A Salad Buffet

My class's salad spread on Day 2, including garden pasta salad, Ceasar, Cobb, and shrimp-artichoke-orzo salad

So far, I'm a huge fan of Garde Manger. I'm only two days in, but it's really kind of nice to--literally--get away from the heat for three weeks. However, it would be misleading to say that we don't use ovens and burners at all in this class. We have used them for components of cold dishes--like bacon for the Cobb salad that we made today--but we're no longer hovering over them for four hours each day.

I have two chefs in this class, and my referring to them by initials in this blog now poses a problem: they're both Chef B.'s. There's the American Chef B. and the French Chef B.--the first real French chef I've had so far at Le Cordon Bleu. I love his accent and he's absolutely hilarious, always commenting about the eating habits of Americans, but never in a snooty way. "Don't go home and eat some Hot Pocket," he said as we left on the first day. "Go home and buy a whole chicken! Practice! Practice!"

On Day 1, we started out with vinaigrettes. I made a really yummy basil vinaigrette that I wished I could bottle and take home. Then, we experimented with infused oils. You see them on restaurant menus all the time--chive oil, garlic oil, chili oil--and I never realized how ridiculously easy they are to make. I heated up some oil and added basil and lemon zest, then pureed and strained it. The result was a vivid green lemon-basil oil!

My lemon-basil oil infusing

Today, we moved on to salads, using some of our vinaigrettes from yesterday to dress them and also learning some new dressings. We learned how to make a classic Ceasar, the most popular salad in America. I had a huge Ceasar salad phase around sixth grade when it was the only thing I would order in restaurants, but since then I haven't been so into them--quite possibly due to the insane amount of Ceasar salad that I consumed during that period. This from-scratch version gave me a new appreciation for an old friend. Our anchovy-spiked, garlicky dressing had great flavor--just a light coating was perfect on crisp leaves of romaine. We also made our own garlic croutons with leftover bread from the Baking & Pastry class across the hall.

I was responsible for the pasta salad for my group. The "Garden Pasta Salad" recipe we were to follow called for half a dozen different vegetables, giving me a great opportunity to brush up on my knife skills, which I've kind of neglected since Skills 1. The chefs told us that all of the vegetables should be cut to about the same size. I thought small dice would work nicely with the bow-tie pasta. I blanched my haricot vert, carrots, zucchini, tomato, and red pepper, then diced everything up. It looked like colorful confetti. Then I chopped some black olives to roughly the same size and minced a bunch of basil. All of this, plus the pasta of course, was tossed with the basil vinaigrette that I made yesterday. It turned out really tasty and refreshing and colorful--a breath of fresh air from all the butter and sauces and meat from Skills 2.

Pasta salad up close