You have to live with your choices.

Today my mom is guest posting. She came with me to my last culinary class cooking lab. Warning: Very Ugly Pictures Ahead. Turn Back Now. Classroom lighting and classroom plating. Blah.

I just witnessed my daughter transform herself to super teacher at her high school! I played her extra helper but I don’t know where things are so I ended up needing her help just as many times as the students. Divided by 5 groups of 5 students each, they were to make 3 things of their choice from a huge selection of foods. Her culinary class went full speed from the start. She talked really fast and moved from one place to another at amazing speed. Sadly, some students have no or little cooking experience or suck at following written recipes.

But at the end, decent looking foods come out at the end of the class—actually, anything edible they make she calls it a success. 70 minutes is not nearly enough and we stumble at the beginning, for 20 minutes, separating chicken that had thawed and froze again and became a block of ice. Arrrgh!

It was a really fun experience me to be in the class and I thought she had great skill as a teacher. At home she is exhausted yet now she transforms herself again into supermom for two kids who need constant supervision and love. No, she does not have time for the blog tonight, so I invite myself to do a guest blog. My stay is almost half over and I am blessed to be here.

I’ve heard of chicken and waffles, but have you heard of fried chicken tidbits with egg in a nest? How… Interesting…

Culinary Lesson #3447: The cookie tray goes in the middle of the oven, not on the bottom rack.

Culinary Lesson #5421: Put the lemon juice in the guacamole before stirring it around for 15 minutes. You really do eat with your eyes when it comes to gray avocado.

Stuffed french toast.

Mochiko chicken and strawberry box cake. (those are 3 choices?) They thought the teacher wouldn’t notice. Nice touch with the powdered sugar.

Family recipe peach cobbler. Pretty good.

These kids have never even tasted black beans. They only eat refried beans, so they say.

Strawberry smoothies with whipped cream. Can you tell this one had a little Nippon Nin touch?

No one ever says, “It’s easy as biscuits.”

Next week will be the last week we cook in the kitchen for culinary class.

Next week will be the last week I have to haul my Kitchen Aid, 4 bags of groceries, a 50lb bag of flour, and my regular humongous bag of work to school, then the perishables up three flights of stairs to the fridge, and then everything back down and over to the kitchen.

Next week will be the last week that I’ll be yelling to kids to turn off their burners when no pots are even on the stove top or to hold knives down when they walk around. After that I won’t have to remind students to look at the recipe instead of just randomly assigning measurements or mixing steps. I won’t have to demonstrate cooking techniques and explanations which immediately become mocked by students as some kind of sexual innuendo (see butter recipe, below). I won’t be cleaning the kitchen for an hour after the students “cleaned up”.

Next week will be the last week that I’ll try to convince whining kids to taste kale salad, that macaroni and cheese from scratch is better than Kraft, and little teeny bits of garlic are not going to kill you when they’ve been simmered for almost an hour in a Moroccan tagine.

Next week will be the last week that these kids will have to convince me that they’ve learned something this year.

I can’t wait until next week so I can miss all of this.

We made biscuits, homemade butter, and jam. I gave out two different recipes to six groups and came out with six completely different products. Biscuits are most importantly about texture. If you’re like us about every third batch will turn out like crackery hockey pucks instead of fluffy flaky puffs. Here are the two Biscuit Commandments:

Thou Shalt Not Knead the Dough Too Much.

Thou Shalt Roll the Dough 1” Thick.

If you follow these two important details, you will do well. After observing my students’ work, I’d have to add a few more pieces of advice:

wet dough is better (and never add more flour than is called for)

do not grease the cookie sheet

pay close attention to teaspoon vs. tablespoon markings

the butter and milk should be cold, cold, cold and work quickly, quickly, quickly

biscuit cutters, if you remember to bring them to class, would be good. cut down, don’t twist.

The recipes we used:

Cream Biscuits by Deb at Smitten Kitchen

Biscuit Recipe

Homemade Blackberry Jam by Savory Sweet Life

Homemade Butter

• 1 Cup cream
• 1/2 tsp salt

1. In a lidded jar, shake the cream and salt about one revolution per second. You’ll have butter pretty soon. If you are doing this in a high school class, use the two handed back and forth method with the jar held horizontally instead of the “shake weight” method. Trust me.

you don’t need this recipe to cook chili and rice

In Hawaii, there is no such thing as chili without rice. It would be blasphemous to eat it as anything but rice flavoring. You need the clean taste of rice to pair with the messy back-of-the-throat acid and warmth of chili.

Chili and rice is a common menu item at local style take out places and a Zippy’s specialty. Supposedly people will take Zippy’s chili back with them when they’re stuck on the mainland for college.

I decided to use chili as the first real test that my culinary students would have. Cooking is often about trusting your taste and testing out your understanding of foods. When you’ve had as much chili and rice as my students have had, you should know what looks like chili and what doesn’t.

So I let them at it.

I brought a lot of ingredients that normally go into chili recipes, and I asked them to put it together. The only help I gave them was to say that they should brown the meat first. And keep the temperature on the low side to avoid red splatter all over everyone’s faces.

Everyone got into their kitchens and started throwing stuff together. They stood over their chili pots protectively, keeping their concoctions from my criticism. Some looked like soups, some had no sauce at all. The students would go visit another group, look at their chili, and go back to the ingredient table and think about why their chili looked nothing like chili at all. Most of my students don’t really read the recipes I give them anyway, so it was better that they only had their instincts to guide them here.

By the end I had 6 very different tasting pots of chili. But everyone one of them could be classified as such. There was smoky chili, bacon chili, basic chili, vegetable laden chili, no beans chili, and watery chili. After everyone declared theirs to be the best and took their portions home, I threw the leftovers together and had enough for dinner for my family and our neighbors.

So I guess they can cook. I was a proud Mama.

And they won’t starve when they go to college, with no Zippy’s in sight.

Chili

The ingredients included in every chili recipe (all veggies are chopped or minced as desired):

• tomato sauce or tomato paste
• salt
• cumin
• beef stock or bouillon
• cayenne pepper or chili powder or both

The ingredients included in almost every chili recipe:

• ground beef (you can get fancy and go with real beef, cubed)
• kidney beans (cooked)
• garlic
• brown or white sugar
• coriander
• dried oregano
• onion
• canned tomato

The ingredients that are optional but often good in chili, maybe not all together:

• peppers (bell or hot as desired)
• chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (canned)
• bacon
• corn
• tomatoes
• cilantro
• different kinds of beans (cooked)
• canned pumpkin
• cocoa powder
• Worcestershire sauce
• Tabasco sauce
• carrot
• zucchini

Basic Chili Directions

1. Brown the meat in a heavy skillet over medium high heat. Drain the rendered fat off and set the meat aside. Fry up the bacon if using.
2. In a tablespoon of oil over medium heat, saute the onions until translucent and just beginning to brown. Add other chopped veggies, if using and cook about 5 minutes. Put the onions and and meat in a saucepan over medium low heat and add the tomato sauce or paste and some beef stock (or bouillon mixed with water). Add the beans. Add spices to taste. Simmer until thickened or add more beef stock or tomato sauce as needed. I personally love the canned pumpkin in my chili.
3. Serve with rice. Plenny of it.

Plans You Can’t Count On and Italian Buttercream

Valentine’s Day is NOT a day that anyone likes to feel disappointed.

About five minutes into making Valentine’s Day cards, Amaya got up to leave.

“Where are you going? We’re making Valentines! That’s the plan!” I said, alarmed.

She looked at me with her little four year old squint and said, with a side pinched mouth, “That was your plan. That wasn’t my plan! I just want to have fun!”

She walked away without one bit of guilt or even one backwards glance at her abandoned list of friends who would have one less Valentine.

Predictably, for our Valentine’s Day, my hub and I were having a bit of a squabble about “adult stuff” and acting like kids about it.

To top it off, my culinary class was supposed to make cupcakes, and I forgot the flour.

I mean, who said cupcakes have to have flour anyway? Why are we forced to give Valentines on February 14th? Why does an argument have so much more weight on an arbitrarily assigned day of the year?

Bah. Humbug.

Basically, every week I have to drag my entire kitchen to my car, from my car to my classroom, then my classroom to the kitchen classroom, and then back again. So when I came back from my all day field trip in time for 7th period, there was no time to problem solve having no flour. My google searches for "substitutions for flour” weren’t going to save me.

I apologized to my students, and the grumbling from those teenagers was even louder than my own grumbling. What if you were promised an hour to cook and then had to write notes on leaveners instead?

I tried to salvage my own romantic Valentine’s Day by ordering takeout. Both places I thought would be appreciated happened to close early on Monday. I went to the store to get some inspiration, and by the time I got home, it was already time for dinner. I basically completely failed to do anything for my significant other. And I had to ruin the rest of our evening because now I had to make 90 red velvet cupcakes. 

Today I brought in the cupcakes. My friend, co-owner of the local cake shop Paradise Pastries, came in to talk with my class about her expertise, and made us some Italian Buttercream.

She whipped up that buttercream like someone who could do that in sleep. I was impressed. I’m very impressed by anything that requires thermometers, whipped egg whites, sugar that could burn your skin off, and pounds of butter. There’s a lot that can go wrong with this recipe. The variables are hard to account for. She could make that alchemy work up into a perfect sweet frosting while I struggled to work out using a phone to order take out.

Stress momentarily melted into that pillowy buttercream. If this is what Italians eat, get me on a plane right this moment. I may have eaten more cupcakes than I originally intended. I’m not normally a frosting person, but I was basically using the cupcake like a plate for frosting.

We played around with decorating, and let’s just say that my technique could use some work. One of my students seems to have a knack for food styling, and she made a rose on her first try. My cupcakes look like Zac Efron’s hair. The “all bangs” look.

I came home to a surprise. These nun orchids have been my Valentine’s Day staple since we first started dating in 2000.

That’s something I can count on.

Valentine’s Day magic lives on. Even a day late.

 

Resources:

My friend normally makes a lot more buttercream than you would need, and buys egg whites by the bucket, but this recipe is closest I could find online to what she used.

I made Annie’s Red Velvet Cupcakes. Easy peasy. Even 90 of them.

Wilton’s website is a great source for decorating techniques using buttercream frosting. Something I will be studying.

Love and Peanut Butter Chocolate Luvah Cake

I have been calling in all my favors.

Chances are, if you know me, you’ve done me a favor lately, whether you owe me one or not.

I need to thank those who wrote me letters of reference, featured my blog in the newspaper, invited us for dinner, helped edit my pictures, gave me advice, gave me pictures, listened to me complain, held my crying baby, gave my baby gifts (even from London), entertained my crazy kid, helped me do my work, and forgave me for my flakiness.

Oh, and thank you to the person who let me borrow 24 ramekins on a moment’s notice so I could make chocolate molten lava cakes with my culinary class.

Thank you, dear readers and commenters and people who have been so complimentary. You have helped keep up my spirits in this stressful time.

Special thanks to chocolate lava cakes that keep giving me reasons to show up and run nightly, and scales that never lie.

But the person I need to thank the most, our resident artist:

My love. I didn’t give you any credit in that article, and I’m feeling pretty silly for it. You’re the one who makes the magic happen. You are the glue that holds this crazy together.

I never make thank you cards, but sometimes I make thank you treats.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Luvah (Lava) Cake (serves 4)

(print this)

Confession: this is the easiest and fastest cake to make. Ever. I’ve made 5 chocolate lava cake recipes in the last two weeks and this lava cake base is my favorite for its ease and flavor. Some of my students found it to be too much chocolate while others were happily scraping their plates. Predictably, there were some students who preferred Hershey’s milk chocolate to Green and Black’s dark chocolate during our chocolate tasting lesson. Leave out the peanut butter if you like. Other add-ins we tried with my class were nutella, crushed oreo cookies and bananas. Experimenting is just a good excuse to make more.

• 5 oz dark or semisweet chocolate (semisweet chocolate chips do work here)
• 1/4 lb unsalted butter
• 3/4 Cup sugar
• 1/4 Cup flour
• 3 eggs
• 4 teaspoons peanut butter

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter 4 4oz ramekins (the whole inside, not just the bottom). Don’t be shy with the butter. Chop the chocolate into small pieces and put into a microwave safe bowl with the butter. Microwave for 1 minute, stirring after thirty seconds. After 1 minute stir and make sure it is completely melted. Microwave in 20 second intervals if it is not.
2. In a separate medium bowl, with a wooden spoon mix the sugar, flour and eggs until completely combined.
3. Add the chocolate mixture slowly into the eggs while stirring until one uniform color.
4. Put about 1/4 C of the batter into each of the ramekins. Place a teaspoon of peanut butter into each ramekin on top of the batter. Cover with more batter until about 3/4 way full.
5. Bake the cakes for 10-15 minutes. The time will depend on the actual heat of your oven and the thickness of the ramekin walls. I check often and remove them just when the sides look softly set, the top looks dry and beginning to crack, but it still jiggles in the middle just a little. If you overcook it you will have just a very moist chocolate-y cake (which is good, too). Mine took 13 minutes and two of the ramekins were perfect while the other ones (with thinner walls) were slightly over done.
6. Softly pull the sides of the cake away from the walls of the ramekins with a knife or spoon, and invert onto a plate. You can also eat it straight from the ramekin. Dust with powdered sugar or garnish with a strawberry if desired. Serve immediately with ice cream, milk, or something to balance the extreme chocolate goodness.

Ok, one more. For the fans.

Hope you have a lovely Valentine’s Day. Make this for yourself even.

Macadamia Nut Tomato Pesto

“What’s wrong with these tomatoes, Miss?” a girl asked me as I was running from group to group during cooking day in my culinary class.

I stopped, mid-crazy. “What do you mean, what’s wrong with them?”

“They’re so red. And soft. Are these rotten?”

I scrunched my eyes up and studied her face. She wasn’t kidding. “Hmmm. No. They’re perfect. Maybe you didn’t know that store bought tomatoes are usually never ripe. And they’re crunchy.” Disgusting, too, I stopped myself from adding.

She still looked skeptical.

When I had decided to make the trifecta of pasta sauces, pesto, alfredo, and marinara, with my class, I didn’t know they weren’t yet familiar with basics of the kitchen. These teens had never been to a land where tomatoes are not crunchy, the stoves are not all electric, and where pasta sauce doesn’t come out of a jar.

So in between looking for the source of the unlit gas stove smell and explaining that one clove of garlic wasn’t the same as the entire head, I was smacking myself on the forehead for my ambitious plan. When I had done my planning, my thought was, “Oh yeah, this will be easy peasy.” 

Maybe I should have stuck to box cake mixes.

Each group got a basic recipe for one of the sauces and a box of pasta. The groups had to come ask me for cooking tools and ingredients, as the kitchens are not stocked. I quickly realized that in addition to the two stockpots I brought from my own home, there was only 1 more in the whole classroom. When representatives from each group came to me to get ingredients they’d forgotten how much of whatever it was they were supposed to get. Most forgot to get the water boiling until about half way through class, so we were cutting it close to finishing a 20 minute dish in 70 minutes.

The week before I had taught them about plating (whatever little I know) and we were supposed to do a plating and photography session with the pasta, but since we were running down to the wire this is about as good as I got:

Success.

And I guarantee you that some of them will still crack a jar of Prego for dinner this weekend.

But at least they know that parmesan cheese isn’t actually that nasty stuff you get in a green can.

Over the weekend I was looking at the leftover tomatoes I had picked up from the Shintaku’s farm, Green Growers, in Hau’ula. They have some lovely tomatoes and amazingly priced compared to the store. Terry was nice enough to send a few pounds my way for free since I was using them for my class.

I thought about the price of pine nuts climbing 300% and the mildew that’s making sweet basil scarce in our islands right now. It suddenly made sense to throw that basic pesto recipe out, however tasty.

No matter how expensive mac nuts are, I bet they’re cheaper than those pine nuts. Pine nuts are going for $30 a bag at the Costco here.

Macadamia Nut Tomato Pesto

This pesto is similar to a marinara but the meatiness of the macadamia nuts gives the sauce some girth. It clings better and the nuts cut a bit of the acid in the tomatoes as well. The sauce goes best with a long pasta, like spaghetti or linguini.

Oh, and use real tomatoes, please. The soft, red ones.

• 2/3 C macadamia nuts
• 1 lb tomatoes (about 6 small or 4 medium)
• 2 Tablespoons loosely packed Thai basil (or 1 tsp dried if none is available)
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1/4 C grated parmesan or Romano cheese (not that they’re the same, but Romano is an option in a pinch)
• 4 Tablespoons of olive oil, divided
• 1/2 tsp salt or more to taste
• 1 pinch sugar
• 1 lb pasta such as linguini, fettuccine, spaghetti or bucatini

1. Bring 6 quarts of water to a boil and add salt to taste. Cook pasta according to package directions. Drain and set aside.
2. While the pasta is cooking, in a skillet over medium heat, dry toast the macadamia nuts until lightly browned, stirring frequently (about 3-4 minutes).
3. Roughly chop the tomatoes, basil, and garlic. Put these in a food processor/cuisinart fitted with the blade attachment. Add the macadamia nuts, grated parmesan cheese, 3 Tablespoons of olive oil and process until pureed, about 30 seconds. The macadamia nuts should be small but visible.
4. In the now empty skillet, heat the final tablespoon of olive oil over medium high heat. When the oil is hot, add the tomato sauce and stir frequently until the color changes to become more red and the sauce is reduced just slightly, about 5 minutes. Add salt as necessary to taste, and a pinch of sugar.
5. Add the pasta directly to the sauce in the skillet. Toss to coat. Serves 6-8, Serve with more parmesan if you wish.

Bento Box Lessons of Love

Today I did not

drink water

pee

or eat food

until after 3:30 pm.

Instead I spent the entire day running around like a mad woman. I loaded up bags of supplies and tools for my culinary class. I wrote up hand outs and directions for simple things such as  “How to boil eggs” and drew maps of the classroom where everything would go. I mentally prepared myself for the chaos that would be 7th period with 32 students.

32 students. For 70 minutes.

Not to scare anyone out of the teaching profession (AAAAAAAHHHHHH! It’s a flaming zombie! Run away before you’re eaten alive!), but being in charge of 32 teenagers is like trying to wipe up a gallon of milk with a tissue. It’s like the test in the eye doctor’s office where you’re clicking the clicker for those random flashes of light in every peripheral spot. It’s like trying to play the piano while the baby is screaming.

Add some chef’s knives, gas stoves, and raw food to the mix.

Now it’s like teaching culinary.

Over the last few lessons I’ve been teaching my students about the visual appeal of food. I thought, how better to do that than with bento boxes? In addition we learned about portion control, balance, variety, and garnish. Since most of our periods are 40 minutes long, it’s difficult to get in much, but I did pack a lot of information in to 3 days. We even made bento box blueprints.

Today we put our plans into action. Every student made his or her own bento. I ran from station to station to thwart safety hazards (“Does it smell like gas in here?”) and answer questions like, “Can I just cook the rest of my SPAM for later?”

32 students need a lot of attention. Almost as much as my 4-year-old.

We even had a photography station and got a shot of each bento box for later grading. I stepped in for a few pictures as the entire concept of photographing food was definitely new to them (not that I’m any sort of expert). Some couldn’t be rescued, color and focus wise, because of the lighting in that room and the settings they chose because I was too busy to help them with each picture (probably this could be fixed more with photoshop but is beyond my capability). Some students are definitely naturals at design. Think we have a few future food bloggers?

They’ve had such small exposure to food, really. But there are such cute details in even the simplest bentos here.

The kids were so impressed with their pictures on that little LCD screen. They couldn’t believe they had made something beautiful. I heard one student say, “Now I remember why I like this class.”

Glad I could remind him.

And glad they could remind me.

Lessons from a Smoothie

Yesterday I started my job all over again. After a semester of maternity leave, I’m back in the high school classroom where chaos and order try to coexist, and when it doesn’t, guess who wins.

Not me. Ha.

There are lots of hard things about leaving my babies and going back to work. Mostly I’m trying to focus on my goal of doing without wasting time complaining about it (except a little. I complain a little).

When the kids poured into the room and all sat on the back row next to their friends, I felt a little like the babysitter. Y’know, how you tell the babysitter that you always stay up past 10pm and eat ice cream for dessert because Mom and Dad always let me. Except substitute “This has always been my assigned seat and we always chew gum.” 

Yeah, Right.

I made my negotiations and played tough but fair teacher to classes of smirking students. I gave my speeches about getting A’s and not making excuses and that fun is not just a word that describes parties.

And then I had my culinary class. And to me, fun is a word that describes cooking.

Culinary 1 is not actually just a cooking class, but is about the food industry, nutrition, and a whole slew of things that have very little to do with cooking. Certain other factors involving practicality, location, time, and money reduce that even further.

Despite this, I’m planning on making it as real as possible, and I’ve already made a couple of promises. To show some good faith on my part (and requiring some show of responsibility on their part), I brought ingredients for smoothie making. I went through my cupboards and fridge and basically brought anything that could possibly be called good in a smoothie. Here were my thoughts:

1. It’s hard to make a bad smoothie. Possible, but harder.

2. Experimentation is easier and faster with a smoothie.

3. It requires almost no skill.

I had each group create a recipe with my list of ingredients, and then they were able to “test” it out in my blender. Mostly, they were just too watery. Somewhat edible.

I learned more from watching them make smoothies:

1. Most of them don’t know how to read or use measuring cups and generally have no concept of volume.

2. Most don’t know that vanilla and baking cocoa don’t contain sugar.

3. They don’t have much experience with taste.

After scanning their "favorite foods” and foods they hate from a questionnaire I gave them, I’m pretty sure my ideas about good food and theirs are a million miles apart.

For example, “Hot Pockets” is not something I would say if someone asked me what I knew how to cook.

As we were coming up with recipes and blending, I was surprised at how quiet everyone was. At my school we have quite a few big jokers. Classes are talkative and generally you have to keep a lid on things. Most teachers keep their mean faces for order’s sake. But in my room, today, they all acted like kids who were being allowed to help in the kitchen for the first time.

I guess that’s what was happening, but I didn’t realize that they were nervous about it.

I’ve got a plan in my head for Momofuku Ginger Scallion Noodles next week. Almost no cooking, knife skills, and simple recipe are the pros. Yet I’m worried that kids who are used to bottled spaghetti sauce are going to hate it.

Then I’ll lose all credibility as a person who knows about food.

Kids are definitely the worst critics, as you can see from Amaya’s face.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Smoothie (adapted from a student recipe)

A group of students actually did create this recipe, but I’ve made adjustments as the original had way too much peanut butter and milk. The cinnamon was an interesting touch, I thought.

• 2 bananas, frozen
• 1 Cup milk
• 1 vanilla pudding cup
• 2 Tbsp peanut butter
• 2 Tbsp cocoa powder
• 1 Tbsp honey
• dash of cinnamon (optional)

Blend together and serve. You may need more milk, depending on your blender and desired consistency.