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Friday, February 22, 2013

Cooking Up a Storm with SF Cooking School

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About a month ago, I was walking down Van Ness, from having awesome dinner at Zarzuela - I'll need to remember to write up a review about my experience because it was so delicious - when I discovered that my beloved Naan and Curry was gone.  The good news is there's a new fantastic Culinary School now at the corner of Van Ness and Turk, SF Cooking.  SF cooking offers a full culinary degree - is that what it's called because I'm not sure - or you can sign up for one day classes, or multi-week courses.  As soon as I started looking over what SF Cooking offered I was, as my friend Rhiannon would say, "In deep smit." (As in really really smitten with the place.  PS - Let's make this a new phrase.)

I immediately signed up for the "Cooking Fundamentals" six week course, along with a one day class on "Asian Dumplings."  (I signed up for the April 7th dumplings class if anyone is interested in joining me.)  I attended my first class yesterday, Thursday February 21st, "Knife Skills."  I have nine awesome classmates (they classes max out at fourteen) and we had a great time learning about the proper way to slice, dice, mince and chop.  Our instructor for the course, David, is super fantastic.  David previously worked at Zuni, and you can tell that he loves cooking.  

After going over the knife basics the class was divided into teams of two and we started on seven different recipes.  

  • Crostini with Goat Cheese and Olive Tapenade
  • Shrimp Fritters with Grapefruit Cucumber Relish
  • Mediterranean Chopped Salad
  • Minestrone Soup with a Pesto Garlic Garnish
  • French Onion Soup
  • Baked Salmon Filet over Veggie Slaw
  • Apple Crumble with Whipped Cream

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The space we cook is beautiful and very spacious. We were all easily able to work on our separate dishes with plenty of room, but still close enough to check out what everyone was doing. We were all provided with aprons when we arrived, along with printed handouts of all the recipes we'd be making that day. (In my excitement to rush home and tell Bob about how awesome my class was I left my recipes behind. I sent an email and they'll hold onto my recipes until I go to next week's class. Whew.)

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After everything was prepared we all sat down together to enjoy our delicious meal, and talk about things we enjoyed or would do differently in the future. For instance my cooking buddy, Hazel, and I worked on the shrimp fritters and we think adding jalapeƱos to the dish would really kick it up a notch. There was sooo much food and everything was really good. I can hardly wait to see what we're making next week in "Sauteing and Searing."

If you've been looking for cooking classes in San Francisco, you must check out SF Cooking!

Lastly, I'll leave you with some things I learned:

  • My knives at home are not sharp.
  • I had never used a properly sharpened knife until this class. Did you know that with a sharp knife you can cut through an onion like it's butter? Craziness!
  • I can now "supreme" a grapefruit. And you can too with this video.

As soon as I get my recipes I'll add them to the blog so you can all see what you're missing.

:)M

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