A good thing going for Adolf is he generally teaches a class called CAC. I have no idea what the acronym stands for, but the class covers a lot of history of foods and their migration around the world. He adds a lot of history and factoids from CAC to our lectures. I find a lot of it very interesting. For example, the top four producing grains in the world are rice, wheat, corn, and barley. All of which are part of the grass family. Yup, we eat grass just like a cow. Cool, eh?
Our grain dishes today will be Cous Cous Salad, Tabolilli Salad, Polenta (my personal favorite) and Quinoa with Red Pepper. I have to admit, I had not heard of Quinoa before. Quinoa is a psudo-grain that comes from South America. It contains more protein than soybeans and has the potential to become very popular in our ever growing health conscious society.
For today, our dishes were really quite easy. At the last minute Adlof pulled polenta out of the line up. I hope we get to make it later. Most of the dishes required soaking or boiling the grains and a ton of knife cuts.
Result: Tabolilli Salad- Good. We were requited to put in way more parsley than I like. After a while I stopped tasting it as I added more parsley, salt, pepper, and EVOO. Key, mince the parsley!!!!
Quinoa W/ Red Pepper- Best Vinaigrette of the class. We added lemon and a touch of sugar that was not in the recipe, shhhh. Our quinoa was a bit too wet. We had tried to rectify the issue, but was only able to get out a bit of extra moisture. Key, strain the quinoa before cooling.
Cous Cous Salad- Didn't get to it because issues w/ quinoa. Used Jarrod's for the picture below.
On another note, our instructors are beginning to warm up to us. Just 3 more weeks to go!!!
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| Clockwise: Tabolilli, Cous Cous, & Quinoa |
I love quinoa!
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