Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Thursday, March 16, 2006

I had something of a pleasant surprise this week from an unlikely source. I received an email from the campus food service vendor telling me that I had been overwhelmingly nominated by the students as the one person on the College's faculty and staff they'd most like to have cook for them.

I'm really humbled to have been nominated/elected because I guess the votes came from students who have eaten at our Bible study on Thursday night and they wanted more of my cooking. I guess that means I must not be poisoning them or some such.

I guess I'll be working on the cafeteria line's "Innovations" station where I'll get to do some sort of fast pan frying such as the meat/peppers for fajitas or some kind of pasta and sauce combination. Hopefully I'll be allowed to do a little of my own inventing but even if I don't, it'll be nice to be able to interact with my students in a pretty non-traditional way.

Sometimes I really wish I had a lot more time to cook. I've been trying to do a bit more lately but with my schedule as busy as it has been, there hasn't been as much time as I'd like. Fortunately things look like they'll be easing off here soon. I've been trying to get myself to slow down when I cook so that I don't feel like I'm rushing to get a meal done so I can get on with other things. To that end I've been pouring myself a glass of wine at the beginning of the meal as well as lighting candles in the space and putting on some acoustic guitar music. My favorite wine of choice is Gewurztraminer though a Reisling will do in a pinch. I'll sometimes have a beer but I find them to be just a little heavy when I want to be moving around...they're better when putting the feet up and relaxing.

So I've done my Waldorf Chicken recipe a couple of times and I feel like I'm getting that down pretty well with a couple of tweaks this time around thatr I think just about set the recipe. I've also been working on a Chicken Carbonara recipe that has been tricky. The first time I made it, it was awesome. The last two times have been so so. The first time I added the Gewurztraminer I was drinking so that might be the key. What I'd like to do next week is identify five recipes I haven't made in a while or at all and try them. I've been enjoying my time in the kitchen and I think I'm going to really push to get back in more often. I always cook on Thurdays but the food is often a large batch type of cooking. Cooking for a lot of people is fun but you don't have as much time to work on presentation and the batch sizes are too big to be all that subtle with your spicing.

In a way I really envy our friend Shaun who has gone to cooking school. I'd love to have that opportunity to create and experiement in a way that's really out there. My wife isn't a big "outside the box" food person so any really wild experimentation stuff I want to do haas to be for me only and that's just not as much fun.

Anyways, I doubt you'll be seeing me on Iron Chef anytime soon but maybe they'll have some sort of live at the improv cooking thing for regular folks and I can do that sometime.

Thanks for Reading.

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