Pre-Symposium Preparation

Wednesday and Thursday our class prepared for the winter term 2015 symposium. On Wednesday, we only met with Ms. Chen and Mrs. Clater to discuss our recipes and the ingredients we needed. 

On Thursday, we went to Whole foods to pick up our ingredients. We were there for about an hour and got to sample some cider doughnuts that were incredible. 

When we got back to Brooks, we went to Ms. Stuarts den, and split up into our groups and began to cook some of our food. My group (Epstein, Higgins, Ives) went to the Perkins house to cook. Epstein and I cooked our breakfast foods. Epstein made bacon wrapped eggs with cheese and hash brown nests with eggs. 

I made Grilled cheese breakfast sandwiches, which we all ate for lunch (including Ms. Chen&Clater)

Heres a picture of Lidiana and Kenisha

Entry by Steven Ives

American Flatbread Journal Entry

Today we had the opportunity to visit the Flatbread Company in Amesbury, MA.  I had been to this pizza place prior to our journey today and was overly excited to return.  Many Brooks students love this pizza and claim that it is their favorite kind in the world, which means that it is definitely good.  It was so refreshing and intriguing to learn the ins and outs of this business through the experience of  a long time employee.  He was brief in discussing how they prepare and make the meals each day but in the end that made sense to me because he later went on to describe how everything they make is from local markets and producers. In a world that is consumed by hormone infested fast food all natural food is extremely hard to come by. So in the end Flatbread has a very simple menu but executes each item perfectly, which in my mind is why it is successful. People continue to go to a restaurant that consistently makes great food and Flatbread delivers on that notion without question.  Not only was it a privilege to be able to visit Flatbread and see how their business is run but to actually get to make our own pizzas.  I think this experience showed each student in my class that making pizza really is not that hard.  I think everybody recognized that there are ways to make healthy, beautiful pizzas in the matter of minutes.  This class is all about exploring the culinary field and today I think our class got more of an insight into America’s favorite food.  

http://flatbreadcompany.com/FlatbreadHistory2010.html

Chelmsford Agway Winter Farmer’s Market

This Saturday we visited the Chelmsford Agway Winter Farmer’s Market. Although the market wasn’t as full as it usually is in the warmer months, there were still lots to buy; from soap to freshly roasted coffee and beef. The coolest part of the market was the fact we could ask the venders questions about their products and know exactly how it was made. All of the food offered was freshly made wish gave them better tastes than things that can be found in a regular grocery store. The jewelry and decorative items were all hand crafted by the vendors themselves. Needless to say all of the vendors put more effort into their products that most those found in regular grocery stores.

Two of the bakery vendors were Bagel Land and La Bella Dolce Bakery. La Bella is an Italian artisan bakery based on age-old family traditions. Bagel Land is a wholesale bakery that offers a wide variety of New York Style bagels, artisan breads, muffins and pastries. They take the time ensure that all of their products are low in sodium and contain no milk, preservatives, oils or fat yet taste delicious. While most of the vendors sold more commonly hand made things some sold more interesting things like soap. Surfing Goat Soap sells soap mixed out of a combination of goat’s milk and oils. The goat’s milk used is form the vendor’s own herd. She use only natural ingredients - no artificial fragrances, no unnecessary additives.

Visiting the Farmer’s Market gave us an opportunity to see some of the alternative food and products available to us locally, other that those at a commercial grocery.

List of Seasonal Farmers Markets in Boston

Final Project Guidelines

For your final project, you will bake or cook a dish to share at the Winter Term symposium. The guidelines are pretty open, but we want you to make something you have never made before. The dish should also not need any specialty tools or obscure ingredients.

In addition to your dish, you will prepare a poster board that has information about both the dish in general and the ingredients. The poster might answer questions such as, how is the dish traditionally prepared? How is it usually eaten? What is the history behind the dish? What ingredients are most important for making the dish stand out? Why and how did you select the ingredients that you did? You need to tell why what you made is Great Food, better than the everyday stuff, and why. You will each meet with Ms. Clater and Mrs. Chen on Wednesday to review what information is important for you to research.

Finally, the project will be individual, but you will have a partner to help you through the cooking process. In return, you will help your partner with his or her project.

Please let us know if you have any questions!!!

Friday, January 16: Coffee

Today, we did a little coffee tasting in a cozy coffee shop called Coffee Coffee in Salem! The coffee shop has ice cream, baked goods, some coffee bean bags and most importantly, freshly roasted coffee! We started by watching Randy, the store owner, pour the coffee beans into the roasting machine. As the coffee beans started to turn dark, Randy told us about the selection of coffee beans and how he blends different kinds of beans from all over the world. All of the coffee beans are organically grown with no pesticides, and this store gathers coffee beans from 500 to 600 farmers all over the world. On the wall, there is a display of all the coffee bean bags that came from various places, including Indonesia, Ethiopia, Hawaii, and etc. Randy explained to us that because the coffee beans they use in the store are in better quality, the caffeine is only half as the caffeine in everyday decafs. There is also less acidity in the coffee they make. According to Randy, the most popular blends in their store are the Sumatra double dark and the Ethiopian blend. Most of us thought that the Sumatra double dark tastes very bitter, but in fact, because the beans were roasted longer, the sugar was caramelized, therefore tasting sweeter than what we expected. Another popular blend is the Hawaiian Kona Peaberry kind. Because there is more starch in the peaberries, the coffee tastes sweeter. After the beans have been in the roasting machine with a high temperature of 473 degrees for half an hour, the beans turned extremely dark. Personally I am not a coffee lover, but I learned so much about the process of making coffee today! 

My cup of cream and a little coffee

Dark coffee beans after they have been roasted