Text 31552, 90 rader
Skriven 2009-11-29 02:34:08 av Dale Shipp (1:261/1466.0)
Ärende: Canada tour 3
=====================
All of the six individual sessions that we attended were quite
interesting and enjoyable.  Prior to leaving we were given a listing of
twelve demonstration sessions, each offered at multiple times.  We
turned in priorities listing three choices in each of six time slots.
We got our first choice in each time slot.

In addition to the six sessions we attended, there were four other
sessions that we did not sign up for.  They were on card making,
decorating, entertaining, and crafts.

The first session was with Michael Smith, who is host of Chef Abroad,
Chef at Large, and the Inn Chef on Food Network Canada. At 6'7", he was
easily the tallest person there.  He is a winner of the James Beard
award for cooking show excellence.  He lives on Prince Edward Island.
His presentation was on the art and science of chocolate chip cookies.
Along the way, he made some interesting side trips via slides of some of
his world travels.  The basic theme of his main talk was exploring some
of the choices that might be made -- such as melted or solid butter,
vanilla versus artificial vanilla, type of flour, brown and white sugar.
For each such choice, he presented pre-baked examples with only that
difference to a panel of three self announced cookie experts from the
audience.  In many cases, they could not tell the difference -- which
was pretty much his point.  At the end of the talk he gave us samples of
his cookie.  He prefers a large, chewy cookie.  I think that Gail's
chocolate chip cookie is better:-}}  It is crisp, with a taste of
slightly caramelized sugar that I like.

During his talk, he held up a picture of a food display which was
artistically done.  He used this to make a point, namely that such
pictures are "food porn" and not really something that we should expect
our food to look like.  This sounded a lot like some of the entries in
Dave Sacerdote's food blog.  Hence, I checked out the address on my
computer and gave that blog address to Michael at the end of another
session.  After I described how Dave often contrasts the advertisement
or box pictures with what the food really looked like, Michael seemed
genuinely pleased and said that such blogs are exactly what he likes to
look at.  I suspect that he might have already visited Davescupboard.

The second session was with Julie Van Rosendaal, author of "One Smart
Cookie" and "Grazing" cookbooks. She lives in Calgary and writes a
popular food blog called dinnerwithjulie.com.  Julie's presentation was
on a variety of things that one might make for a food gift basket for
the holidays -- called "Sweet Gifts from the Kitchen".  She made sugar
plums, peanut brittle, chocolate bark, sweet spiced pecans and something
she called "After Eight Sandwich" cookies.  This last is made by putting
an After Eight mint between two warm from the oven chocolate cookies (or
open faced by putting a mint on the top of each cookie).  She was an
entertaining and dynamic speaker.  Every picture I tried to take of her
came out blurred.

Our third session was with Ken Kostick.  He is described as a celebrity
chef and television personality.  He lives in Toronto.  His talk was
based on his latest book, "The $10 Gourmet" in which he talks about
making restaurant quality meals for two for under $10.  He made a turkey
and white bean chilli (and yes, that is how he spelled it).  The samples
were quite good -- although I know that most of us would call it soup or
stew and not chili.  In response to a question, he said that the chilli
powder he used was simply ground red chile peppers.  He had never heard
of the typical chili powder we get in the US which is a mix of ground
chile peppers, oregano and cumin.  Along the way, he made a suggestion
that really sounded like a good thing to do.  As you are cutting up
vegetables, put the leftover pieces into a bag that lives in your
freezer.  This could be things like broccoli stalks, asparagus ends,
onion ends, washed potato skins, etc.  After some time, when the bag
gets full -- toss it all into a stew pot (or crock pot) with chicken
broth.  After cooking, puree it with immersion blender (aka motorboat)
and turn it into a good vegetable puree soup.  Gail has started just
such a bag.

On the next day, our fourth session was with Paul Rogalski.  He was born
in Calgary of Ukrainian immigrants.  Our handout book lists a number of
credits, including being a co-creator of the Rouge Restaurant.  The
theme of his presentation was to make a dish based on ingredients at
hand when guest show up unexpectedly a day early.  The audience chose
five ingredients from the table for him to use.  Our chosen ingredients
were sweet potato, lemon, mushroom, prosciutto, and asparagus.  From
this he made a sweet potato soup, using the asparagus cooked with the
finely diced prosciutto as a garnish floated on top of the soup.  He did
use a few other items such as chicken broth and onions.

                               Dale Shipp
                  fido_261_1466 (at) comcast (dot) net
                              (1:261/1466)


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