BOK, BOK. — PREP CREATIVE

Hope everyone had a lovely and delicious Thanksgiving! Surprisingly enough, I didn’t cook a thing this year. Not one thing. I know, who am I? I woke up Thursday morning itching to get in the kitchen and make something ( I have a problem), but we had reservations at Rosemary’s in West Village. It was fabulous. It has been a nice break from the craziness of this past week and a half at school. There has been so much going on that I decided to break it into two posts, otherwise it would easily turn into a novel.

The week started off with a trip to the Hydroponic Garden:

ICE’s hydroponic garden and farm is at the forefront of urban agriculture. Utilizing LED technology and a hydroponic irrigation system, the farm classroom is a unique, custom-designed, climate-controlled indoor learning space with eight kinds of hydroponic and lighting systems. More than 50 crop varieties are grown at any one time, including rare and unusual herbs and greens, tomatoes, eggplants and strawberries.

Oftentimes, we use herbs, flowers and microgreens from the garden for the recipes we make in class, and we are allowed to take home any herbs that have been harvested. During the first week, we all planted seeds that would eventually cycle into the garden once they sprouted. Given my inability to grow things, I was slightly concerned. It didn’t help my confidence when we showed up and my sprouts looked like this (see bottom right corner):

My poor little Mexican Mint Marigold (which also happens to be known as “Texas Tarragon” ) looks so sad and pathetic compared to the others. But, I was assured that it was just the herb that struggles to sprout, not my gardening skills. Not sure I believe that…

The hydroponic garden grows more than 50 varieties of rare herbs, edible flowers and microgreens at a time. LED lighting and hydroponics have been used to cultivate over 250 varieties of culinary plants to date. This indoor grow room uses no pesticides or herbicides and around 95% less water than a traditional farm.

The rest of the week was packed, and I mean packed, with protein. Quick heads up, if you don’t like looking at raw chicken, the following image is NSFW.

Under the guidance of Chef Olivia, we learned how to properly fabricate (cut up) a chicken. We are not allowed to say “butcher” the chicken, because we didn’t actually kill it. When I admitted to my classmate that I found it oddly fun to fabricate, he said, “I’d love to be a fly on the wall in your therapy sessions.” Ha.

I’ll spare you the rest of the raw poultry images, but post-fabrication, we attempted to master every type of chicken cooking techniques as possible. By the end of the class, we sautéed, pan seared, grilled, braised, fried, roasted, broiled, stewed and baked that bird. Needless to say, I met my protein requirements that day.

Next, we got soy into protein week…

We covered everything from soy milk, to tofu, to miso and tempeh. I was a happy girl when they gave me the Miso Ginger Salmon recipe to lead. My excitement over the salmon may have topped my enthusiasm for eggs from last week if you can believe it.

Chef Olivia showed me how to descale the fish, which I can honestly say I’ve never done before. Not quite as fun as fabricating, but definitely interesting.

This is one of those recipes that’s going into rotation for easy meals. I would venture to say that it gave my go-to pesto salmon a run for it’s money. The trick is to bake it only for 8-10 minutes in the oven, then broil it for a few minutes until it gets crispy on top. Don’t worry, I put the recipe below.

Another “whoa I’ve never done this” moment this week was watching tofu get made from scratch. Is it worth it?? Ummm, I would say no, but I’ll let you decide. You start by making about 14 cups of homemade soy milk, which eventually transforms into one little ol’ block of tofu. It’s very time consuming and labor intensive. One block of tofu at the grocery store is less than $2. Imma stick to buying it.

But it was still so fascinating to see the process.

Our team was put in charge of a tempeh “sausage” recipe that was divine. This one, I would make again. Jess steamed and grated the tempeh and combined it with a bit of oil and spices before dredging in cornmeal and pan frying.

We whipped up a little batch of maple-dijon sauce for painting the plate, I mean, dipping, and I think we all agreed it was the best thing we ate that day.

Although this caesar salad with a spicy horseradish dressing made from tofu was up there on my favorites list. I truly think the dressing could’ve fooled any caesar connoisseur. It was topped with crispy pan-fried tempeh as “croutons.”

Other recipes from soy day included: Tofu Scaloppini and Tofu Terriyaki

Now, we couldn’t forget the final “fake meat” substance, seitan, also lovingly called “wheat meat.” Mouthwatering, right? I’ll try not to hate on seitan too much, and I will attest to its versatility and ability to disguise itself as meat.

To make it from scratch, you make a dough from 10 cups of whole wheat bread flour, 10 cups of white bread flour and 10 cups of water. After kneading the dough and submerging it in water, you rinse it under running water for about 10 minutes to wash away all the starch. What’s left is the wheat gluten, or the protein part of the grain. Hence the name “wheat meat.”

With the seitan, we made: