I finally took a cooking class, though I am a little late in blogging about it. In this class, I probaby had more than 25 foods I've never had before. I stopped counting on my 25 foods awhile ago when I hit 50!! I mistakingly signed up for a demonstration cooking class instead of the hands on one, but I volunteered to help stir and mix everything so I pretty much helped with everything, including the eating! The first thing I made in the cooking class was Blackened Halibut. This was pretty good! There were several seasonings I had never heard of before, but wasn't afraid to try them out! We made a pineapple mango salsa to go on top of the fish. I couldn't wait to try this one at home. Something kind of unique for me was the shrimp lettuce wraps. I normally refuse to eat any kind of lettuce wrap because I'm such a picky eater, but this was awesome. There are so many different sauces put into it that I probably wouldn't be able to make it again by myself. I mean have you ever heard of Mo Bean noodles? I sure haven't. Next we made flank steak tacos. These were pretty tasty minus the creamy sauce we put on top of them. I'm not a big fan of creamy sauces unless it's gravy so I didn't eat much of this. One of the sides to the taco was a tomatillo salsa. You may not know that a tomatillo is not actually the red tomato you think it is. It was like a yellowish, greenish looking very small veggie. Plus it was extremely spicy. This was probably the easiest thing we made though!
My favorite part of the entree was the baked black beans. The beans consisted of bacon, onions, carrots, celery, brown sugar, molasses, ketchup, apple cider, mustard, cilantro, and several more spices. The beans took quite a while to cook but they tasted amazing! Along with the beans we made cumin scented rice. This was also easy and we used basmati rice, which I again had never heard of.
Our dessert was Pineapple-Mint Sangria Sorbet. Man was this good, but way too strong on the alcohol. You are supposed to put tequila and an entire bottle of white wine in the mix, but the instructor put quite a bit more. Most of the people in the class could only take a few bites because they feared they wouldn't have been able to drive home (we were served wine and beer throughout the class). The sorbet had a very sweet, elegant flavor. I would defintely eat this again, but not add as much alcohol.
All in all, my first cooking class was quite a success!!
