Wow, What a blast. I had the last class at Maggie's last night, and it was so much fun.
Thank you wholeheartedly to all of you who attended. I hope you all had as much fun and learned as much as I did.
To the rest of you poor souls whom regrettably were unable to attend..... bummer.
Seriously, we had fun. The basic premise was the fact that varying techniques change flavors. I prepared 2 salsas, a basic salsa fresca, with the addition of diced nectarine and replacing the cilantro with some lovely fresh and varied mints brought by my friend and colleague. (Pineapple, apple, mountain, pepper, and chocolate varieties were in attendance, though not all used) and half I served raw, the other I blasted in a 475 degree oven for a few minutes. The change was obvious and very telling of how in that instance heat changed the flavors and textures. I also made a lime, mint cream cheese to accompany the salsa, we had wholegrain corn chips and slices of fresh cucumber, and showed that with few parts, you can offer quit a diverse array of snackages, canapes, and credit without a lot of work.
I believe thew most impressive/self empowering/inspiring (pick one) idea i managed to convey was that the standard rule of thumb that we live and die by the recipe, is a load of... stuff. You only need a basic understanding of the basics and the freedom to experiment to open a whole new world of cooking. You don't cook to impress the person that wrote the recipe. as soon as your check clears, they don't care.
You cook to please your friends, family, guests, and yourself. You like what you like for your own reasons, and if you are taught to cook for your own tastes, you wont be disappointed, and as you learn to cook for your tastes, you will begin to cook to please those around you. That is why cooking is best done as a community event. More impute, and ideas will only help you grow in your experience and e\overall enjoyment in the kitchen.
Thanks again to all those who attended last night. It was quite an insightful and enjoyable evening. To the rest, well.... sucks to be you. Maybe I will see you at the next one.
Be around or be a square.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
FREE STUFF!!!, aka "The Big Day!"
The "FREE STUFF" thing totally worked! You're reading, now just keep going.
Tuesday July 26th will be a rather big day.
Technically this will be the second monthly class I have taught at Maggie's Cafe Express 116 Madison St. on Sturgeon Bays West Side.
I will be hosting another installment of my fundamental principles of home cooking, class. I will be doing a demonstration of how a simple change of technique can, even with the same ingredients, change the flavor of the dish. As to what we will be sharing, I am keeping it simple, and fun. A nice, lite snack and I will hopefully give you a taste (total pun intended) of what Home Cooked is all about. It promises to be a good time, so please tell your friends, and stop by for this the last open class.
I have just learned that my venue will, with much regret be closing its doors at the end of this month, so after this class I will be forced to change my rotating classroom locale, thus making it necessary for me to make it a first come first served type, sign up to attend affair.
Because of the limited class size needed, I might be inclined to add a second class each month to accommodate the eager and teaming masses. Both of you! lol
So, please, if you are in the area, please stop by. It will be a blast, and since this is the last Maggie's Class, I will be doing it FREE, or is it "Pro Bono"? I will have a "tip" jar, used to accept both comments/criticisms, as well as a mere financial trifle that best represents the amount you think the class was worth. No cash, no biggie. I still want you here. Standing room only could be fun...
Anyway, 7:00 PM sharp, let the fun food fest fly (see, "f" words without the evil eyebrow")
Come in and grab a brochure.
Keep checking my blog, Follow it, and get updates./ Tell your friends, share it, whatever people do, who don't spend there whole life in a kitchen. Help me get the word out if you like what I'm all about, or tell me what I'm doing wrong, if you don't, and I might change, (if you know me, you will take note of the strategic use of the word "might" there) See you tomorrow night @ Maggie's, 7 o'clock.
Be around or be a square!
Tuesday July 26th will be a rather big day.
Technically this will be the second monthly class I have taught at Maggie's Cafe Express 116 Madison St. on Sturgeon Bays West Side.
I will be hosting another installment of my fundamental principles of home cooking, class. I will be doing a demonstration of how a simple change of technique can, even with the same ingredients, change the flavor of the dish. As to what we will be sharing, I am keeping it simple, and fun. A nice, lite snack and I will hopefully give you a taste (total pun intended) of what Home Cooked is all about. It promises to be a good time, so please tell your friends, and stop by for this the last open class.
I have just learned that my venue will, with much regret be closing its doors at the end of this month, so after this class I will be forced to change my rotating classroom locale, thus making it necessary for me to make it a first come first served type, sign up to attend affair.
Because of the limited class size needed, I might be inclined to add a second class each month to accommodate the eager and teaming masses. Both of you! lol
So, please, if you are in the area, please stop by. It will be a blast, and since this is the last Maggie's Class, I will be doing it FREE, or is it "Pro Bono"? I will have a "tip" jar, used to accept both comments/criticisms, as well as a mere financial trifle that best represents the amount you think the class was worth. No cash, no biggie. I still want you here. Standing room only could be fun...
Anyway, 7:00 PM sharp, let the fun food fest fly (see, "f" words without the evil eyebrow")
Come in and grab a brochure.
Keep checking my blog, Follow it, and get updates./ Tell your friends, share it, whatever people do, who don't spend there whole life in a kitchen. Help me get the word out if you like what I'm all about, or tell me what I'm doing wrong, if you don't, and I might change, (if you know me, you will take note of the strategic use of the word "might" there) See you tomorrow night @ Maggie's, 7 o'clock.
Be around or be a square!
Saturday, July 23, 2011
"The Good Old Day"
I remember when I was a kid we, as a family would go out to eat as a special treat on the day my parents got paid. And it was great. What a blast, going in to a restaurant and having someone greet you, take you to a table, and then after asking for whatever you wanted, they would bring it right out to you. And yet another person had to wash your dishes! Bonus! It was like an adventure eating the things my dad couldn't or wouldn't cook.
What happened to that? Something has changed. We as a culture have re-prioritized. Dining out was a treat, but now not eating at out is like a punishment. The last ditch, cant afford to eat out, now we have to eat at home, like you did something wrong. If you spent wiser, you should have been able to eat out today too.
And my folks would have people over at least once a week for a meal. they would get there an hour before dinner and everyone would mill around the kitchen, helping, laughing, talking smack, and laughing some more. It was genuine fun. I as the child, was right in the thick of it. I was laughing and learning in a wonderful environment.
Eating in the home has become the necessary evil.
To much work
To much time
To much money
Wrong wrong and wrong.
Cooking with and for your friends and family is quality time well spent. The television, is not a social opportunity. You interact better and grow closer to those you actually are performing a task with.
You get to control what is going into yours, and your friends bodies. How it is prepared, how it looks, smells, and tastes, is in your hands. But as you cook with those you cook for, you can ask questions, make suggestions and cook it just right, to please everyone there (beware there is always that one guy who will never like it, tell that guy he gets to wash dishes or cook next time.)
The act of cooking together and sharing a meal is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to spend actual quality time with your friends and loved ones. Think of how much a night out costs. Dinner out for 4+movie=$$$$$$. Think of cooking with your friends as the ultimate interactive dinner theater. If cooking with your friends is not a blast, get some new friends, cause something is broken.
Have fun
What happened to that? Something has changed. We as a culture have re-prioritized. Dining out was a treat, but now not eating at out is like a punishment. The last ditch, cant afford to eat out, now we have to eat at home, like you did something wrong. If you spent wiser, you should have been able to eat out today too.
And my folks would have people over at least once a week for a meal. they would get there an hour before dinner and everyone would mill around the kitchen, helping, laughing, talking smack, and laughing some more. It was genuine fun. I as the child, was right in the thick of it. I was laughing and learning in a wonderful environment.
Eating in the home has become the necessary evil.
To much work
To much time
To much money
Wrong wrong and wrong.
Cooking with and for your friends and family is quality time well spent. The television, is not a social opportunity. You interact better and grow closer to those you actually are performing a task with.
You get to control what is going into yours, and your friends bodies. How it is prepared, how it looks, smells, and tastes, is in your hands. But as you cook with those you cook for, you can ask questions, make suggestions and cook it just right, to please everyone there (beware there is always that one guy who will never like it, tell that guy he gets to wash dishes or cook next time.)
The act of cooking together and sharing a meal is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to spend actual quality time with your friends and loved ones. Think of how much a night out costs. Dinner out for 4+movie=$$$$$$. Think of cooking with your friends as the ultimate interactive dinner theater. If cooking with your friends is not a blast, get some new friends, cause something is broken.
Have fun
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Fun+Mental=Fundamental
The secret that restaurant chefs don't want you to know, is there is no secret. All of cooking boils down to a surprisingly limited amount of fundamental knowledge.
You can learn about a vast array of techniques, ingredients and vocabulary, and you will never learn it all, because even as we speak, there is more invention and innovation going on, all over the world.
The truth is that all cooking, or food preparation boil down (pun) to 4 or 5 techniques;
1) Dry Heat: Cooking in an arid moisture free, or at least limited environment. Bake, Roast, Saute, Grill, Broil, Hot Smoking, Bar-B-Queing etc.
2) Moist Heat: Not dry (kinda duh huh?) Boil, Steam, Poach, Blanch.
3) Combination Heat: Start with dry, end with moist, Braise, Stew, etc
4) Denaturing: changing the raw to the ready to eat with a chemical or physical change. cured, pickled, cold smoking, etc.
5) Raw: just that, raw, just prepped, plated and presented, as is. ie veggies, sashimi, fruit etc.
So all these techniques can effect very different flavors in the same ingredient. Onions are the perfect example
Raw onion: crisp, stringent, very flavorful, great for that date you never want to see again... that was a joke, sorry honey.
Sweated onion: low to med heat, little oil, some salt, just cooked long enough to start breaking down and giving up its juices, making it softer so it and its flavors melt into the final dish better (great way to hide onions from your kids too. Cut em small and sweat em. They will virtually disappear when they are added to almost anything.)
Fried onion: lil fat, lil salt, high heat. They retain some of their crunch (think al dente onion) and the liquid released evaporated leaving the sugar on the edges of the cut onions to brown slightly to add another level of richness to the final dish.
Caramelized onion: low and slow again, very low and slow. still lil salt, lil fat, cook long enough to obliterate the cellular structure and slow enough to reduce the liquid (IE water) leaving the sugars in the pan to... ding, ding, ding! Caramelize! Very rich, very sweet, and a great way to add sweetness without adding any refined sugar. Awesome on grilled meat too. Can make a burger so good you cant decide to eat it, or spoon with it.
So you see there is not much you have to learn to get more out of your own kitchen. Go in there and get your "recess" on. Have some fun with it. Play around. Next time you are cooking, try changing some of your techniques around, and taste, taste, taste. Taste and smell are both closely related to memory, so try everything, all the time, as you cook taste often so you can correlate different levels of flavor directly to different stages in the cooking process. It will make the whole experience that much more enjoyable.
Though a word of caution, please try everything at all stages of cooking, fridge or cupboard to the plate, but use some common sense. raw meat, poultry, fish etc. please make sure you are getting some advice or professional help (lay on the couch and tell me about your mother kinda help, maybe) But it can be done, in the i=right way, with the proper guidance and advice.
Thats why Im here. Ask questions if you are not sure about something. Ask me, or ask that cook friend of yours. I know you have one, we al do, so ask. Ask and taste, taste and ask. You will find that there is a lot of fun in the kitchen, with a light sprinkle of the mental to keep you coming back.
You can learn about a vast array of techniques, ingredients and vocabulary, and you will never learn it all, because even as we speak, there is more invention and innovation going on, all over the world.
The truth is that all cooking, or food preparation boil down (pun) to 4 or 5 techniques;
1) Dry Heat: Cooking in an arid moisture free, or at least limited environment. Bake, Roast, Saute, Grill, Broil, Hot Smoking, Bar-B-Queing etc.
2) Moist Heat: Not dry (kinda duh huh?) Boil, Steam, Poach, Blanch.
3) Combination Heat: Start with dry, end with moist, Braise, Stew, etc
4) Denaturing: changing the raw to the ready to eat with a chemical or physical change. cured, pickled, cold smoking, etc.
5) Raw: just that, raw, just prepped, plated and presented, as is. ie veggies, sashimi, fruit etc.
So all these techniques can effect very different flavors in the same ingredient. Onions are the perfect example
Raw onion: crisp, stringent, very flavorful, great for that date you never want to see again... that was a joke, sorry honey.
Sweated onion: low to med heat, little oil, some salt, just cooked long enough to start breaking down and giving up its juices, making it softer so it and its flavors melt into the final dish better (great way to hide onions from your kids too. Cut em small and sweat em. They will virtually disappear when they are added to almost anything.)
Fried onion: lil fat, lil salt, high heat. They retain some of their crunch (think al dente onion) and the liquid released evaporated leaving the sugar on the edges of the cut onions to brown slightly to add another level of richness to the final dish.
Caramelized onion: low and slow again, very low and slow. still lil salt, lil fat, cook long enough to obliterate the cellular structure and slow enough to reduce the liquid (IE water) leaving the sugars in the pan to... ding, ding, ding! Caramelize! Very rich, very sweet, and a great way to add sweetness without adding any refined sugar. Awesome on grilled meat too. Can make a burger so good you cant decide to eat it, or spoon with it.
So you see there is not much you have to learn to get more out of your own kitchen. Go in there and get your "recess" on. Have some fun with it. Play around. Next time you are cooking, try changing some of your techniques around, and taste, taste, taste. Taste and smell are both closely related to memory, so try everything, all the time, as you cook taste often so you can correlate different levels of flavor directly to different stages in the cooking process. It will make the whole experience that much more enjoyable.
Though a word of caution, please try everything at all stages of cooking, fridge or cupboard to the plate, but use some common sense. raw meat, poultry, fish etc. please make sure you are getting some advice or professional help (lay on the couch and tell me about your mother kinda help, maybe) But it can be done, in the i=right way, with the proper guidance and advice.
Thats why Im here. Ask questions if you are not sure about something. Ask me, or ask that cook friend of yours. I know you have one, we al do, so ask. Ask and taste, taste and ask. You will find that there is a lot of fun in the kitchen, with a light sprinkle of the mental to keep you coming back.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
The power of knowledge
Man I love food. I love to cook it, share it, learn about it, just plain play with it.
It is, I have heard, a more important, stronger urge than others that shall remain nameless to keep this a family blog, but you get what im saying. I guess I need food more, but I feel thats just a theory.
Here are the facts, as far as my opinion sees it.
Cooking is fundamental to who we are as people, distinguishes us as individual cultures and can unify us as a global society in the simple fact that it is the lone facet of life we all have in common. As the wise man once said, "Hey, ya gotta eat!"
Eat indeed.
We love food, and food is so much more than the mere mechanical techniques involved (place in microwave and nuke to a soft glowing green). It can be that simple, but in my opinion, to truly grasp the social, biological, and even, dare I say, emotional conditions we enjoy about food, we should realize that food can be translated into terms explained, expounded and grown by all schools of human thought. Biology, math, chemistry, art, physics, agriculture, sociology, the list is endless, can all in some way be tied to food. That knowledge or search for it, takes the basics and grows them into the how, the when, the why and the wow of food.
Curiosity, and questions, are the fuel that takes the ember of a passing fancy and creates from it, a burning passion, (not to be confused with a "burnin yearnin," for which I have no explanation) And passion is all you need to achieve exactly what you desire in the kitchen.
It is the thirst that I have for that knowledge that fuels my passion for food. The only thing more dear to me than cooking food, are the family and friends I cook it for.
Thank you for your time.
Patrick Floyd
Next tuesday night; At Maggie's Cafe Express, 7:00, class is in session.
Tell your friends, find me on Facebook, follow me here, please help me to spread the word.
Thank you for your time.
It is, I have heard, a more important, stronger urge than others that shall remain nameless to keep this a family blog, but you get what im saying. I guess I need food more, but I feel thats just a theory.
Here are the facts, as far as my opinion sees it.
Cooking is fundamental to who we are as people, distinguishes us as individual cultures and can unify us as a global society in the simple fact that it is the lone facet of life we all have in common. As the wise man once said, "Hey, ya gotta eat!"
Eat indeed.
We love food, and food is so much more than the mere mechanical techniques involved (place in microwave and nuke to a soft glowing green). It can be that simple, but in my opinion, to truly grasp the social, biological, and even, dare I say, emotional conditions we enjoy about food, we should realize that food can be translated into terms explained, expounded and grown by all schools of human thought. Biology, math, chemistry, art, physics, agriculture, sociology, the list is endless, can all in some way be tied to food. That knowledge or search for it, takes the basics and grows them into the how, the when, the why and the wow of food.
Curiosity, and questions, are the fuel that takes the ember of a passing fancy and creates from it, a burning passion, (not to be confused with a "burnin yearnin," for which I have no explanation) And passion is all you need to achieve exactly what you desire in the kitchen.
It is the thirst that I have for that knowledge that fuels my passion for food. The only thing more dear to me than cooking food, are the family and friends I cook it for.
Thank you for your time.
Patrick Floyd
Next tuesday night; At Maggie's Cafe Express, 7:00, class is in session.
Tell your friends, find me on Facebook, follow me here, please help me to spread the word.
Thank you for your time.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Monthly classes
As I said in my last posting, I have changed jobs, this time for one with “steady” hours, I only work on days that start with a consonant, and end in a “Y”. Kidding, sort of. I do in fact have one day off a week, and my boss tells me that it can, and should (got to love that word, right?) have the same day off every week. That day is Tuesday, so TGIM is my whole new thing.
Here is where you come in. I am planning, in collusion with my good friend Jamie Stahl and owner of Maggie’s Café Express (the old DC Brew on Madison St. in Sturgeon Bay) to begin teaching classes open to the public in said establishment.
The last Tuesday of this month, and the final Tuesday of the foreseeable months, at 7:00pm (central time) I will be teaching a class/lecture series on the fundamentals of cooking, as well as attempting to charm you and all your friends to such a degree that you will not be able to help yourself from booking a Home Cooked class of your very own.
A short meet and greet, followed by a short cooking demo, or lecture, perhaps some tasty fruits of my, or our labor, and a question and answer period to follow.
It will be a simple, tangible and satisfying, or more to the point, fun, way for us to meet face to face, in a relaxed and comfortable environment, and hey, you might just learn something. Pretty sure I will.
I fully intend to use this blog as a message board to share ideas for classes, field questions from past classes, or ideas about future topics. This is going to be great, and I hope you are as excited to meet me as I am, you.
So please continue to read my upcoming blogs and your comments are appreciated, Check out my flyers and brochures around town. Shoot me your Email address and I will do my best to get you a copy of my flyers, cards etcetera. I am also planning on creating a newsletter that will also be available via Email soon.
Lets get the party started!
Im Back
Sorry loyal readers, or reader as the case may be, I have been a little busy with a nice dose of life lately and have allowed my blogging to laps, for an unprecedented amount of time. For that I beg your forgiveness, and eagerly look forward to having some feedback to let me know what I’ve missed (and if anyone is even reading this).
As some of you may know I have changed jobs, this time leaving under rather amiable circumstances as Head Cook at “the Irish pub’ and have moved on to a cooking position at yet another newly opened establishment right here in “River City”. I welcome the change and think it will be for the best, if only for the short run.
I still would thoroughly enjoy finding out how to get Home Cooked up and running, while still earning enough to pay the bills. Kids eat 3 times a day! Who knew? That, and landlords not caring about charisma pretty well necessitates my following of the all mighty dollar.
But I digress, or is that regress? Whatever.
I’m back baby, although the simple fact is that a baby would find this, or probably any blog a total drag, so… I’m back, sir or madam. Whichever the case bay be. I have some exciting news to share, so keep on reading the upcoming (and hopefully more regularly written) blog.
Thanks again, see you soon.
Patrick M. Floyd
Culinary Consultant
Email: homecookeddc@gmail.com
(920) 559-9425
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