Learning to Cook

Last week we went to a cooking class at the local kitchen shop. It was a special class by one of my favourite local chefs, Ric Orlando. He is the owner of New World Bistro in Albany (amazing food) and two time champion of Chopped on the Food Network. Can't wait to try his other restaurant near Woodstock.

The class itself was a lot of fun (although I wish we had known about the bring your own wine rule), with the chef demonstrating how to cook all the food while we all watched. He was very entertaining with lots of stories and cooking tips. I would highly recommend anyone doing a class like this.

The menu consisted of pear mustard and homemade ricotta on toast, gluten free gnocchi with a tomato sauce, pork loin with pickled cherry peppers and cannoli cones. We got a copy of all the recipes too if anyone wants to see how to make this stuff! The photos are from Matt's phone but they came out pretty well I think. We got samples of all the food he made and here is what we got!...

After our cheese making experiment earlier this year (here) it was nice to see how to do it successfully, even with a few things that went wrong! The pear mostarda is kind of like a condiment that you could eat with bread and cheese with pear, dried figs, mustard, mustard oil and mustard seeds among other things, cooked in a sugary syrup. It may sound weird but it was really good. We already got mustard oil and black mustard seeds from the Asian market so will be making it soon!

This was the most amazing gnocchi. Light, fluffy and delicious. I am so excited to have such a good gnocchi recipe. We've made it a couple of times before but it was nowhere near as good as this! The sauce was good too. There were big chunks of bacon in it but I wanted to try the gnocchi so much I picked out the bacon and ate the rest of the sauce. I would never usually do this but I'm glad I did! (We actually got more food than in the picture but it looked so good I tucked in before getting a pic).

I didn't try the pork of course, but Matt said it was the best he had ever had. He's even made it since then as Price Chopper had buy one get two free on pork tenderloin last week. His attempt wasn't quite as good as Chef cooked, but according to Matt, still the best pork he had ever made by a long way! Everyone at the class was raving about how tasty and moist the pork was so I'm pretty sure it was a big hit!

Cannoli cream served in an ice cream cone with pistachios and shaved chocolate. Do  I need to say more apart from more please!!