Last Saturday, I went to the cooking workshop to learn some useful cooking skills for the future. I sort of wished we could have worked on more dishes, but I know there were some that were very involved. The first thing I found really useful was learning how to chop an onion. Whenever I cook for myself, I don’t particularly care what it looks like, so I just use a knife to get the food into edible pieces. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the best way to prepare food. You want to cook food that’s about the same size, because then you’re able to get a more even cook. So Professor Gier demonstrated how she chops onions, by cutting a sort of blooming onion like lattice before chopping it into individual pieces. I actually got to try this with the dish that I made, but with a small onion, it didn’t turn out as nicely as the demonstrated onion.

When we split up into the different stations, I was immediately attracted to the chicken, broccoli and brown rice casserole, because I knew I liked all of the ingredients, and they are pretty common and inexpensive items. Looking back, I might have chosen something else just to try working with different foods I wouldn’t normally buy for myself. The recipe called for boiling brown rice in a bag and microwaving broccoli, which I had never had experience with.

Some of my starting ingredients

My Final Product

After the food was cooked, the food was placed out for everyone and we all tasted the different dishes. The biggest surprise for me was the avocado omelet. I had never really liked the taste of avocado, but its fattiness worked really well with the egg. Another dish I really enjoyed was the salmon (which I guess others liked a lot as well, because it was the one dish that was completely eaten when we reconvened at the end.

Once we had a chance to taste the food, there was a brief discussion about all of the foods and some questions people had about nutrition in general. I learned that those eggs in cartons are actually real eggs, and perfectly healthy. One thing I thought about afterwards that I didn’t get to ask, was whether there was an easy dairy-free substitute for the white sauce. Overall, I had a great time cooking and enjoyed a nice meal with the other Rose Scholars. I will definitely check out some more recipes from Cooking Light magazine in the future, because they were simple and came with lots of pictures to help.

Remnants of our cooking