Feeding My Passion

Chef Cameron (a truly learned, experienced, and passionate Certified Executive Chef, and a good friend) and I are teaching a vegetarian cooking class at Whole Foods in Chicago on 3 Aug at the Halstead location. This will be our third class, the first two being Thai food (right up my alley) and ceviche respectively. We’ve had a lot of fun with the classes, met some nice people, made some money, and I always enjoy going into the city, probably my favorite in the US (sorry SF!). I enjoy teaching and I love passing along my enthusiasm for food, so I actually started teaching before I went professional. 

Several summers ago, I rented a church’s kitchen and taught Thai restaurant favorites and Asian summer salads. Both classes were well attended, mostly by friends who like my food and who like me and who paid, but there were a few others who came as well who had seen my tiny advertisement in a local weekly publication.

After running that tiny ad, having to go into Chicago for ingredients, and renting the space, I lost money on those classes, but they were a ton of fun. I know there was one person who actually made some of the things I taught during those classes, mostly the students just had fun in the class and enjoyed the food.

The classes Cameron and I are teaching in Chicago are much less participatory than the ones I did, but people have really been enjoying them, they get to eat everything we make, and the groups have been great.

This vegetarian class is going to be a blast. First of all, neither Cameron or I are vegetarians. I could go veggie pretty easily, but Cameron gives the impression he’d die without meat. Bacon occupies the lowest level of his food pyramid, with 12-18 servings a day. Last night, he and his lady, Sandi, invited me to celebrate the completion of their lovely new deck by having me over for some grilling. Her son and daughter-in-law were finishing up the deck as I got there (amazing job by the way), and Cameron and I chatted about the class on 3 August.

Since I had a few days off before starting my new job, and I’m guessing my new job will be pretty consuming, I thought the get-together was a perfect time to test the recipes I’d planned for the class. My first idea about the class was to come up with 3 menus, and do a course from each menu, appetizer, side, main dish, and dessert. It should have come to me much earlier, but the more I thought about it, I realized vegetarians don’t have any problem finding veggie appetizers, sides, and desserts, just main dishes, the place where the meat would usually go.

So I stayed with the multiple-menu idea, but just focused on teaching a few great veggie main dishes. Since my speciality is Asian, one of the menus is Vietnamese, Mexican was another one, this is summer, so something for the  grill was natural as well, and since it’s particularly challenging to find meat-less main dishes for the holidays, I wanted to do something really dramatic, delicious, and worthy of the seasons. I’ve never had Tofurky and I didn’t want to keep them in that box.

And while I”m on the subject of tofu products, I also didn’t want to fall back on the easy meat-like soy-based products, of which there are plenty, and some of them interesting. So until we get to dessert, there aren’t any soy products at all in my menu. I don’t have anything against the lovely soybean, it’s great, I can eat edamame all day long, fried tofu is awesome in stir fries, I have a recipe for a great tofu egg salad which I’ve been known to enjoy, and I think miso is all kids of awesome, but soy, specifically tofu, is probably first thing non-vegetarians think of when they think of what vegetarians have to eat since they don’t eat meat, and non-vegetarians generally curl their lips at the “T” word. So let’s avoid that trap this time, ok?

So I bought all the ingredients for the recipes I wanted to test and started cooking. I’ve got a small, kinda dark, un-vented kitchen, but I enjoyed putting everything together and getting it ready for Cameron, Sandi and her family.

Here are the 3 dishes:

• Vietnamese winter squash stew and peanuts simmered in coconut milk
• Squash and corn enchiladas
• Wild mushroom tart in puff pastry

All three were a hit, especially the enchiladas and the mushroom tart, the latter of which was not only great to look at, but incredibly delicious, with deep, mushroomy flavor.

Even Cameron really liked it. As a side for his Kobe beef filet.

I cannot lie, the Kobe fillet was quite amazing, and at $29/pound (wholesale!!), it better have been. The ribs were delicious, especially with his awesome jerk-style sauce. The delicious potato/green bean/corn-on-the-cob sides weren’t vegetarian though, since he greased them up with bacon fat before roasting them. Cameron needs this class more than anyone I know.

So let me know if you’d like the veggie recipes and I’ll post them!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Cooking Class. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.