French cooking class

We had the opportunity to take a french cooking class recently. There is a gourmet kitchen store here  and they opened a cooking studio where they teach classes. This one was a couples cooking class. I believe there were eight cooking stations so 8 couples in attendance.

The menu was steak with bordelaise sauce, whipped potatoes, salad and chocolate mousse with strawberries marinated in balsamic vinegar and palm sugar.  Due to the time-consuming nature of prepping the potatoes, the salad and the marinated strawberries, all we had to do was the steak and the mousse. 

We first prepared the mousse and while it was chilling we worked on the steaks. It was supposed to be filet mignon but the chef couldn't get them so he substituted ribeye. The sauce was made with shallots, butter, red wine and reduced to a slightly thickened sauce.

It was interesting to learn that several of the people taking the class really couldn't cook at all. They had no experience melting chocolate in a double boiler, beating heavy cream or egg whites or reducing a sauce. Because I grew up cooking these are not foreign concepts to me.

The chef teaching the class recently opened his own Chinese restaurant in town so we will go there at some point. It was his first time teaching a class and he seemed very nervous at first but calmed down a lot by the end. We seemed to progress at a faster pace than many of our classmates. At one point the chef asked if he could borrow my egg whites to show how it should look when they were beaten enough. He turned the bowl over above his head to demonstrate they were stiff enough. Luckily they stayed in the bowl. I later saw a classmate turning the bowl over his wife's head to test his whites. Guess he didn't want to risk the test over his own head.

Our steaks are resting...

  

Our steaks plated up but without the potatoes.

After preparing our meals, we sat down to eat along with our classmates. We did an excellent job! The steak was some of the best we'd had here and the strawberry concoction placed on top of the mousse was scrumptious. We felt the mousse was slightly grainy-- perhaps due to the particular chocolate used??-- but still tasted pretty good. The staff prepared potatoes and salad was also very nice.  It turned out that I knew a couple of the ladies in attendance. I used to play Mahjong with one of the them and another I met at an AWA coffee. It makes sense since the event was AWA sponsored. At our table was a couple who seemed very nice but sadly are packing out in a couple of months. That's the buzz phrase for the final step for folks leaving here so their final phase has begun. We learned they spent part of their lives living near our family in NY. Small world.