One of the best parts about being a member of The Chopping Block team is that when you work for a place that is so passionate about education, you end up learning quite a bit along the way! So when I had the idea for a menu highlighting the end of summer and the start of fall, I had the help of our curriculum master Chef Sara Salzinski to help bring my menu to fruition and Chef Lisa Counts to help execute everything.
I wanted the menu to have a few of what some chefs might refer to as a “fluid recipes” or something that allows the home cook creative license to switch out different ingredients based on seasonality and availability. A plum cake is lovely for late summer and early fall, but during the middle of the summer, you can substitute fresh peaches, nectarines or pretty much anything else you can think of!
Making your own salad dressing is a great exercise in seasoning and tasting as you go. For Late Summer Harvest, I wanted students to see how your typical vinaigrette can change by adding a few techniques. By charring our oranges and scallions for the vinaigrette, it added a layer of savory and complex char flavor that would balance the sweetness of the beets in the salad, as well as the creaminess of the goat cheese.
Perhaps one of the coolest parts of the class was my entire family surprising me to come and be a part of the class!
Our running family joke is how much my older sister Stacy doesn’t really like cooking, and how she’s pretty lucky that her husband Brett likes to cook or she’d be on a strict popcorn and Grub Hub diet. Maybe you can relate to her? It’s easy to make cooking a meal at the end of the day seem like more trouble than it’s worth. But when my sister cooked the most beautiful crispy-skinned sea bass, it filled her with not just confidence but excitement to recreate the dish at home for her family!
The old adage of giving someone a fish versus teaching them how to fish may be something that we’ve heard a million times, but it still rings true. If you do something once, it breaks that seal and shows you just how fun, rewarding and delicious trying something new might be!
If you want to be more confident in the kitchen, get yourself into The Chopping Block’s Knife Skills class. If you want to learn how to make a quick and delicious dinner, try our new demonstration series called Supper in a Snap. If you want to try out my Late Summer Harvest menu yourself, you have just one chance left!
Join us this Tuesday, September 13 at 7pm at our Lincoln Square location as you learn the techniques behind these dishes:
- Butter Lettuce, Roasted Beet and Goat Cheese Salad with Charred Orange and Scallion Vinaigrette
- Pan Seared Bass with Red Goddess Dressing
- Warm Farro with Oven-Roasted Tomatoes, Sweet Corn and Bacon
- Plum Cake with Vanilla Whipped Cream
