The Good Rabbi's Blog

I've gone through both the European Cuisine and the Foods of the Americas courses, and now I'm in th middle of Asian Cuisine. These courses have been an incredible amount of work, and it's been difficult to keep up with all my responsibilities. On top of all this, after European Cuisine, I switched to the morning session, so I now have class from 7:00 AM to Noon instead of 12:30 PM to 5:30 PM. This has been an adjustment, but overall, I'm glad I made the switch. Now if only I could keep myself from getting really drowsy in the mid-afternoon, it would all be good!

For both European Cuisine and Foods of the Americas, I've had native people teaching me appropriate cuisines. My Euro class actually had me studying under a French Master chef, that used to have (until he sold it) a very good restaurant here in San Francisco (in a very posh neighbourhood to boot). For my Foods of the Americas class, I studied under a native Chilean, who has literally worked everywhere. Both classes were extremely intense, and an incredible amount of work, but I've learned an enormous amount about the history and conditions that spawned the foods I love and hate.

The Asian cuisine class, even though it's ongoing, has been particularly challenging for two reasons. First, it's the cuisine that I know the least about, so everything is new, and second, all the western techniques and knife skills that I've acquired up to this point, do not apply. I've had to relearn just about everything. My instructor for this class is like an Asian version of Yoda. She's been around for at least 723 years, and has been cooking with everyone. She's pretty good friends with Martin Yan, and he comes out to my school fairly frequently.

The whole Asian technique is quite different than what I'm used to, but I'm not complaining. We've spent one week on China alone, since it is the predominant culinary influence in the region. In the coming weeks we'll be studying Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, the Phillippines (sp?), Indonesia, Malaysia, and India. Then we start both team and individual Iron Chef competitions, and an individual project where we have to come up with an "Asian inspired" dessert.

While I've gotten pretty proficient this week in the use of a cleaver (which is used for pretty much everything in Asian cooking), I am a bit nervous for the Iron Chef competitions. I'm not sure how that will turn out. Maybe the chef will let me be either the ditzy commentator or the chairman (I'd bring my own pepper too). I'll keep you posted. :-)