Appies inspired by Ontario greenhouse veggies

Brett fills cucumber boats with bruschetta.

Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers (OGVG) hosted a competition between Liaison campuses in Toronto today. After preliminary rounds at their individual schools, five semi-finalists recreated their appetizer dishes at Cirillo's Culinary Academy on Dundas Street West.

The panel of judges included chefs Christine Cushing (of Food Network fame) and John Cirillo, CCC (owner of this state-of-the-art recreational cooking school), along with self-professed foodies Jim Veri (greenhouse grower and board member of OGVG) and Elmer Buchanan (former Ontario Minister of Agriculture and Food, and chair of the Greenhouse Vegetable Industry Advisory Committee).

Our AM Cook Basic students made the trek into Toronto to cheer on their classmate Brett as he got the experience of his first (but likely not his last) culinary competition.

To see more photos visit our Facebook page.

Some of the classmates that came out to support Brett in Toronto -
Clockwise from back: Brett (with hat), Don,  Melissa, Deborah and
Elizabeth, with their instructor Chef Steve Djerfi (right) 

Chocolate - It's not just for dessert

Our A.M. Advanced class will be presenting their Chef's Table on February 6. With the date falling so close to Valentine's Day, they decided on an all-chocolate menu. This inimitable, bitter-sweet food of the Gods will appear in a variety of incarnations, in every course from amuse-bouche through dessert.

The students did a trial run today, serving lunch to their colleagues and chef instructors. The wine, fine linens and ambiance were missing, but the advanced feedback on seasoning, texture, flavour and presentation will be invaluable when they serve their final meal to invited guests in a few weeks.

Amuse-bouche: cream cheese with paprika & chives, layered with
chocolate and served with orange coulis.  

Pan-seared salmon with candied lemon zest. The sauce had a hint of white chocolate.   

Spinach and strawberry salad with feta cheese and berry vinaigrette, garnished with shaved chocolate.

Dessert was tiramisu, served in a martini glass, and finished with grated chocolate. 

Cooking in the Christmas Spirit

Students and staff are getting into the Christmas spirit as they take care of last minute preparations for the Christmas dinner at Hess Street School today. We will be heading over shortly to serve lunch to 300 elementary students! Watch our Facebook page for more photos from this fun day.

 

Merry Christmas! See you in 2014.

Hess Street School Christmas dinner 2012

Our students and staff are gearing up to serve Christmas dinner to 400 students at Hess Street School on Thursday. We are all looking forward to this annual celebration to get us into  the festive spirit and start the wind-down to our holidays.  

There will be no Open House this week (December 17). We will be closed from December 20 through to January 12. Drop by for a visit during our next Tuesday evening Open House, January 14, 2014.

Merry Christmas! We hope to see you in the New Year.

Christmas 2012 at Hess Street School

The toughest job of all.....

Cook Basic students sit down with Chef Bill to sample a
10-course meal, and learn how to talk about food. 

It's not easy being a culinary student: weeks of studying theory, humbling test marks and the ego-busting reality of cuts, burns and burnt offerings when you finally get into the kitchen. The toughest job  of all, though, is actually learning to talk about food.

Cook Basic students are encouraged to taste everything that our Chefs turn out while demonstrating the fundamental techniques, so they will know how their own dish should taste. It's not often, though, that they are asked to give feedback on other students' cooking.

Last Thursday the afternoon Basic class sat down to a ten-course lunch, thanks to the PM Advanced class. The meal gave the cooks the chance to work as a team, turn out creative new dishes on a deadline and practice their plating skills. The lessons for the diners? Try every dish (fence-sitting is frowned upon), listen to the chefs at the table, and learn how to express their opinions on seasoning, presentation and flavour with confidence.

Sweet endings 

To view photos on the Advanced students in the kitchen, and the meal they served to fellow students, visit our Facebook page.  www.facebook.com/LiaisonCollegeHamilton

Gone Fishin’

How does your food go from this...

It’s not what you think. We’re not kicking back with a line in the water, or nursing a hot toddy over a hole in the ice. And there’s no catch and release policy. It is ‘Catch and Kill’ day at Liaison, and there is not much nostalgia involved.

It is a city kids’ fishing trip, as our students trek over to the nearby Asian market, a cooler full of water in tow. The merchants might think we are strange (they have never said), but are always happy to scoop a dozen or so tilapia from their live tanks and deposit them unceremoniously into the cooler. They handle live fish every day, so this non-event is a contrast to what lies in store back in the classroom.

One by one, the students, with varying degrees of trepidation, dip into the cooler to catch a fish with their bare hands, while trying to avoid the spiny back and dorsal fins. For most, it is the first time they have ever handled a whole fish, dead or alive. Some are repulsed at the prospect of knocking it on the head to kill it: others find filleting to be the greatest challenge.

The chef-instructors focus on the latter, but there’s a secondary message that they want to relay. Every piece of meat, fish or poultry that budding cooks and chefs will serve to their customers was at one time, a living, breathing being. We must respect and honour that life, and the process involved in bringing it to the table. 

......to this?

Visit our Facebook page for the whole story in photos.

Hitting the sauce

The transition is seamless as students enrolled in the Chef de Cuisine diploma complete their Cook Basic training and move on to Advanced Level 2. First on the agenda for the current Advanced class, along with some Basic students and alumni, was three days of prepping, cooking and serving a Christmas lunch to almost 400 children at Hess Street School.

Jessica works up a bechamel sauce.

Kevin starts his veloute with a roux.

The glow of team work and camaraderie that made the Christmas lunch lively, fun and efficiently executed will follow everyone that pitched in to make it work. With such a concentrated curriculum to work through in the next 15 weeks though, our students have little time to digest the experience before returning to the kitchen.

Essential groceries for sauce week-
the reason those sauces taste so good!

After a quick review of mother sauces (béchamel, velouté, Hollandaise, brown and tomato sauces), Chef Dan demonstrated an array of small sauces that are borne from these five. Students cooked up a few of them; the rest were relegated to quick jottings in their kitchen bibles. Chef delivered a homework-in-the-making heads-up: they will be making sauces from their own notes in a few days, and will need to remember much more than turkey gravy and cranberry sauce. 

A lot of sauces start with quality stock,
so this spigotted stock pot is often on the
back burner. 

Students' kitchen bibles are their best friends
when a demonstration includes twenty sauces. 

Chef Elaina Ravo makes us gush

Chef Elaina Ravo amongst the books that she loves best.

We train a lot of chefs here at Liaison College Hamilton, and meet many more who do great justice to their chosen craft. We are proud of all of our graduates, but we don't often melt into a barrage of superlatives. Chef Elaina Ravo, though, is worthy of all the accolades we can summon, and we are extremely happy to count her amongst our graduates.

Chef Elaina's story is the latest in our series of alumni profiles on our website. Check out this recent addition to our pages (Graduate Success Stories), and get in touch if you, or someone you know, has a story to share.

Culinary Bootcamp will whip your kitchen skills into shape

The atmosphere in the college can feel a little tense as the afternoon Advanced class nears their final exams. At the same time, afternoon Basic class is approaching their deadline for their all-consuming, research- and calculation-intense menu project.

Culinary Boot Camp, in contrast,  helps offset the intensity of the diploma programs. The weekly recreational classes lend levity and balance to the school. Laughter spills from the kitchen as amateur cooks -from 18 to 80 years young – share their love of food while learning knife skills,  recipes and new techniques.

Mushroom ragout in the works
 at Culinary Boot Camp.

Our current Boot Camp is fully booked through mid-December. We have just introduced a 10-week springtime program, though, to run from March 13 to May 15, 2013. There’s nothing quite like a warm and fragrant kitchen on a 

cold and rainy spring evening, but you’ll have to start planning now. Classes fill quickly. Hope you can join us.

Chef Dan will inspire the artist in you

Have you ever wondered how chefs create unusual and photo-inspiring cakes? This is your chance to learn some of those secrets. We are running a six-part series on Cake Decorating with Chef Dan Notley, every Wednesday evening (6:30 – 10:00 pm) from June 13 through July 18.

Chef Dan has thirty years of experience in the kitchen, a repertoire of cakes that are playful works of art, and a teaching style that puts even the most timid students at ease. He will inspire your creative side using fondants, butter creams, gum paste, royal icing and air brushing techniques on flat, tiered and sculptured cakes.   

Space is filling up quickly. Reserve your spot before June 4 by calling 905-308-9333, or email liaison.hamilton@sympatico.ca.

Questions? Call or email us for more information.

 

Spiders, scales and salamanders...

Whips, paddles, mandolines, spiders, scales and salamanders: the new Cook Basic 1 students are on tour. It’s not Amsterdam’s red light district though, nor an exotic pet shop. Chef-instructor Dan Notley is taking us on our first walk-about through the kitchen at Liaison.

The tools of the trade bear some resemblance to my home kitchen equipment, but are bigger, hotter, faster and sharper. Most home cooks have little need for wire whips and ladles in five different sizes, a broiler (salamander) that can sizzle ten steaks in a flash, or a five-gallon, spigotted stock pot.

To novices in this field, a spider is just another skimmer, a weigh scale is a scale is a scale. The difference between conical strainers (Is it a chinois or a China cap?), a slotted spoon and a perforated

one, or a spaetzle press and a grater are clearly obvious to a food-service pro, but to the newest round of students, the kitchen is a Wonderland of discovery.

As the lessons progress we will surely be seduced by the craft and nipped by the knives and the vegetable slicers (mandolines), but for now this tour is just a tease of the weeks of training to come.