This week in Lecture, we finished talking about poultry and started learning about seafood, freshwater fish, and shellfish. I have the most experience cooking and working with chicken. I make a lot of chicken in a wide variety of preparations. Contrarily, I don't have any experience with any fish or shellfish. I have only cooked fish a few times. I don't particularly like it and Maggie, my wife, doesn't like it at all. So, I feel like a fish out of water (sorry 🙄 ). The text from our book regarding fish and shellfish is a lot of information about the different types, lean, fatty, or shellfish. Fish is not inspected regularly by the US government like poultry, beef, or pork.
Lab was my favorite this so far this week. On Monday, we roasted cornish game hens, which are a breed of chicken from the county of Cornwall in England. They are heavy, muscular birds that lay brown eggs. Thanks, Wikipedia! They are much smaller than US Chickens. They usually weigh around 2 pounds. We removed the backbone and cooked them spatchcocked. We served them with rice. They taste a lot like chicken but are a little sweeter and more tender.
On Wednesday, we learned how to break down a whole chicken, raw. I have done this before, but not well. I'm pleased to have learned how to do it properly. We only got to break down one chicken. I wish we were able to do more than one. I purchased one at the store, and I'm going to make chicken and rice. I usually cook the chicken whole for the recipe, but I think I will break it down, for practice, and cook it in pieces.
For Hospitality this week, we visited Midwest Foods. They purchased Gino's recipes when the restaurant closed. They now produce all of Gino's salad dressings, sauces, and cheese blends. I enjoyed seeing a product I love being manufactured on such a large scale.
The gourmet dinner was neat this week. The cuisine was from Tibet/Nepal, so a lot of warm Indian spices, and of course no beef or small creatures. I love Indian food, but I am very intimidated to cook it. To blend so many types of spices successfully is art. I tend to keep things very clean and straightforward in my cooking, but I could not enjoy eating Indian food more. It was a great experience to see the meal. It all looked and smelled amazing! My personal favorite was the dessert, which was a whipped yogurt with cardamom and was topped with blackberries, pomegranate seeds, pistachios, candied lemon zest, and edible flowers — the most beautiful dessert.
Next week is our last week of labs! I can't believe how fast the semester has gone. We are making chicken cacciatore on Monday with the chickens we broke down this week. On Wednesday, we are making Shrimp Creole, so that should be interesting. We are cleaning and deveining the shrimp, which I have never done before.