Cheese Tasting Party

Today we got all fancy and had a cheese tasting party, focusing our taste buds on French cheeses.

First the students looked at our cheese selection.  The cheese monger at Harmon's helped us select an assortment and some bread, honey, nut, and fruit pairings to go with.  Here the students are strategizing how to group the foods and lay them out attractively.

Brie Fromage was controversial!  Very complex, surprising, intense and strong, with a mushroom finish.  Here are the words to accompany it: 

Fetid

Musty

Musky

Dirty

Calm with a gush of bitterness

Recalcitrant

Abrasive

Earthy

Sage making the honey look pretty.

Port Salut:  the cheese monger suggested we pair it with sour dough to bring out it's citrusy notes.  This was the most unsurprising, some said "dull" cheese.  Here are the list of descriptions the students came up with for Port Salut:FamiliarMildSmoothNon-descriptCitrusyCasualRelatable

This Domaine de Vallage triple cream brie had a sweet finish.  This was  a popular cheese that was interesting, had some complexity to it, but not too crazy.  Here are our words for this cheese:

Calm with a little zing

Hundreds of baby bunnies

Silk lingerie

Creamy

Cashmere

Salty

Soft

Silky

Subtle

Melty

Gentle

Diaphanous

daphinois

Bleu D'auvergne:  

Vibrant

Bold

Bullet

Hay

Cheesy

Strong

Sharp

Nautical

Sweet aftertaste

Teacher Josh doing his cheese board thing.

Teacher Eric's favorite.  The Goat Buche had a soft, runny rind and a dry, crumbly center.  Here's how we described it: 

Subtle

Crumbly

Dry

Timid

Gentle

Strong but soft

Foggy

Cloudy

I loved how the decimated cheese board looked, and all the descriptive words scribbled around each cheese.  So beautiful!

Good times.

Gjetost:  the kids' fav, the teachers' least fave.  Unsurprising, as it tastes like caramel cheese.  Here's what everyone said:

Pleasant

Unexpected

Peanut butter

Candy

Carameled

Dairy

Caramel apple

Cloudy

Cloying

Vivacious

Changing

Jejeune

Milky

Refreshing

Savory

Overwhelming

The feasting.

The spread.

Cheese Awards

People's Choice:
Gold Medal--Gjetost
Silver Medal--Domaine de Vallage

Judges Awards:
Gold Medal--Brie Fromage
Silver Medal--Bleu d'Auvergne

word cloud

Lula adds to the word bank.

It's always a challenge to describe food with fresh and unexpected vocabulary.  Today we created a word bank on the board, and the students came up with some of the best words of any food writing class yet.

Enjoy the list, and look for these words in upcoming posts!

Word Bank:

Nutty

Hard

Semi-hard

Musty

Sharp

Mild

Shredded

Grated

Dry

Crumbly

Creamy

Ribbons

Meticulous

Impeccable

Appease

Ineffable

Incisive

Earthy

Pungent

Variegated

Cloying

Placid

Insipid

Servile

Vivacious

Exorbitant

Jejeune

Fetid

Viscous

Rapport

Saccharine

Revle

Repulse

Replete

Relish

Extreme

Raucous

Perusal

Plethora

Poignant

Acute

Astringent

Mineral

The Slade Family Vineyard

I didn't know until my student Tiana wrote this blog post that bottling grape juice is a Utah tradition. I had my first experience harvesting and bottling grape juice from my garden this fall, and it was luscious. The beautiful and talented Slade sisters each wrote a post about their long-standing family tradition of making grape juice--these are some of my favorite student writings about family food traditions.

Here's Tiana's:

One of my family’s biggest traditions is making grape juice every fall. We enjoy growing, tending and juicing the grapes together, and the outcome is delicious.

The grape vines are almost magical: the way they look so dead during the winter, then in the spring, the way the small pink buds emerge and shoot out furry red leaves, that over the following days turn green and fan out. And watching the grapes start out as little green specks, and turning into juicy purple Concord grapes is really is fun.

Our vineyard was planted when my mother was about 12 years old. She was born and raised in the same house that I live in now, and you can tell that she loves keeping the family tradition that she spent a lot of her time growing up with. We even have bottles of grape juice from when my mother's family first started bottling it, but it's all pink now, and nobody dares to drink it.

This tradition brings our family closer together. Picking grapes in the cold nips at any bare skin. Helping each other and keeping each other company and taking everything you got that day into the warm house where the stove is turned on. De-stemming the grapes while sipping the fresh hot grape juice just out of the steamer. It is a great thing to look forward to in the fall, and I love being able to enjoy our hard work all year round when we open up a bottle months later.

Anyway, I think that traditions are an important part of growing up and bonding with your family. It is never too late to start traditions.
Have fun!

Here's Ella's:

Wool gloves, stained from last year's session, in an effort to keep your hands warm in the frost.
Boots muddy from the soft ground
covered with light ice crystal sprinkled over the brown.
Dry leaves and luscious, plump, drooping grapes, ready for what they were planted for.
Cold bitter wind biting at your ears and nose, quickly snapping vines, work steadily.
The smell of Kool-aid fills the room, steam mingling with overflow from the crack of the lid. Moist and sweaty.
Plucking the delicate fruit from their stem, rinsing in the sink, the dust and spider webs come clean from their skin, ready to be loved by a new sort.
Sweating contently, liquefaction.
Time and effort, love and passion.
Dreaded and impatient, awed and amazed.
Mixed feelings tingle through our blood, unsure of how the experience will turn out with the season.
Mason jars, patterned perfectly,
translucent circles cover the floor, being filled with the joys of the year,
overlapping attention,
opaque with thick royal purple,
dense with pure lovin’.

Puerto Rican Day

Today Jasmine's grandma, Madeline Ramos, came to demonstrate Arroz con Habichuelas to the students. She also made some pollo (on the side to accomodate vegetarians). We learned about sofrito, and that, surprise!, there's a Puerto Rican restaurant in Sandy, Utah.

The rice was steamy and savory with little green piquant olive gems studded throughout. Puerto Rican food is not spicy, but has a lot of layered flavors with onion, garlic, peppers, cilantro, pimiento, olive oil and tomatoes. Madeline Ramos' arroz was made with red beans, green olives, and corn. She shredded a whole roasted chicken and sauteed the chicken with sofrito, olives, and carrots.

The food was quite a hit with the students and teachers. Ramos talked about mofongo, arroz con pollo, and pernil. It made me homesick for my days in New York, with its Puerto Rican Independence Day Parade, and its fantastic Puerto Rican restaurants on every corner of the upper west side, where I lived during most of my tenure in the city.



Madeline talked about how she doesn't use measuring cups or spoons, just her eyeballs. This is something I hear a lot from cooks who grew up outside of the U.S. It seems like when we learn cooking in the kitchen with our parents, we grow up doing it by smell, look, and feel. It makes me sad when people can't cook without a recipe. It seems like an indication of a diminishing food culture. So, students, get your grandmas and grandpas, moms and dads, brothers and sisters, cousins and friends into the kitchen. I promise you'll have a fantastic time.

Thank you for coming, Ms. Ramos!

Mastering the Omlette

Today we watched the master himself, Jacques Pepin, make a classic French omlette on You Tube. At first we thought it would be simple, and his technique was breathtakingly elegant, but once we got in front of the stove, we began to sweat.

We each took a turn, and went through a couple dozen eggs. Our omlettes weren't as beautiful as Jacques', but they weren't super far away either. We've all vowed to practice more at home.

A couple of the students remarked that they had never really liked omlettes before, and I think the taste of an egg that is perfectly cooked is radically different from an overcooked egg (personally, I despise browned eggs, but maybe it's just me.) Sage and Casey noted that the chives, with their baby onion subtlety, gave the mellow flavor of the egg just enough kick to make the simple omlette surprisingly flavorful. Shelbi, who runs our lunch program, donated a beautiful avacado to the dish, and Sage really liked how its perfect silky ripeness complemented the omlette. Lula loved the eggs' tenderness and suppleness, and found the dish comforting and soothing. Jasmine thought it would make the perfect midnight snack.

Here's a photo of Lula's country omlette:




Timing the omlette was a little stressful. I started sweating the minute I poured the eggs into the pan, but it was really satisfying, and a little magical, to see the eggs actually hold together in their beautiful pale yellowness, the color of the winter sun, flecked with little bits of bright green chive, reminiscent of the pine needles on my Christmas tree, which is now languishing in the gutter of Locust Circle, waiting for the composter to pick it up.

Watch this video of Jacques, and tell me how much you love him:



I'm so happy to be back in my apron, teaching my favorite class again!

Locavore 2012

Welcome to Locavore Cooking and Writing 2012!

We will focus our writing, research, cooking, and field trips on the local food scene in central Utah, and spend about half our time cooking, tasting and field tripping and half our time working on food poems, restaurant reviews, food memoirs, recipe writing, and blog posts.

Here's our wish list of activities for the term:


COOKING

Pastries

Ratatouille

Meringues

Mastering the egg

Mexican Food

Indian Food

French Food

Chinese Food


WRITING

Restaurant Review

Poems

Blog Post

Working on Description

Word Bank

Food Memoir

FIELD TRIPS

Les Madeleines
(the photo at the top of this post features "green button" cookies from this fantastic Salt Lake bakery.)

Compare/Contrast Fast and Slow Food

Cheese Tasting

Beehive Tea Room

Multi-course French Dinner

French Breakfast

French Lunch

French Dinner


It seems a French theme has emerged here--so perhaps we'll be doing Francophile Locavore? Is that a thing? We'll try to invent it and let you know!

Writing For Publication: Foods Edition

It's Winter! (But we call it Spring Term anyway. . . .) Here at Writing for Publication: Foods Edition, we will use food as our subject (here's a link to an article I wrote about food as a subject in the writing classroom), and we'll be writing some delicious food memoirs, poems, reviews and recipes for your pleasure. We might even cook, eat, and visit a few illustrious local restaurants and chefs.

(Also, that beautiful picture of ricotta cheese on the left is from our heroes at Edible Wasatch. . . .)

Here at Walden we have some pro writers for students. Many of them have had work appear in professional publications, and last spring we had a couple of beautiful poems by Jasmine Rudolph and Levi Calveri appear in the Provo Orem Word. In Spring of 2010, student Sofia Adams and Walden alum Eva Asplund had food poems and a food memoir in the POW. We're gaining quite a track record.

Here are a few things we hope to do this term (keep in mind that this is a wish list):

Writing:
Food Poetry
Restaurant Reviews
Recipe Writing


Cooking:
Panini's
Rattlesnake
Crepes
Pizza
House Smoked Bacon
Hand-made Pasta

Field Trips:
Marley's
Beans n' Brews
The Pie
Clifford Family Farms
Sammy's
Artisan Cheese Making
MATC Kitchen
Butcher Shop
Communal
Mushroom Foraging