"I'm Not Nervous. I'm Just Silly."

Derrick dropped all his recipes on the floor as he was talking about his menu, "Sicilian food the DASH way". "There's no need to be nervous, Derrick," Chef Vinita said encouragingly. "I'm not nervous," he said. "I'm just silly."

He has good musical taste, though. He brought his iPod speakers to class today, since he was one of the three facilitating chefs, and so we got to chop and stir to Stevie Wonder, Jason Mraz ("I hope no one thinks I'm wimpy,") Death Cab For Cutie and Dave Brubeck, plus a bunch of hip hop stuff that I didn't recognize.

I was part of Andrea's team, and her task was to cook low-salt Vietnamese food. This presents a bit of a problem as the cuisine often contains contains fish sauce ("nuoc mam": 1 tablespoon contains 690 mg sodium) and soy sauce (tamari: 1 tablespoon contains 1002 mg sodium; low sodium shoyu: 1 tablespoon contains 600 mg sodium). The goal with the DASH diet is to keep sodium below 1500 mg per day, 500 mg per meal. Her menu included hot and sour shrimp and shiitake soup, lettuce wraps with spicy chicken, glass noodles and lightly pickled carrots and daikon, and sticky rice with mangoes. Dava, Aaron and Silvia also worked for Andrea today.

Per normal, Andrea was well organized, and she brought in a written plan of action. I had several tasks throughout the morning. I cleaned and deveined shrimp (saving the shells to use in the stock). I started the sticky rice, using sushi rice and a couple of tablespoons of coconut milk in the cooking water. I sautéed the chicken breasts after they'd been marinating for a while, then put them into the oven to finish cooking. And Aaron and I cooked the little rice cakes for the dessert. Here's what it looked like:




In order to keep within the required guidelines, Andrea removed all the offending ingredients from the recipes. Maybe it's because we're not regular consumers of Viet food, but we didn't notice a big flavor hole where the fish sauce and soy should be. There was lots of flavor: fresh, spicy, sweet.

For his Sicilian menu, Derrick started with minestrone, followed by mussels in marsala sauce over fettuccini, and finished up with strawberry granita. The mussels were especially good, though their appearance caused some adolescent snickering, reminding me yet again how young and immature some of my classmates actually are. Jordan was the other facilitator today. He was tasked with making Japanese food, and prepared spinach and strawberry salad, sesame honey chicken, and broiled fruit kebabs. Unless something was lost in the translation, I didn't get the Japanese influence in his menu.

Sarah asked me if I'd cook her chicken on Friday. She's planning ahead. "You know how to cook chicken good," she said. Like me, she has to cook African-style, but her restrictions are diabetic, so chicken is allowed. I wasn't sure if she really liked me, but cooking the chicken's a pretty big responsibility.

Jim showed up today. "How did it go yesterday?" he asked. He said Chef will let him turn in his report, though he won't be able to make up the in-class presentation. Twenty points out of a hundred, right there, and that's not even taking into account his 50% absentee rate. How long will they let him flounder?