"You Will Walk Away, Satisfied"

Chef Vinita concluded her first morning's lecture by saying, "If you cannot taste the earth, stars, sun, and moon in your food, you are missing the point."

It's Day One of Contemporary Cuisine. Although she has seventeen students on her roster, we numbered ten today. We'll be digging in deeper to the Nutrition book (good thing, too: it's an $80 text and we barely cracked the spine during our crash course during Basic Skills.) We'll be learning about various alternative and restrictive diets, and our focus will be on adaptation: using cooking techniques, substitutions, modifications and changes in serving size to accommodate the potential needs or requirements of our customers.

Chef Vinita Jacinto was born in India and studied hotel management and cooking there. She talked a bit about the challenges she's had as a woman in an Asian professional kitchen, where the attitude has been "Go home and raise your children, and do your cooking there." She's been a professional chef for 26 years, and she is enthusiastic and warm as she introduces herself and outlines the plan fo the next three weeks.

"There's no room for softness," she said, though she appears soft, at least outwardly, but I have no doubt that her inner core is steel. She's a vegetarian and a yoga practitioner, and we've asked her to lead us in some basic stretching exercises before class begins. We've been broken into five teams of three or four (I'm working with Jim and Dava — strict alphabetical order), and each day we'll be given several recipes in one of five categories: Soup & Salad, Sides, International, Protein, Beverage & Finale. We'll have an hour or so of lecture, a "fresh air break," then cooking. We'll set up a buffet at 10:30, eat, then finish the clean-up.

Today, Dava made potato leek soup with sorrel, and Jim made three gallons of vegetable stock. I made a quick cucumber/dill salad (with yogurt), then helped to organize our class refrigerator, sorting the supplies we received today. Compared to our last kitchen, we have tons of carrots, celery, herbs, and low fat and soy milk, and a large variety of grains and flours. We do not have cases of eggs, or of butter.

Chef told us that this part of the curriculum is the "most fluid, the most cutting edge," and that it's important for us to understand such concepts as raw food and sous vide in order to have a complete education. She told us that "more than in any other class," we'll be using both our right and left brains, in order to creatively develop delicious dishes while working within strict guidelines.

Today's buffet also included zucchini provencal, risotto alla parmagiano, pan-fried eggplant, crab cakes with bell pepper coulis, and raisin spice bars, with mint green tea. Chef urged us to try "everything that you see," and expand our palates. I've joked that tofu caused my divorce. That's overly simplistic, but I've resisted tofu for twenty years, mostly on principle, and I've never cooked with it. I have the feeling that that's about to change.

We have a final group project, due in two weeks, which will require that our team "lead" the class in cooking a particular style. I'm in the Vegan group. Other groups are ova-vegetarian, macrobiotic, DASH ("Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertention,") and diabetic. Individually, we have to develop a three-course menu in our style, based on an assigned cuisine. Mine is North African. Dava's is Spanish. Jim's is Japanese. (Other students will be cooking Korean, Moroccan, Sicilian, and so on.) We have to find and analyze recipes to fit our cuisine, and modify them to meet a set of restrictions that we will receive later this week. I haven't done any research yet, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that even vegan North Africans don't eat tofu.