#31 - Take a Cooking Class

A few years ago, Denise gave me an IOU for a cooking for my birthday.  Last night I finally collected.

Earlier this week I registered online for a class at the Sur La Table in Carlsbad.  I elected to turn it into a sort of date night and registered Denise as well. 

The topic of last nights course was "Quick Dinners from the Italian Pantry."  The menu called for Quick Parmesan Polenta with Thyme-Scented Mushrooms - Orechiette with Chicken, Roasted Red Peppers, and Pine Nut Pesto - Peach, Prosciutto and Gorgonzola Pizza with Aged Balsamic - Roasted Green Onion and Farro Salad with Fresh Mozzarella. 

I have to say that if I learned nothing else from the class I at least learned that Italian pantries are apparently better stocked than mine.  I don't generally have things like prosciutto, fresh mozzarella and aged balsamic laying around.  I guess I will have to work on that.

The class consisted of about 13 people divided into teams of four or so.  Each team prepared all four dishes, with different team members handling different parts of the prep, chopping, grating, whisking, sauteing, and whatever.  Here we have an action shot of Denise quartering cherry tomatoes for the Farro salad.  Look at those knife skills!  She's not even bleeding.

The instructor/chef and her assistants handled some of the prep to keep things within something like the 2-hour scheduled class time.  For example, the farro was pre-cooked before the class and the pizza dough, obviously, was prepared quite a while ahead so as to have time to rise.

The menu turned out to be very tasty.



Roasted Green Onion and Farro Salad with Fresh Mozzarella



A not at all good photo of the Orechiette with Chicken, Roasted Red Peppers, and Pine Nut Pesto

Another lousy picture of the polenta and mushrooms.

Peach, Prosciutto and Gorgonzola Pizza with Aged Balsamic

Sorry, the pictures were from my phone and the quality kind of sucks...also, in most cases I forgot to take pictures before I started eating.

Although I didn't learn much of anything new in the way of technique, I did come away with some new recipes, some ingredients I haven't played with previously and an opportunity to buy a bunch of kitchen gadgets that I probably don't need.  I especially like my new Pig Molcajete.

You get the class, a four-course meal and a 10% off coupon for all your Sur La Table shopping for the fairly reasonable price of $69/head.  Dinner out would have cost at least that much - but then dinner out would also have included alcohol.  I must sneak some in for my next class - perhaps their Summer Paella Workshop.

#29 - Visit a Civil War Battlefield

I suppose I should have been more specific, as I could have ended up in Libya or Syria or Sudan or God's knows where, but I did in fact mean to visit a United States Civil War battlefield.  And as a result of my most recent vacation I can check this one off.

Attended my nephew's wedding in Pittsburgh, PA, the last weekend in May.  Pittsburgh did not sound the least bit appealing (my only frame of reference being steel mills and Ben Rothlisberger fans) but it turned out to be quite a nice town and well worth a visit even if you're not attending a wedding.  We were lodged in a neighborhood near the University of Pittsburgh (Go Panthers!)  with an abundance of nice little diners and sandwich shops and bars and what not.  Consider (below) the steak sandwich from Primanti Brothers, their #2 best seller.  Foolishly I asked what their #1 best seller was; "Beer."

We even had time for a Reds-Pirates game at PNC Park on Memorial Day.  A violinist played the National Anthem - awesome!  ("Awesome...like a hot dog?"  "Like a hundred billion hot dogs sir!")  Check out the violideo on Facebook.

Leaving Pittsburgh on Tuesday (my 30th wedding anniversary - my wife's too, coincidentally) we headed east toward the quiet southern Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg.  Stopped, inadvertently, along the way at the Flight 93 Memorial site.  Inadvertently because we did not realize we were anywhere near the site.  Just happened to pull off the turnpike for a Denise break and saw a sign directing us to the memorial.  It is quite beautiful and moving.

The remainder of the drive to Gettysburg was uneventful except for the MASSIVE THUNDERSTORM that forced us off the road and into a convenient hilltop bar.  Waited through several Yuenglings for the storm to subside and finally arrived in Gettysburg in the early evening.

Tuesday night we stayed at the Quality Inn at General Lee's Headquarters on Seminary Ridge.  As the name states, Robert E. Lee made his headquarters in a couple of the buildings incorporated into this hotel site.  There's a small museum on site - free to lodgers - and probably more importantly, the Appalachian Brewing Company brew pub is directly next door, serving a perfectly acceptable IPA.

Our balcony on Seminary Ridge

Wednesday after breakfast and a tour of the hotel museum, we spent the entire remainder of the day touring Gettysburg National Military Park.   The visitor's center is beautiful, the museum very nice and the cyclorama, oh, interesting in a Disney-esque sort of way, that is until you realize that it was painted by one guy in less than a year in 1883 - it's 27 feet high by 359 feet around!

At the visitor's center we purchased "The Gettsyburg Story: Battlefield Auto Tour," a 3-CD set guiding you through some 16 different stops around the 10 square mile battlefield.  It is very good and well narrated - parts could bring you to tears, for example "The Wheat Field" (you can listen to the excerpt at the web site.)   Of course, the narration is much more powerful when you are sitting in the actual field.

We spent about 6 hours driving the 3-hour tour - BTW, I can't use the phrase 3-hour tour without hearing the Gilligan's Island theme song rattling around in the open recesses of my cranium - because I felt compelled to get out of the car and run around at every scheduled stop and points in between.

I could easily have spent a week or a month.  It is beautiful and poignant and inspiring.  I won't even try to recount any details of the visit, there are way too many to begin to describe.  The best advice I can give is to visit. 

A small sampling of photos follows...you can view the lot here.

Little Round Top

Confederate Cannon

Near the Confederate "High Water Mark"

A fine long day, eventually we had to move on towards D.C., but not before dinner at the Pub and Restaurant in downtown Gettysburg.

As a postscript to our visit, after arriving in our Arlington, VA, apartment, the boys and I spent the remaining nights of the trip streaming Ken Burn's "The Civil War" through Netflix.  I've always loved that, but the experience of the battlefield visit puts the film in a whole new perspective.

#3 - Visit the Smithsonian

Yes, I have now visited the Smithsonian.  Or a couple Smithsonians actually, there are after all a whole herd of Smithsonian museums in Washington D.C. and its environs.

My first visit was to the National Air and Space Museum, Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport, new home of the Space Shuttle Discovery. 

Also home of the Enola Gay, Gossamer Albatross, Concord, GlobalFlyer, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules and even a couple Goodyear blimp gondolas.  Very cool!  Pictures to be viewed here.

Next day we spent a bit of time at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History on the National Mall.  Too much to see and too many groups of school children, but we managed to see bits of dinosaur fossils, ancient seas, human history, the Hope Diamond, gems and minerals and the Chilean miner escape pod.  We even had a beer in the museum's cafe.