The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (24 page)

 

For a “lazy sourdough,” mix the next batch in the same container without cleaning it first. You can substitute 2 cups of whole wheat flour for the white flour if desired.

 

 

 

 

8 ounces cooked pasta
2 cups heavy cream (2 tablespoons reserved)
teaspoon salt
cup grated Parmesan or Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
1 garlic clove, minced (optional)
Freshly ground black pepper

Prepare the pasta according to package directions. Carefully reserve one cup of the pasta water to use in the sauce. Over medium-high heat, add all but 2 tablespoons of the cream to a sauté pan or skillet. When it bubbles, add the salt. Small bubbles will erupt into larger bubbles. Stir. When the sauce thickens enough to cover the back of a spoon or leaves a clean line in the bottom of the pan when you pull a spatula across it, add the pasta water. Cook over medium-high heat for about 3 minutes, until it bubbles again and the sauce thickens. Add the reserved 2 tablespoons of cream, heat through, and then add the cheese, garlic (if using), and a few cranks of pepper. Taste, and add more salt if needed. Add the cooked pasta and any additional ingredients and stir well to coat.

CHAPTER 8

The autumn before I started the project, I donated the first of several cooking-class dinners to charity. A sweet couple forked over seven hundred dollars to a worthy cause for my services, blissfully unaware that, at the time, I had never taught a cooking class.

As Lisa and I arrived at the door clad in chef's jackets and armed with cooking gear, an elegant woman with a bob of highlighted blond hair holding a white wine spritzer opened the door. “Hi, we're all so excited!” she greeted us enthusiastically. “Yep, it's the chef. She's here!” she yelled over her shoulder to her guests. She kept one hand on the doorknob and waved us inside with the other clasped firmly on a flute of champagne. She smelled vaguely of Chanel No. 5.

Her guests gathered around the granite-topped kitchen island littered with wineglasses. The house was a well-decorated atomic-era ranch style with an expansive backyard blanketed with lush green grass and ringed by evergreens. The friends stood around in casual summer attire, the women in capris and the men in Dockers and button-down short-sleeved shirts. Two of the men put down their drinks and left to help Lisa lug in the rest of our cooking gear from her truck. As I exchanged pleasantries with the hosts, a dark-haired fellow holding a gin and tonic cheerfully asked, “So, Chef, where's your restaurant?”

Ugh, that question. “I don't have one. I'm a food writer,” I replied.

“Oh, so you're not a real chef,” he said, a little confused.

The hostess interjected, “Don't put her on the spot. Of course she's a real chef! She went to culinary school. In Paris, no less!”

Booze comes in handy for dodging questions. “Oh, hey, I almost forgot! We brought champagne to make kir royales.”

After I made a round of cocktails, I opened the fridge door to put the remnant champagne inside. Three dozen bottles of vinaigrette clanked like wind chimes caught in a Category 1 hurricane. “That's quite a lot of dressing you've got in there,” I said to the hostess. “Why don't you make your own?”

“Oh, I'd have no idea how,” she said, fingering her pearl earrings.

“Do you have a jar?” I asked.

We ransacked the cupboards, pulling a motley collection of barely touched bottles of oil and vinegars of seemingly every shape, size, and flavor and set them on the kitchen island. “Okay, everyone, gather around,” I said. As I explained the impromptu tasting session of oils and vinegars, the guests exchanged dubious glances.

“But are those even edible alone?” a woman asked.

“Of course,” I said. “You need to know what each tastes like so that you'll have an idea when you put them together.”

We started with the oils, a variety of olive, canola, safflower, and sesame and a small aging bottle of walnut. We set aside a bottle of olive oil that had turned rancid. “Oils don't have the shelf life most people think,” I said. “It's, like, six months, and less if you store them over the stove like you're doing here because the heat breaks down the oil.” Lisa and I had everyone taste the good oils and then the bad oil. “Rancid oil isn't bad for you, but the unpleasant flavor and acrid taste will ruin whatever you decide to do with it.” We moved on to the vinegars, which ranged from cider to white wine to red wine to balsamic.

Then Lisa explained that vinaigrette dressing is just a simple ratio. “It's generally three to one,” she said. “Three parts oil, such as olive oil or sesame oil, to one part acid, such as vinegar or citrus juice.” The hostess and I measured three tablespoons of olive oil and one tablespoon of balsamic vinegar into her empty jar. We added some salt and pepper. I gave it to the hostess to shake fiercely.

“Now what do we do?” she asked excitedly.

“Congratulations. You just made vinaigrette,” I said. She looked proud and held it above her head as if she'd won a trophy at Wimbledon. Everyone cheered. A month later, she sent an e-mail thanking me for the class, adding, “I haven't bought a bottle of salad dressing since that night. This sounds crazy, but it changed my life. It made me start to wonder what else I have been buying that I could just be making myself.”

I printed out that e-mail and brought it to the next class. I told the volunteers the story, and then read the e-mail aloud to them as they gathered around the worktable. Only one short week after the numbing heat of the pasta and bread class, the kitchen temperature was nearly twenty-five degrees cooler.

“That woman had everything she needed to make vinaigrette,” I said. “She was missing only one ingredient: the know-how to make it.”

Vinaigrette is one of the more expensive products to buy by weight at a grocery store. A sixteen-ounce bottle of dressing can run anywhere from $3.60 to more than seven dollars. At an average of thirty-two cents an ounce, that's nearly forty-one dollars per gallon. Yet it's one of the easiest and cheapest things to make at home.

After the story, we circulated copies of a basic vinaigrette recipe. At the top of each page: “oil + acid = yummy.”

Lisa and I led the volunteers on a raid around the kitchen to collect oils, vinegars, soy sauce, jams, chutney, fig paste, cheeses, garlic, dried coconut, gingerroot, spices, red wine, lemons, limes, olives, and some of the Dijon mustard from the chicken lesson. We broke the class into two-person teams. “If you can think of something you had eating out, consider the flavor profiles, the way we did in the chicken class. What flavors make something taste Italian? Name them.” We went around the table: Parmesan cheese, oregano, red wine, tomatoes, basil.

“Thai?” Basil, coconut, curry, lime, hot chilies.

“I usually buy a strawberry balsamic. How would I make that?” Shannon asked.

“In summer, you can add mashed-up fresh strawberries. The rest of the time, you can just use a bit of strawberry jam,” I said, an answer that generated a collective “ah” of enlightenment.

The group went to work tasting and talking, a cacophony of whisks in motion, stopping and tasting again. Jodi and Dri made an Asian version with sesame oil, grated gingerroot, soy, and lime. Another team crafted a balsamic with fig paste and bleu cheese. Sabra and Gen made classic mustard and white wine vinaigrette with fresh thyme thrown in.

Then we stopped everyone. “Okay, whisks down!” Lisa commanded. She and I had bought a couple of packages of mixed greens. We set them on the table. “Pick out different salad leaves and dip them into your vinaigrette. You want to see how the flavor pairs with your lettuce, since all lettuces taste different,” she explained. “Remember, there is no right or wrong answer. Whatever tastes good to you is all that matters.”

Everyone stopped and delicately selected a few leaves—radicchio, butter lettuce, romaine, arugula, frisée among them. The group chatted and murmured. “This one's bitter.” “This one doesn't go with the ginger.” “Huh, it's great with the arugula but terrible with that red leaf.”