Personal Chef 101

Time is moving so fast I'm losing track of where I am and what I need to post.

My Nutrition class is basically Personal Chef 101.

Here is my first class effort:

Roasted Pepper and Olive Salad

Pan Seared Chicken Breast on Couscous with Green Beans and Cinnamon Gelato

I was pleased with the dish and I received a rave review from my client. It has somewhat of a Greek theme with the the olives, couscous and chicken. I'm not so sure that the couscous is actually couscous. Chef said it was but then Chef ordered a new case it it doesn't look like this stuff, but again, my client liked it, whatever it was. The chicken was seasoned with cracked pepper, cumin and turmeric. The "couscous" was tossed with onion, peppers and tomato. The green beans were seasoned with nutmeg. The gelato is not a true gelato since no custard is used. Cornstarch is used as a thickener instead. I also had to use soy milk because my client has a milk allergy. The taste was good but the texture was off. I would say it was closer to pudding than ice cream. It reminded me a lot of tapioca pudding. All in all I was pleased with my first effort. In looking at the picture, I could have done a little better on my plating.

We did this meal after cooking in the morning for our banquet class. That meant I was cooking or washing dishes from 8:30 to 4:30 with a break from 12:00 to 1:00 to serve food and eat. My ass was dragging. My feet and legs hurt so bad. I could feel myself move slower and s-l-o-w-e-r and slooooooowwwwweeeeerrrrr. I once saw a Red Wings hockey game that went to six overtimes. By the sixth period it looked like they were skating on slush instead of ice they were moving so slow due to fatigue. That is exactly how I felt.

Looking around the class, my buddy Tennessee was attempting to wing it with no prior plan. Fried prosciutto in a pesto cream sauce on homemade pasta. Kudos for home made pasta rather than processed and refined stuff, but not really a healthy meal overall. And damn that prosciutto was salty! Took me hours to get the taste out of my mouth.

Good ol' RK took three hours to make empanadas. They were the size of of a Hostess cherry pie, if not bigger. Granted they had a savory filling with rice and olives and raisins, but they were deep fried and HUGE! That was his entire plate too. He made eight, we're serving one. Some people just don't get it.

Gelato

Several weeks ago I was watching Barefoot Contessa as I am wont to do waiting for PTI to come on and Ina Garten was making what she called Deeply Chocolate Gelato. It looked amazing. Even though I like hazelnut chocolates I thought that I would make it without and call it Double Chocolate Gelato.

I can see the difference between gelato and ice cream. Ice cream typically does not have the custard base made with egg yolks. But I'm not sure of the difference between gelato and frozen custard. We Cheeseheads LOVE our frozen custard (I miss Milwaukee).

Besides leaving out the hazelnut chocolates at the end I also opted to use up the ordinary Hershey's cocoa powder I had on hand rather than using a fancy expensive one as Ina calls out in her recipe. I also used a 3oz bar of dark chocolate rather than buying any bittersweet chocolate. It was just easier. I finely chopped and used the whole bar. The bar I bought was from Green & Black's and was 70% cocoa. Easily found at Ingles in the candy aisle. Whatever you do, do not use chips. Chips are coated with a release agent to keep them from sticking together. You don't want that in your gelato.

I found that I needed to strain the gelato twice. Once after I combined the cocoa and chocolate and again after I made the custard. I found that not all of the cocoa powder dissolved and some lumps were left behind. Maybe I only needed to strain the second time but I don't think it hurt to do it the first time. Besides I had some chocolate bar wrapper pieces I needed to strain out.

I was amazed that I didn't have any Kahlua in the house. I did have an OLD bottle of Starbucks coffee liqueur. I don't even know if they still make the stuff. I used what little I needed and threw the rest out. It wasn't Kahlua but the gelato came out great with the Starbucks.

The chilled gelato base is pretty thick. I put it in my Krups Automatic Ice-Cream Maker. This is one of those counter top units where you freeze the bowl a day in advance. Lickity split it was done, maybe 15 minutes.

The gelato was divine. It was so rich that after just six bites you have to consider that you've had enough. I think this gelato is as close to eating frozen fudge as you can get.