foodie 101

my brother aaron & his girlfriend sarah came over this weekend for their very first class in our exclusive cooking school. (it is so exclusive that so far, they are the sole participants.) we are so official: we made up special folders for them with all of the evening's recipes, and well as brief yet enlightening biographies on their two awesome instructors (matt and myself.) {in case you are wondering, our tuition is very steep: it involves babysitting (which we immediately cashed in last night to go see julie & julia) and running to the store on the way over to bring whatever last minute food items we realize we don't have on hand.}

once the syllabus and menu was out of the way, we got cooking! 

(note: these photos do no justice to the fact that sous chef sarah worked very hard and tackled lots of food making. for some reason i only captured aaron in the act of actually preparing food. i also neglected to get pictures of half the food we made and the finished product.)

our menu, (which we pillaged from various alice waters cookbooks and mark bittman's how to cook everything):

• baked figs stuffed with goat cheese
• homegrown garden lettuces with basic vinaigrette
• meatballs with a simple tomato sauce
• homegrown green beans
• homemade herbed ricotta ravioli with butter and parmesan
• raspberry sorbet with shortbread

we began with dessert so it would have time to freeze (raspberry sorbet) and chill before baking (shortbread cookies). here sarah helps aaron strain the berry puree so it is seedless once we put it in our ice cream maker.

an important thing to remember when cooking is that you need a snack so you don't get too hungry, or nibble so much along the way that there is no food left when it is time to eat! (or maybe i am just justifying our appetizer) with this in mind we started with the figs stuffed with goat cheese & baked. yum. even aaron, goat cheese hater, was down for the goodness.
with so many items on the docket, we had quite a full kitchen. food preparation was happening on every single surface; add in 4 adult bodies and a toddler, and it was definitely a party.
little m attempted to "help". or something along those lines...
aaron gets to work making the pasta dough, under matt's tutelage, while sarah and i make the tomato sauce and prep the green beans.

aaron grates onion into the meatball mixture...
and attempts to squelch his tears with matt's sunglasses. not so effective.
lots of backyard herbs to add to our various recipes.
meatballs ready to go into the oven. (they are my favorite!!!!! well, they are my super favorite when he throws in pinenuts, but we forgot to add them this time, so i demoted them to just my favorite.)
pasta rolled out and dotted with ricotta filling. look at that focus!
pressing the pasta into individual ravioli.
ravioli ready to go!

and then, somehow, i stopped documenting the evening. maybe it was that we slipped into a food coma...instead of one big meal we just ate as things came out and took little breaks over edibles. 

despite matt and my bickering over the tomato sauce, i don't think we scared our students off! next class? improvise and make a full meal using only the ingredients in the pantry, fridge and freezer. unfortunately sarah's pantry consists of...literally nothing, and aaron's stove is a hot plate, so looks like we'll be back in our own kitchen for round two!