anyway... so after this so-called meditation, the morning session started with a discussion on menu planning, taste, etc... i've discovered that i get bored when its not a proactive session with the lecturer doing all the talking. some of the stuff mentioned sounded like common sense to me, even though i am not a chef.
we had a brief on making dressings, very enlightening and we had to decide as a group what we want to make. so everyone was supposed to write on a piece of paper their choice and martine (the instructor) would come around and pick one. i didnt know any better so i didnt bother to write any. my closest idea of a salad dressing is my favourite japanese dressing from meidiya which had sesame and roasted nuts so obviously that's not going to work in the raw vegan menu
(roasted doesnt work!) and i have no clue what the recipe is anyway. it really is quite easy to pick it off the shelf at meidiya at $7+ a bottle rather than buying the ingredients and figuring it out in the kitchen! anyway was an interesting experience making the dressing (which took an hour!) and the more hardworking serious students in our group made the effort to come up with the perfect citrus miso dressing. my favourite in the end was a mexican dressing, really nice. i did learn something interesting from a classmate though! did you know that to make salad dressing with olive oil, its always 3-1 part for the oil, so for every 3 parts of oil, you have 1 part of the other portions. (i think that's what she said anyway! i'm not very good at picking such things up yet!)so fast forward, after making the salad dressing, i think i can do it! haha... its really not rocket science. i will definitely try when i go home.
today was a mexican theme. we had a demo with martine and matt on making mexican salsa and the "rice" that you put into the shells. as per routine, we had to replicate the same within our group.
lunch was mexican, surprised? ... YES! the girls made the tortilla shells yesterday afternoon when i was in dreamland so i missed out on that one but it doesn't look impossibly difficult. i think i am starting to figure out how the stuff are made. the question now is, will i do it? hehe..
after lunch, we had a debriefing session on the salad dressings. i must say its quite interesting to look around the group and each group come up with very different colours and tastes, really very interesting. cherie and martine gave what i am sure are very constructive feedback to the themes, but for some reason, i find it so easy to switch off during such sessions, haha....
then came soups! again we are supposed to put in our recipes for soups for martine to pick. ours turned out to be apple almond cream curry soup (i think that was the name!)
this was the bucket of shredded apple that went onto the garnishing. i shredded it with the cusinart.it's quite nice learning and applying the different methods of doing preparing stuff, like making the almond milk by blending it and using the bag to squeeze the milk out. (almost like the way we make soya bean milk but much easier!) and it taste so delicious! I think I'm going to start doing it as a replacement for the cow's milk which is so bad for health...
so our soup turned out very nicely. apples have never been my favourite fruit so obviously i was not too excited by the prospect of an apple based soup, and of course interestingly, the last thing i would even consider is apple mixed with curry powder & almond milk! how exotic is that? but it worked. someone mentioned its a nice summertime soup. i guess hard for me to relate since we have summertime all year round plus i still like my soup hot!
our testers for everyone...
concoctions from other teams....
there were more... dunno what happened to my pics! anyway got to run. will talk abt my menu next.....
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