In the Kitchen

What’s New at Paulding & Company

January 2010

This month marks the beginning of our sixth exciting year in the Paulding & Company kitchen. We look forward to having a great year, with many events, classes and parties, and are already working on some exciting improvements. We are inching slowly closer to putting a newly redesigned website online—with updated format, more opportunities to be interactive, and better ways of showcasing all the things we do in the kitchen. We will also have a neat little video to show you even sooner—next month it should be linked to the newsletter and website, a collaboration with some students at Berkeley School of Digital Arts, shot during one of our team building events. We are also bringing in some new and interesting teachers who will be offering classes in a variety of cuisines, so check the calendar between newsletters. Some will start in February, including some Ethiopian cooking classes we’re very excited about, but dates and information didn’t quite make the deadline for this newsletter. Our summer program for teens and pre-teens will be back, with the first year’s experience serving as a basis for an even better summer this year. We’re already getting inquiries, as the kids who came to camp raved about the experience, and many came back to Tracy’s holiday workshop, making delicious presents for family and friends.

We hope to see more of you return to the kitchen this year—we have lots of ideas for events that will capture your imagination, and make your next party, team building day, or rehearsal dinner a spectacular success. We’re still offering our special “mini” events, only $64 per person (12 person or $768 minimum) for a fun and delicious two-hour experience, complete with a delicious meal. Contact Terry for the details, or jump back to last month’s newsletter for a list of the various offerings.

Summer Program for Pre-teens and Teens-Registration Starts Soon!

We will be publishing our 2010 COOK! Culinary Programs schedule and registration later this month. To be the first to hear about it, sign up on our mailing list. We are looking forward to an extraordinary summer!

Classes

Knife Sharpening. Our first class of the year is our quarterly knife sharpening session with Eric E. Weiss, There’s room still—it’s Monday night the 11th, and it’s a class that will set you on your way to fulfilling that resolution to cook at home more this year, by making the prep work much easier with nice, sharp tools. Hone your knives and then come to our next class and learn knife skills!

Knife Skills and Pressure Cooker Soups and Stews (taught by Terry Paulding, 1:30-5 Sunday, February 7th). Yes, I know it’s Superbowl Sunday, but if you’re looking for an alternative activity that includes great food, here it is! Find a warm group of friendly people, learn some skills, and eat well in this wonderful class, a special request made by some of our great students. Knife skills AND learning how to use my new favorite tool, the pressure cooker, rolled into one fun afternoon! We’ll focus on the cutting up, and then make some speedy but delicious food with the product we create. I’ve been playing with my electric pressure cooker several times a week, this wintery weather makes a hot soup or stew or braise more than welcome, and making it quickly is of course a bonus. Making long-cooked minestrone in 20 minutes may seem like a typo, since it usually takes about 3 hours—but it works, and it’s delicious and nutritious, as good or better than the original on both counts. As an added bonus, several of our attendees are bringing their teens along—you’re welcome to do so to!

Italian Cooking Classes with Rosetta Costantino! Check the calendar for a roster of great classes in Southern Italian cooking, the classes are listied all the way through May—and since most are not yet sold out, it’s a great time to sign up for one or two. If you haven’t checked out Rosetta’s wonderful blog yet, you can see it at calabriafromscratch.com and sign up for a feed to your email inbox when she posts new things. It’s a truly inspirational combination of gardening and cooking lore, recipes, and gorgeous photos. Her cookbook will be published in the fall, a major offering for the next holiday season. There’s a good reason all of Rosetta’s classes sell out—so if you’ve never been to one, come on into the kitchen!

In the Market

The farmers are making it to market when the weather and their crops permit (lots of freezes this year), bringing the sturdy greens and squashes and citrus fruits of winter. There are still some grapes and persimmons in the market, but the pomelos and grapefruit, Satsuma and clementine mandarins, navel, kara-kara and blood oranges are most delicious right now. Apples and pears are still around, including the Japanese pear varieties, with great crunch and delicate sweetness. Lots of radiccio type greens—sturdy, a little bit (some a lot) bitter, and great paired with citrus. Not much lettuce, but a few farmers are bringing butter lettuce and oak leaf that are surprisingly nice. Mostly, though, baby greens mixes. New in the market this week, are gorgeous pea sprouts. Onions, including leeks, spring onions and thinnings from the shallot fields are abundant. The Grand Lake market features a great variety of potatoes and squashes; the red kuri being my hands-down favorite this year. Just cut into wedges, and bake with a little butter or olive oil, salt and pepper. The skin is edible, so scrub it well first. All the dark leafy greens are healthy now, and sweet with the cold. Italian heirloom broccoli di cicco has made it’s first appearance of the year. This is tender, sweet ‘sprouting broccoli,’ with little heads and edible leaves, almost a cross between a kale and broccoli in character. Best with garlic, chili flakes and extra-virgin olive oil (you can add an anchovy filet if you like), this lovely vegetable takes only minutes to cook. Just stew the garlic and chili in the oil for a few minutes, add the broccoli and some salt, plus a few tablespoons water, toss together and cover. Put over high heat until the water evaporates, and stir again. Whatever your pleasure, it’s a great time to support the farmers and vendors in the market, and say “thanks” for braving the cold and rain to pick and pack and travel to see us all!

Recipe of the Month

Tracy and Joe, her boyfriend, made panna cotta with pomelo sauce and candied pomelo rind and brought it to my birthday dinner—and wowed us all. The dessert was the perfect end to my favorite birthday meal of Maine lobster, much better than cake! The panna cotta is pretty much a standard recipe, although they took their version from one of James McNair’s cookbooks. You can flavor the panna cotta itself and make many variations (just steep the flavoring, for instance a vanilla bean, in the cream) if you want, and serve it with other fruit accompaniments. This one was plain, and perfect with such an assertive sauce. I’m going to try a variation as an experiment, making the pomelo sauce by caramelizing the syrup left from candying the rind, but haven’t tried this yet so am printing the recipe as they made it. The brown sugar adds a caramel flavor layer to the fruit, and the beads of pomelo flesh maintain some pop even after cooking, which adds a great textural element. The panna cotta by itself is good, but pairing it with the pomelo is magical.