Fulfilling a Dream - Part 1

For most of my adult life, I've dreamt of doing some kind of culinary training - not necessarily with the idea of becoming a chef, mostly just for the sheer joy of it, and of course always with the hope of developing new skills and becoming a better cook.

Several months ago when I discovered the Matthew Kenney Culinary Academy, which offered courses (both onsite and online) that bring together innovate and creative culinary arts with optimal, plant-based nutrition, I was completely captivated and I really felt that this was my ticket to realising that dream.

Finally, last month I had the opportunity to complete Level 1 of the Fundamentals of Raw Cuisine through Matthew Kenney's online academy, and to say this was an extraordinary experience would be an understatement.

Of course, the food was fabulous, but it was also very satisfying to learn classical techniques - knife skills, food safety, flavour balancing, plating and presentation - skills that you would learn in any typical culinary training, and with techniques that were applied to raw food.  Typically raw food is not heated above 45 degrees C (115 degrees F) to preserve the enzymes in food which are normally destroyed during cooking.

You might think that this would mean going without a lot of things, but it was very inspiring to find new and creative ways to ensure that this food was highly enriching rather than any form of deprivation.

Working through the online academy, I did miss the camaraderie of working in the kitchen with others;  however, there is plenty of opportunity for students to connect with each other online, and tutors are incredibly helpful and supportive.  Every effort really is made to make students feel as connected as possible.

So, I'm sure you're all dying to know what I learnt - well, I can now safely say that raw food is so much more than just 100 ways to chop lettuce!  From tacos to tarts, soups to salads, and everything in between - here's a little glimpse of some of the things we made.

Juices, Smoothies and Almond Milk ...

Green Juice

Apple Aid

Blueberry Bee Smoothie

Pumpkin Pie Smoothie

Almond Milk

Beautiful salads ...

Sesame Noodle Salad, with tamari almonds and spicy almond sauce

Zucchini Tartare

A simple but delicious Butter Lettuce Salad

Kale Caesar Salad, with rosemary croutons, pine nut "parmesan" crisps and shiitake "anchovies

Seaweed Salad, citrus laden and very fresh

We pickled and fermented ...

Dill Pickles

Pickled Ginger

Kimchi

We made sushi ...

Nori Rolls with chipotle mayonnaise

Spicy Tuber Hand Rolls with mango chutney

You don't need pasta to make ravioli, lasagne or dumplings ...

Red Beet Ravioli, with cashew cheese filling, pistachio pesto and yellow pepper sauce

Heirloom Tomato Lasagne, with macadamia ricotta, tomato marinara, and pistachio pesto

Kimchi Dumplings, made with coconut wrappers and served with a sesame ginger foam

This Bahian-style soup, was a taste sensation and one of my favourite dishes of the course, and it was the inspiration for this Quick Curry Noodle Soup

Breads, cookies and pancakes didn't escape the raw food treatment either ...

Tostadas with pico de gallo, guacamole, and cacao mole

Flatbread Pizzas

Portobello Sliders with bbq sauce and caramelised shallots

Banana Bread

Sweet Maple Pancakes

Chocolate Chip Cookies

We made cheeses out of nuts ...

Cashew Nut Cheese & Macadamia Ricotta

Fermented cheeses

And, of course, there were sweet treats ...

Banana Chia Chai Pudding

Truffles

and a Lemon Chamomile Meringue Tart

The course also offered plenty of opportunity for creative expression, giving us the ability to explore our own ideas around the various techniques we learnt.  I'll share some of my own creations with you in  Part 2 of this story later in the week, along with a glimpse of the dishes I made for my final project.

If you would like some more information about this course, or one of the many other courses offered through the Matthew Kenney Culinary Academy, please email your contact details to me at yoga(dot)tapas(at)gmail(dot)com, and I'll get in touch with you.

Quick Curry Noodle Soup

Regular visitors here will know that I like to cook along with my friends at I Heart Cooking Clubs, where each six months we choose a new chef and take an in-depth exploration of their recipes and cooking techniques.  What you won't know, because I'm shamefully guilty of not having posted for the last month, is that we have now moved onto our 14th IHCC chef - Curtis Stone.  Curtis is of Australian origin, pursued a cooking career in London (including working under Marco Pierre White, and, in addition to a number of popular television shows, he now has a well-known restaurant of his own in Beverley Hills, California.

This week at IHCC is actually Potluck Week, which means we actually get to choose any recipe we like from any one of the 14 chefs in the IHCC stable.  However, since I've yet to join in with cooking any of Curtis' dishes, it seemed only fair that I should dip into one of his many culinary tomes.

It was the Quick Curry Noodle Soup from Curtis' book Good Food, Good Life which provided my initial inspiration. Curtis' soup incorporates beautiful prawns and fresh fish in a rich coconut broth with lots of Thai flavours of lemongrass, ginger, coriander, and kaffir lime - delicious!!

However, as I've just spent the last month doing a Raw Food Chef's training course through the Matthew Kenney Culinary Academy (which I can honestly say has been truly amazing, and you can visit this post to find out about my experience and see what we made), I was inspired to see if I could make a raw version of this dish.  Further inspiration also came from a Bahian style soup which we made on the course.

I went about making my version of this soup by substituting the seafood for vegetable "noodles" - carrots, zucchini and beetroot - and whizzing up my coconut milk and loads of zingy flavourings in the blender instead of in a pot. Obviously, because this is a raw version, it's not a hot soup, but there's actually plenty of heat comes through from the chilli, so it was still plenty comforting even on an autumn evening.  The wild card I guess in my version was the beetroot - not something that you would generally expect to find with these bold Asian flavours, but the sweet yet earthy flavour of the beets actually worked surprisingly well, and there's no doubt that they certainly add some visual impact to the dish.  I would have no hesitation including them again.

You might not have thought about raw food before, but I urge you to try this dish - it just might surprise you.

Quick Curry Noodle Soup Recipe
Inspired by Curtis Stone & Matthew Kenney
Click here for a printable copy of this recipe

coconut milk
1 cup dessicated coconut
2 cups water

vegetables
1/2 medium carrot
1x small zucchini
1/2 medium beetroot
sea salt
2 teaspoons lemon juice

soup
1-1/2 cups coconut milk
1/3 cup carrot juice
5cm (2 in) piece spring onion, white part only, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons fresh coriander, leaves and stems, chopped
1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger
1x small clove garlic, minced
1/2 medium red chilli, remove seeds if you prefer less heat
1x lime, grated zest and juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1x avocado
1x large tomato, seeds removed and diced

to serve
coriander leaves
kaffir lime leaf, finely shredded
lime cheek

Begin by making the coconut milk - pour the water over the dessicated coconut and leave to stand for at least 10 minutes.  (Go have a cup of coffee, put your feet up, have a snooze - nobody dies!!)  After a suitable rest period, add the coconut and water to a blender, blend thoroughly (really thoroughly), and strain.

Next prepare the vegetables.  You can run the vegetables through a spiraliser to create your noodles, or if you don't have a spiraliser, a vegetable peeler that creates fine juliennes or ribbons will do just fine.  Place the carrot and zucchini noodles in a bowl, sprinkle with a pinch of sea salt and a teaspoon lemon juice, toss well and set aside to soften slightly while you prepare the broth.  Do the same thing with the beetroot noodles, keeping them in a separate bowl from the other vegetables so that the beetroot doesn't turn everything pink.

Now, onto the broth.  Put all of the soup ingredients, except the avocado and tomato into a tall jug or deep bowl. Using an immersion blender, blend everything until smooth.  Add the avocado and blend again, at which point the broth will thicken up.  Lastly, add the tomatoes and blend until smooth.

To serve, arrange a pile of the vegetable noodles in a bowl, and pour the broth around the noodles. Garnish with a few coriander leaves and finely shredded kaffir lime leaf.  Serving a lime cheek on the side would also be a nice addition.

If you would like to get to know Curtis Stone a little better, and to see all the wonderful Potluck dishes my friends have come up with, then do go visit I Heart Cooking Clubs and check out the links. 

I'll also be sharing this post this week at Souper (Soup, Salad & Sammies) Sundays hosted by my lovely friend Deb at Kahakai Kitchen.

Boozy Peaches (aka Peaches in Sticky Wine)

According to Shakespeare, "brevity is the soul of wit".  That being said, I fear this post may be rather long on the brevity (is that really possible), and short on the wit.

The long and short of it is that this has been a week that really got away from me, and if I don't get this post out in the space of a very short lunch break today, it isn't going to happen.

So getting straight to the point, this week at I Heart Cooking Clubs, where we continue our journey with the gorgeous Diana Henry, we are creating Gifts From the Heart.  With Christmas just around the corner, it's a great opportunity to explore some of those edible gifts that we cooks like to give to family and friends over the holiday season.

I knew I would find something in my copy of "Salt Sugar Smoke" - in fact I found many things which will make wonderful festive gifts, but I decided that nothing could be as simple to make, nor impressive to receive as a jar of these Boozy Peaches.

Diana's original recipe uses apricots soaked in muscat, but I used what I had - a bag of dried peaches and a bottle of dessert wine.  Really the variables are limitless.  It's just dried fruit packed into a sterilised jar, covered with booze, and then left in a cool, dark place for the fruit to plump up in the alcohol.  According to Diana, these will keep for a very long time, though I defy you to actually do that, and are just perfect for an instant and luxurious dessert.  I'm thinking that chilling these before using them would be a nice touch, and a couple of these with a generous dollop of thick Greek yoghurt would be heavenly.

Not sure yet who is going to be the lucky recipient of this jar as a Christmas prezzie, but I'm willing to take offers.

Boozy Peaches (Peaches in Sticky Wine) Recipe
Ever so slightly adapted from recipe by Diana Henry
from Salt Sugar Smoke

Take a large sterilised jar

Fill jar to approximately 2/3 full with dried peaches
(apricots, plums or pears would all be good alternatives)

 Add one bottle of a sticky dessert wine

Ensure that you have left enough room in the jar for the fruit to plump up.  After a few days add more wine if all the fruit is no longer covered.

Store in a cool, dark place until you are ready to use.

If you would like to get to know Diana Henry a little better, and to see what everyone else has cooked up this week, then do go and visit my friends at I Heart Cooking Clubs and check out the links (who knows, you might even want to join the journey and cook along with us) ...

Best Tomato Pasta Sauce Ever

I say it so often here that I should not have been surprised by this.  The best food of all is that which hasn't been messed with too much, but which is a simple combining of good quality, great tasting ingredients.  Yet, I was still shocked at how blindlingly good this simple tomato pasta sauce tasted.

In my effort to keep up with my massive tomato crop I've been telling you about, making some tomato ketchup seemed like an option.  "But why?" inquired the other mouth that I feed.  He is of the opinion that nobody could do a better job of it than Watties, and a sauce that actually tastes of ... well, tomatoes ... instead of preservatives and other things you can't pronounce, would just be too much of a shock to his tastebuds.  In fairness, he's come a long way and appreciates great food when it's given to him.  But there are some things he will always consider to be vaguely inferior when made at home - namely, tomato sauce, ice cream, and bread.  Still, I'm convinced that if I can come up with a good tomato sauce, and sneak it into the Watties bottle when he's not looking, then I have a pretty fair chance of passing it off as the "real deal".  Keep watching this space!

In the meantime, I decided a batch of tomato pasta sauce would take care of a few tomatoes, and would never go astray around our house.  Of course, when looking for a good sauce recipe, the first place I turned to was the Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan.  Marcella is the high priestess of Italian cooking, as far as I'm concerned, and this book is like my bible when it comes to Italian food.  Trust me when I tell you that, if you have no other Italian cookbook in your collection it should be this one.

When I found Marcella's recipe for Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter, my initial reaction was that I could "trick it up a little" by adding in some garlic, maybe some roasted red peppers, maybe some chilli flakes for a bit of kick, a bit of freshly ground black pepper even.  And then I decided to just allow Marcella's wisdom to prevail and stick with the recipe (a rare thing for me), and am I ever glad that I did just that.

This sauce consists of nothing more than tomatoes, an onion, a little butter, and a sprinkling of salt - that's it, nothing more.  The onion is simply cut in half and then discarded at the end of the cooking time, rather than diced into the sauce, so it serves to ever so delicately "fragrance" the sauce rather than overpowering it.  The flavour is wonderfully sweet and so intensely "tomatoe-y" that it's almost shocking.  This sauce is as intensely flavoured as any I've ever tasted, and yet it maintains a freshness and purity of flavour that is a sheer delight.  Think of the flavour of a freshly picked tomato, still warm from the sun, sliced thickly and set on top of freshly buttered toast, and you have pretty much exactly that in sauce form.

We enjoyed this tossed through some pappardelle with a sprinkling of freshly grated parmesan.  Marcella also recommends it as being a great accompaniment to gnocchi.  I hope you'll give it a try.  For best results use sun-grown fresh tomatoes, picked at the perfect stage of ripeness - out of season, hot-house grown tomatoes, picked early and ripened in the supermarket chiller, just won't cut it.  Marcella says you can also used tinned tomatoes.

Best Tomato Pasta Sauce Ever Recipe

Adapted from recipe by Marcella Hazan

from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

Makes enough for four servings of pasta

Click here for a printable copy of this recipe

1 kg (2x pounds) tomatoes

1x onion

100g (3.5 oz) butter

flaky sea salt

Peel tomatoes and discard the skins.

Remove and discard any woody cores from the tomatoes and roughly chop the flesh.  Cut the onion in half.  Put tomatoes, onion, butter, and a generous pinch of sea salt into a large saucepan.

Simmer uncovered very gently, stirring from time to time, and mashing the tomatoes with a wooden spoon, until the tomatoes have completely broken down and the sauce is reduced and thick - about 45 minutes.

Discard the onion, and immediately toss through pasta, or cool completely and freeze for later use.

I'm sharing this post at See Ya In the Gumbo, hosted by the lovely Michelle at Ms. enPlace;  at Foodie Friday, hosted by Designs by Gollum; and at My Meatless Mondays hosted by Chaya at My Sweet and Savory.