Culinary Communion: Class Photos

	Thank you for sharing your kitchen and fantastic recipes with us. Our team has a wonderful time together in general, but our experience at Culinary Communion is certainly a highlight. I hope we can join you for another sunset soon!
—A.B., a student

Series Classes Individual Classes Wine Education Class Photos

Playing with Your Food, January 2003

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Playing with Food is a series of classes near and dear to Chef Gabriel's heart: an opportunity to get together with students who are avid foodies, interested in and inspired by food, and create the dishes of our dreams. While it's not a "series" in that students have to sign up for a specific number of classes at a time, Gabriel does want to build a core group of creative cooks for these classes.

Our first class in the group, Friday, January 17, was an extremely exciting, fun evening. Before class, each student spoke with Chef Gabriel about a specific dish he or she had experienced at a restaurant, seen in a magazine, or just envisioned, which he or she found exciting, creative, and inspirational. Each had a specific course or type of dish to be on the lookout for: appetizer, entree, dessert, etc. At class we mentally deconstructed and then created each dish, playing with combinations, building flavors, and composing a whole menu of exciting food. Our focus was learning how to create dishes from the ground up, using our imaginations, our intuition, senses, tasting, and collaboration. We drew pictures of presentations, tried several variations of each dish, and critiqued our own performances over each course. The food, the learning, and of course the camaraderie were sensational!

Gabriel found fresh, live sea urchins (uni) at Uwajimaya the day of this class and picked up a couple of them partially in case they might go with one of the dishes, but mostly to show students this incredible food.

Cutting into one of the sea urchins. The flesh was so rich and buttery that we each could only have a little taste. What an experience!

The first dish we did was a Tuna Carpaccio that one student had eaten in a local restaurant. We played with the flavors and presentation of the dish, serving the tuna with a seaweed salad, a crab-wasabi mixture, and crispy fried wontons.

Another presentation of the tuna carpaccio, this time in a martini glass, with radish spouts as garnish.

We made a coconut polenta cake as the crispy corn cake for our second appetizer, Chipotle Shrimp on Coconut Corn Cake with Pepita-Cilantro Pipian.

The polenta cakes turned out fabulous, but we thought that the dish's flavors were a bit too similar.

Kevin looks a bit worried as Chef Gabriel flames a sauce reduction right next to him!

Our salad course was a Grilled Romaine Salad with Blue Cheese, Pine Nuts, Bacon and Apples.

We wrapped each romaine quarter in partially pre-cooked bacon, then grilled them and served with a Champagne vinaigrette.

A short pause from the effort of cooking all this great food!

During dinner we each gave an evaluation of how we felt the dish we'd each come up with had turned out.

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