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SilentQ and I talked about degrees of cooking. White belt is the beginning: you can boil water, strain pasta, and add cheese and milk in the correct amounts. Green belt cooks make recipes that involve words like sweating, and searing, and preparing dishes in stages. Brown belts learn the fine art of making sauces, or making foods that require lots of assembly for the finished product. Black belts are for those who regularly cook in the "X with Y" category. They don't make chicken, they make rosemary crusted chicken with zesty pesto sauce, potatoes with asagio and parsley, and green beans sprinkled with pine nuts and sauteeed in a lemon-garlic wine sauce. It usually takes longer to describe the meal than to eat it.
Last night's spanakopita was definitely a brown belt experience. You have to sautee onions and garlic, then add spinach and parsley. It has to be heated just enough to reduce the spinach w/out reducing it to a green paste that bonds to metal. The excess water must be strained out before you add it to your cheese mix. then there's the matter of phyllo dough. Thin as vellum and just as dry when you expose it to air, unless you keep it moist with paper towels. Lay the parchment, swab with butter, lay again, then add the mix (you know, you can sing that to the tune of Headhunter). Fold it up like you're folding a flag. Once again, old Boy Scout training comes in handy. Add a little more butter to the top, then heat in the oven. Add a salad with cranberries, 2 yr old cheddar, and fuji apples, and you have yourself a rather hearty meal.
There are two other terms that can be associated with cooking, that aren't belt dependent. Freestyling is the ability to walk into a kitchen, pull random ingredients off the shelf, and end up with a tasty meal in the end. Freestyling can occur and any level, with a wide variety of results. Anyone can freestyle and get it right once in a while. Once you have grown beyond recipe books, and can recreate and modify recipes on the fly, and just throw things together and make a gourmet meal, you have become a freestyle ninja.
Soup's on! *vanishes in a cloud of flour*
Last night's spanakopita was definitely a brown belt experience. You have to sautee onions and garlic, then add spinach and parsley. It has to be heated just enough to reduce the spinach w/out reducing it to a green paste that bonds to metal. The excess water must be strained out before you add it to your cheese mix. then there's the matter of phyllo dough. Thin as vellum and just as dry when you expose it to air, unless you keep it moist with paper towels. Lay the parchment, swab with butter, lay again, then add the mix (you know, you can sing that to the tune of Headhunter). Fold it up like you're folding a flag. Once again, old Boy Scout training comes in handy. Add a little more butter to the top, then heat in the oven. Add a salad with cranberries, 2 yr old cheddar, and fuji apples, and you have yourself a rather hearty meal.
There are two other terms that can be associated with cooking, that aren't belt dependent. Freestyling is the ability to walk into a kitchen, pull random ingredients off the shelf, and end up with a tasty meal in the end. Freestyling can occur and any level, with a wide variety of results. Anyone can freestyle and get it right once in a while. Once you have grown beyond recipe books, and can recreate and modify recipes on the fly, and just throw things together and make a gourmet meal, you have become a freestyle ninja.
Soup's on! *vanishes in a cloud of flour*
