Williams Sonoma Technique Class - Vegetables

Williams Sonoma is a specialty cookery store here in the US. They sell everything from kitchen gadgets and cookbooks to sauces and spice mixtures. It's like the The Apple Store (high end) for kitchen things. ;-) It's seriously hard not to drool over their stuff. Anyhow, a running friend of mine notified me that they have free cooking demonstrations every week. Wait a minute, did you say FREE? Hello! I'm in!!!!

During the month of April, the theme of the W-S classes was Healthy Cooking which got me all the more interested. And the class on April 18th was on Vegetables (other topics were Seafood, Baking and Chicken). So I thought it was right up my alley. I could learn more about various cooking techniques and possibly get some new ideas.

Verdict- The "class" was a huge disappointment. The demonstrator, who was very nice lady BTW, basically showed us how to use a fancy food processor and a not-so-fancy food processor also called the multi-chopper. She also showed us how to use their salad dressing emulsifier by throwing in all the ingredients.  The recipes demonstrated were

1)  Hummus - throw a few ingredients in  a food processor, pulse and ta-daaaaaa- HUMMUS!

2)  Vegetable Tian - this was kind  of interesting because I didn't know what a Tian was but it's just a caserolle dish where you pile in a bunch of veggies, top with cheese and breadcrumbs and bake. No real technique was shown except the sauteeting of onions and peppers (which I do pretty much everyday).

3)  10-Layered Salad - Again we were shown the usage of the various blades in the food processor and how eeeeeasy it was to put together. Oh well. I'm sure there were some who got a great deal of knowledge form that class but it was not for me.

However a few random things I did find interesting I took note of-

• Rosemary stalks are tough enough that they can be used as skewers to grill. 
• Veggies cut the same size ensure even cooking- I am not good about this usually....
• Cook stuff (pasta, veggies..) in boiling water rather than cold. 
• A healthy way to enhance the flavour of any dish is by using fresh herbs
• Ratio of oil:vinger in a salad dressing is 3:1 

The handout given was pretty interesting.. There are tips on choosing and storing vegetables for maximum shelf life, a guide to produce by colour and a list of veggies by season.

I'm yet to find out what the schedule for May is..Chances are I will still attend because the handouts seem very informative and hey, you can't beat FREE.