Saturday, February 11, 2012

Adventures in eating

A friend of mine invited me to a cooking class on Wednesday. I'm not going to lie, she had me at "Would you like to...." and the icing on the proverbial cake was that it was a cooking class. On the menu? Winter salad, pannini, and chocolate covered strawberries.

When we got there and the class began, I was surprised to find we weren't actually doing the cooking. We were given the recipes and we got to eat the menu items, but the instructor did the actual prep, cooking, and assembly.

I'm not much of an adventurous eater, so this made me nervous. Because, really, how on earth am I supposed to leave off all the stuff I don't want if I'm not making the food?

Or - maybe this was an opportunity to break out of my comfort zone. Or maybe I was just really hungry and figured it wouldn't kill me to just try it.

Either way, I tried it all. And it was soooo good. The salad was mixed greens, blueberries, pears, walnuts, almonds, pecans and three types of oranges drizzled with an apple cider reduction dressing.

They ended up serving two sandwiches: the pannini and a version of grilled cheese with goat cheese, bacon, strawberries, fresh basil, and spinach. Oh. my. goodness. They were both delicious. I'd love to say I'd make them myself, but I just can't justify spending so much money on ingredients for a couple sandwiches. And I know there's no way the kids would touch them. 

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