Behind the Scenes in our Cooking School - designing our classes

It is a warm, drizzly spring day. The cold weather greens in my garden are finally mature enough to harvest: arugula, spinach and mesclun. Pea tendrils curl up from the darkened earth, reaching up to grab their wire trellis and I’ve finally taken the cold frame off the tomatoes, exposing them to the warmer nights and sunshine-filled days. Birds sing hopefully, looking for mates while my family plans the chicken coop for the new spring flock. And what am I thinking of? Snow.

Or at least, barren trees accompanied by a late Fall harvest: acorn squash, cranberries, apples, turkey…It’s true – while the rest of the northern hemisphere is having thoughts of warm weeks to come, I’m planning for Autumn and the holiday season. It is menu-writing time for Third Quarter at Stonewall Kitchen Cooking School.

The Cooking School was started by Jim and Jonathan because they wanted to create a place where people could come, enjoy a meal and want to come back again. So far, their idea is working. Since the school was started four years ago, we have had thousands of classes and taught tens of thousands of people. I am lucky to have been involved in the school for the past year. Cooking for and feeding people comes from deep inside me and sometimes I cannot believe that I actually get paid to do it!

Course catalogs are published on a quarterly basis. Started months in advance, in-house instructors and visiting chefs alike prepare their menus and turn them in for scheduling and several rounds of review within the company. Keeping this information in mind, this means that I am currently teaching classes with menus I dreamt up in February. While snow was flying, I was thinking of coleslaw,tomatoes and grilled everything.

So now the converse is happening. I am tasked with creating 2 menus per week for 4 months. Even my faulty math knows this means a daunting 32 complete menus. First step is to remember what Fall and Winter feel like. I go through my iPhoto library and look at pictures I’ve taken over the years of wintery New England landscapes, holidays spent with my family, images of food that I’ve cooked. I then go to my cookbook shelves and start to pull some down, stacking them next to my computer. I pore over them, dog-earing

pages that give me ideas, making notes in my notebook, revising recipes in my head. What would people like to eat? What types of classes have we had requests for? What can I prepare that would make a good class: something delicious and soul satisfying, a menu that inspires people to cook at home, perfect for entertaining.

All of these thoughts are in my head as I write down possibilities, scratch them out, start all over. I know my deadline is Friday - and so far I’ve only created 12.

And I realize I’ve got a class coming up that I need to prepare for - but that is another blog entry all together.

Stonewall Kitchen Mustard Recipe Contest - We Have a Winner!

The votes are in and after much deliberation we have found the winner!  It was no easy task.
First we solicited recipes from bloggers all across the country. Then we sorted through a whole pile of fabulous recipes and blog postings on the recipe creations. Next, we came up with eleven finalists and then passed it off to the Stonewall Kitchen and blogger fans for voting.  Votes were tallied from Facebook, Pinterest and the Stonewall Kitchen Blog to determine the final top three which were:

goosefat1.blogspot.com   
Fiddleheads, Shrimp & Flageolet Beans with Champagne Shallot Vinaigrette using Stonewall Kitchen Champagne Shallot Mustard.

framedcooks.com
Ham and Pineapple Biscuit Sliders with Stonewall Kitchen Spicy Honey Mustard.

 

cookingwithbooks.blogspot.com
Mustard Hoagie Rolls using Stonewall Kitchen Maine Maple Champagne Mustard.

 

Each of these three recipes tasted delicious and were beautiful culinary presentations which made the final decision so tough.  

The Fiddlehead and Shrimp recipe was not only a beautiful presentation, but the light flavors of fiddleheads, with shrimp, beans, and the asparagus we added, really made for a great dish we would be happy to serve at our next dinner party. The mustard sauce was complex and full of flavor and we really enjoyed dipping our mustard hoagie rolls right in for a lasting morsel of flavor.

The Ham and Pineapple Biscuits were simply delicious. The grilled pineapple was refreshing against the robust mustard sauce and the biscuits rounded out the sandwich in a good-southern-manners sort of way! And we really enjoyed the presentation from the Framed Cooks blog. The pictures were bright and fun. We can envision preparing a plate of these for our next picnic.

The Hoagie Rolls were unique and oh, so tasty!  The texture offered a dense outer layer which protected the soft doughy inside. The tasting panel really enjoyed eating these just as is - without being made into a sandwich. We made a request to our recipe developer to make pretzels out of the dough. She said they came out great as a pretzel too (they must have because we never got to see or taste them - somehow they disappeared in the photo studio!).

And this is what our Judging and Tasting panel consisted of:

And the winner is....drum roll, please! .....Framed Cook's Ham and Pineapple Biscuit!  Congratulations!  

Thanks to each and every blogger and voter who participated in our first recipe contest.  We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.  Be sure to try the recipes from each of our contestants, they really are all so wonderful. Keep an eye out for our next recipe contest. Dessert maybe?