Week 26: A gift from Jamie

This week I am going to talk about a cooking class that Jamie gave me for being the best husband and father in the world! Actually since the gift was a cooking class she kind of gave the gift to herself;-) Jamie thought that i could use some inspiration since I am half way through the year and need to refocus my efforts for the next 6 months. She got me a cooking class at The Dirty Apron. There were so many options that i had a hard time choosing but in the end I settled on a seafood class. If you enjoy food and cooking I would highly recommend taking a class at The Dirty Apron. The Chef teaching us was excellent and very helpful and the rest of the staff were also great. The free flowing wine did not hurt either;-)

I am not going to go over the recipes here since I feel like that would be cheating or something like that. I will go over the menu and post the picture. We started the night by making Mussels Congolaise which are from Chambar (one of our fav restaurants in town). This dish has an excellent tomato coconut cream sauce that is perfect for dipping your bread.

For the second course we made maple seared scallops with a warm chorizo and kalamata olive ragout and a pea coulis. This dish surprised me because I do not like olives yet I ate all of the ragout. I am pretty sure it was because the chorizo was so delicious that it covered the yucky olives. I could have done with out the pea coulis it was too sweet and too pea-flavoured to be truly enjoyed. The maple seared scallops were amazing and so simple. Just let the scallops soak in a cm or so of maple syrup for 10 minutes and that is it. 

The final course we prepared was a pan roasted halibut on a bed of sauteed spinach and crushed fingerling potatoes with a charred tomato vinaigrette. There is really nothing more to say about this dish then it was superb!

The dessert course was prepared for us because we did not have the time to do it. It consisted of a cardamom, caramel poached pear with vanilla ice cream and a chocolate sauce. After they poached the pear they took out the core and seeds with a melon baller and piped the ice cream inside. In a word, divine.