The Gourmet Vegetarian Workshop takes place on Tuesday, March 6. I’m kind of excited about it because great vegetarian cooking is challenging. Eating vegetarian, at home or out, isn’t difficult these days – our palates are more sophisticated and global than ever. But dishes such as hummus, tabbouleh, quesadillas, and sushi have become regular additions to the American table — so much so that they seem rather ordinary now. My entree at Craigie St. Bistrot in Cambridge recently was a reminder that great vegetarian cooking is not too boring: a sweet potato and laguoile cheese gratin with red quinoa and glazed winter vegetables. It was sublime. (Chuck is always mystified when I order vegetarian at expensive restaurants; at these prices, shouldn’t we be wallowing in foie gras? Hey, I get my protein during dessert, usually in the form of whipped cream. Or ice cream. Or pastry cream. Anyway — cream.)
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The Beyond Basics Series is one of our most popular. The new session begins on Thursday, March 8, and continues for six consecutive Thursday nights. It’s an intermediate level course, designed for people who cook quite a bit but want to improve their skills and learn some new technqiues. See Class Descriptions for more details. Enrollment is still open if you’d like to attend.

The first component of the series is Herbs & Spices. A lot of home cooks seem to hit a wall when it comes to flavoring food. I’ve found that they feel pretty comfortable with salt and pepper and also with the really hot stuff; it’s everything in between that’s the problem. How to match food and spices? How to store leftover herbs? How to substitute for herbs and spices you can’t stand? Thi component is the best place to begin the intermediate series because we will use fresh herbs and spices extensively throughout the series. By the end, students are seasoning with abandon. Not wild abandon — judicious abandon.

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Culinary Underground is a small cooking school – a very small cooking school. I’m the founder, owner, and sole faculty member. There’s a wonderful high-school student who helps out with administrative stuff, recipe testing, and class assistant, but that’s it. Oh, and a business manager, who I sleep with in lieu of payment (we’re married). So imagine my glee on receiving nearly 100 pounds of Nestle’s new premium baking chocolate, addressed to our “Culinary Arts Department”. Bwah-ha-ha! The marketing blitz must be huge. I’ve been forcing it on friends, family, students, and the guy who fixed my septic pump.

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We were recently asked to test some recipes for the new edition of On Baking, a Prentice-Hall textbook. It’s a textbook of baking and pastry fundamentals for culinary arts students. A big shoutout to my sister-in-law, Yvonne, for recommending CU to the editor; I’ll have to send her a case of baking soda as a “thank-you”. My intrepid assistant, Rachel, and I will be testing four recipes of the next month. On Tuesday, we prepared the recipe for Plain Bagels (meaning Rachel made them while I kibbutzed from the other side of the kitchen).
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