickles.  I’m even more excited about this now.  If you’ve paid attention to my posts over the last couple of summers, you’ll know how much I love to pickle things and that I will pickle anything.  I plan on doing bread & butter pickles in the class and I will be sharing some of my other favorite pickle recipes.  There’s a link sign up for the class on the sidebar now too.

I’m pretty sure I’m the last person out there to discover First Aid Kit.  I can’t even take credit for discovering them, my dearest babydaddy heard them, realized I needed it and he made it the tunes I cooked to one day.  I do love that man.  Best Coast has a new album out, that I’ve heard great things about.  I haven’t listened to it thoroughly yet, but I do like what I’ve heard.  Anyone catch “Birth of an Album” on NPR this morning with Neko Case?  Totally made my morning. 

In a year of non-parties, the Oxford Road Block party was last weekend.  I was worried when I wasn’t hand delivered my invite and instead happened to catch a flyer on a telephone pole.  Turns out they didn’t invite anyone, it was all they could do to get the flyers up. At least they had the party though. There was a wonderful ‘mom circle’ that happened that refreshed my spirit that day in a much needed way.  I heard other women that were there say the same thing.  Maybe we need to do those things more often ladies.  D- I’m totally serious about Wine Thursdays, just hollar.  Also, I want that recipe please.

The best part of the evening though may have been watching Edie give the Fein boys a firehouse bath in the driveway.  All is always right with the world when there are boys who understand she holds the hose and stays dry while they get soaked.  I blame all older neighborhood boys who catered to her so much in her toddler years that she now expects all boys to do exactly what she tells them to do.  The male portion of humanity has no idea what they have wrought upon themselves.

Now’s your chance.

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Want to learn to can?  Well, here’s your chance!  I’m teaching a Canning Class at the Charlottesville Cooking School on Saturday, July 28.  We’ll do tomatoes and peaches and talk about all sorts of food preservation. I’ve got some great recipes and tricks to share that I’ve picked up in the dozen years I’ve been canning on my own.   I’ve been working on my outline for this class since last winter, so I guess you could say I’m pretty excited about it.  I’ve been teaching friends how to can for years in my kitchen, so the opportunity to do it in a space bigger than my 4 square feet of counter space that has air conditioning is going to be a treat!  Sign up today!

Kicking it up a notch.

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I like to bake. 
I bake cakes like that three layer chocolate on chocolate goodness pictured above on regular occasion for family and friend’s birthdays. They all encourage me to sell these creations and while I have here & there, I feel like my presentation skills are slightly lacking.
Remember this from a few weeks ago?  That’s me playing around with piping.
I prefer to think of it as modernist abstract.
So my answer to this small problem was to assist in a baking class at the Charlottesville Cooking School this past weekend.  I figured I might learn a trick or two about baking and I would hopefully learn a little something about how to make my cakes and cupcakes look better.
The baking class in question was taught by Rachel Willis. Click on her name and you will go to her website to see her cakes.  They are amazing.  She is an artist.  She is also a fantastic teacher. 
I can also tell you her cakes taste as good as they look.  Maybe better.
It was a two day class, with Day One being for the making of the cakes, frosting and some of the fillings with Day Two was set aside to put them all together.  While I learned a few new things Day One, what I learned primarily is that I know far more about baking than I realized or give myself credit for.  I have learned by just doing: by reading recipes and following them to the letter.  Even if they don’t always look good, they usually taste good. Because recipes don’t tell you the finer points of how to make icing pretty when you put it on. This is why I signed on for the class, to kick it up a notch, and make my cakes look as good as they taste.
So, Day One, was a bit of a cake walk.  (Slight pun intended.)
Day Two however, was a whole other ball game.

I learned how to slice a cake.
You can use this trick to make a cake’s top surface level and you can use it to turn one layer into two.

I learned how to structurally build a cake so that when I stacked layers, they would stay sturdy.
(Hint: Pipe some buttercream frosting around the edges to keep the filling in place.) 
I learned I held my piping bag the wrong way.  I learned I don’t let the air out when I first fill it, so when I go to decorate the cake in question, it looks like that cupcake up there.  (Like doo-doo.)
I learned so many things I was doing wrong and how easy it is to fix them.
I learned you can practice with the same frosting over and over, on an upside cake pan. 
I see that happening in my future.

I learned how to make my cakes look like that. 
Smooth.
It’s really not much more than a flick of the wrist and how you hold your tools.
I learned what a crumb coat is and why you do it.  I learned that I need to allow myself more time in assembling my cakes, that this is key in making them stay together better, as well as the final appearance. 
Two basic cake recipes, a classic vanilla butter cake and a dark chocolate sour cream cake, were given out, along with a buttercream recipe and two different fillings – a whipped triple cream and a chocolate ganache. We learned variations on those – like a mocha buttercream, a white chocolate ganache and so on. Everyone got to ‘design’ themselves a cake using those basic guidelines.

 

I think they did some fantastic looking cakes, didn’t they?

I learned my favorite chocolate buttercream frosting is actually a Swiss style buttercream.
I learned the differences in all the buttercream frosting styles actually, as well as flour and cocoa types.
Oh yeah, I learned there are different buttercream frosting styles.  Although this, I had a small clue about, having so many different frosting recipes in my little collection of cookbooks.

Everyone took home a four layer masterpiece they had spent the weekend creating.
It was such a fun class, with a great group of ladies.  I enjoyed spending my weekend with them.
  I got to enjoy a slice of Rachel’s that she shared with the class,  but as assistant, I didn’t make a cake and I didn’t take one home, which was more than fine with me.  Given all the cake we’ve been eating around here lately with all the birthdays coming just after the holidays, I’m developing a muffin top.  I am holding fast to my pledge to not bake a cake for at least a month, although I am dying to try out my new skills.  But, until I get serious about working out again, lose that muffin top and fit into my jeans, I’m not baking a cake.  It’s one thing to be my age, quite another to look it.
I just won’t have it. 
I’m proud to say I hit the gym hard today.
Nothing like cake to motivate.
I came home from this class completely jazzed Sunday night.  I had every intention of blogging about it yesterday, but then I stumbled upon that estate sale.  I’m still sort of floating on that little high – I spent last night reading some of my new cookbooks.  That Southern Living Heritage series is a treasure.  Today, in between cooking dinner & laundry & working out & running to the grocery store & doing the after school club pickup & blogging & uploading pictures from the class to the cooking school’s Facebook page, I managed to clear a spot for the series on my dining room hutch, while the rest found a home in my cabinet. Which, by the way, is officially chock full, until I figure out a new home for either the stand mixer or a few of those cookbooks.   Some creative problem solving is most certainly needed, whatever the answer is, because none of them are going anywhere for a while.

Sprinkles optional.

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The ice on the trees at the park this weekend was just gorgeous.  It made the grey seem sort of magical.
It also was quite conducive to curling up, cooking yummy things for my birthday honeys and on Sunday, when all the celebrating was done, to stay in our jammies all day, reading the New York Times and watching tv. Over the course of 4 days, I made 2 dozen cream filled chocolate cupcakes, 2 dozen carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting (made from the organic, heirloom carrots we planted last spring), a batch of tapioca pudding and one half dozen cheesecake cupcakes with a raspberry sauce.  I spent two days making my dad’s spaghetti sauce recipe, which is actually a very authentic Italian gravy.  And yes, per Edie’s very special request, I included all the meat the recipe calls for (usually I omit most of it, mostly because I’m not a big fan of meat other than bacon).  She was quite pleased.  For Pat’s birthday dinner, I tried a new recipe from a friend for a lamb risotto that’s made in the crock pot with barley.  It also called for arugula, which I always seem to have a small row of in the garden,  regardless of season, so I grabbed some of that and threw it in.  I, who don’t like lamb, liked this dish very much.  Those who like lamb (the other people that live in my house) weren’t as wild about it.  Oh well.  Can’t win them all.  I also managed to whip up a new shirt for Edie for her birthday.  It’s a tunic, made out of plaid flannel I picked up at the SPCA store.   She loved it, wore it to school and the boys complimented her on it, which lead to her coming home and telling me about, wondering why boys like plaid flannel.  So I played her some Nirvana videos on you tube, to show her exactly how cool plaid flannel is.  I’m not sure she was impressed.  She watched the Pearl Jam movie with us a few months back and was pretty taken aback at the time about the hair(!) and the clothes (!) that her father and I so fondly remembered.  Some days I wonder how I got a child so uptight.  (She calls herself that.  Admitting is the first step to getting over the problem, yes?)
You’d think that after all that cooking, I’d be steering clear of it for a few days.  Well, sort of.  This morning I assisted with a kid’s baking class at  The Charlottesville Cooking School, dragging Edie along so she wouldn’t spend 2 days in a row, in her pj’s watching tv (like she did last weekend, also a three day weekend).  They made coconut macaroons, chocolate dipped oatmeal cookies and carrot muffins, with cream cheese frosting.  Can you tell which muffin was decorated by a third grader and which one was decorated by me?

Which is why I have signed myself up for the weekend long cake class at the cooking school the first weekend of February.  I think it’s time my cupcakes looked as good as they taste.
(Hint, I didn’t use sprinkles.)

I love cooking classes.

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We are huge fans of Indian food around here, but I’ll admit, my ability to cook it just falls short.  We all got pretty excited when we heard The Charlottesville Cooking School was offering classes on that speciality.  I have taken a few cooking classes and certainly learned some tricks in them, but I have to say, this one was by far the most amazing I’ve ever taken.  Sudha Khare taught it and all I can say about her style is that it was like learning to cook from the Indian grandmother I never had.  First up, she unveiled what she called ‘The Spice Box.’

 I want one.  All her essential spices were right there and she knew which was which by the color.   Right there, I was amazed at the cooking skills she’s amassed during her lifetime.    In that box was roasted ground cumin powder (which she made right there in class by roasting cumin seeds and the smell was divine), dried red pepper, turmeric, cumin seed and a few different masalas. 

And then she started dicing the potatoes for the Samosas.

 As she talked to us about what she was doing, I’m not even sure she was watching her hands as she diced potatoes just like that, in her hand.  I’d seriously have part of myself in that bowl if I attempted to do that. 

She led us through making Samosas, which is sort of like a dumpling, filled with potatoes and peas, if you’re not familiar with them.  I’m definitely going to have to get my assistant to help me roll out the dough to make them, as rolling out any thing is a weak spot for me.  Sudha had this sweet little wooden rolling pin and made it look so easy.  Maybe I just need a new rolling pin?  That’s it….

When she mixed the Pakora batter, she did it by hand, until it felt right.  Someone in the class described it as being like pancake batter, with stuff in it.  I definitely feel more secure about my ability to whip these up at home.  They are really an Indian version of a fritter and if you know us, you know we love fritters around here.  So, an Indian version?  Yes, please.
The pakoras made in class had potatoes, onions and spinach, but Sudha included notes to add other vegetables.  I can’t wait to get jiggy with it.

Ta-da.  The final result.  Samosa, Pakora, Mango Chutney and Hot Cilantro Chutney, which for the record, is wicked easy and oh, so, so, good.  I definitely learned a few tricks and I definitely have more confidence in my ability to cook Indian.  I can’t wait for her next class in a few weeks…..North Indian Breads.