Cooking Lesson

Several years ago my  lady friend Gigi, who is French, and I took a trip to Sydney Australia.  We decided while vacationing it might be fun to take a cooking class.  The 1st hour was a demonstration on how to prepare 4 items.  After the demonstration we broke into groups, exited to a work kitchen, and each group was assigned one of the dishes to duplicate.  

Gigi and I were assigned the seafood pasta dish.  We were allowed 45  minutes.

I don’t remember all the seafood ingredients other than shrimp, scallops and some other native fish.  The very key to making this dish perfect had to do with the consistency of the sauce and pasta.  The two of us worked together to cook and sauté all the ingredients and then came the very special sauce.  

Gigi is an excellent cook and she played with the sauce for quite some time to get the consistency just perfect.  After all the participants were finished with their cooking, the chef instructor came over to view and taste everyone’s presentation.  What I remember most about this experience are the comments from the chef instructor.  After tasting our dish, he commented that in all his 30 years of teaching, our dish was the only one that was absolutely perfect in consistency, and flavor.  Most folks do not get it perfect and he never in the past tasted and witnessed a perfect dish in all his years of teaching.  We were so elated and excited and he in voted us to his restaurant. We decided the next day to go to his restaurant.  We did not have a reservation and it was packed, but we told the hostess who we were and the the fact we were invited for dinner as a result of the class we had just taken the day before.  The chef came out, greeted us and welcomed us to a table.

The cooking class, being recognized for our cuisine, and getting into the chef’s restaurant all made this experience one I will never forget.  Bon Appetite!

shel