Excellent Cook Nancy and I have been to the Le Cordon Bleu MasterChef Cooking School, and we have certificates to prove it.

Many moons ago, Excellent Cook Nancy and I brought a TravelZoo (I think) discount voucher for a cooking class at Le Cardon Bleu.  They teach MasterChef Cooking Classes each Saturday.  Finally we were able to get our schedules coordinated and to cooking school we did go.

This is the largest cooking school in the state of Texas so they tell me.  People go here to get culinary degrees – we went for a Saturday MasterChef Cooking Class on Irish Cooking.  We wondered what we were in for – potatoes, cabbage, Irish stew, ???  Some of our guesses were correct, but we also cooked soda bread, a rhubarb crumble, and fish and chips.

Look at star student Excellent Cook Nancy.  We were having fun!  Chef ?? (I’m sorry.  I forgot his name.  Honestly, I never knew his name.  It is a hearing thing.  He was a good instructor.) first demonstrated what we were to do – just like they do on TV.  He said he wanted us to learn techniques, not recipes.  We did learn how to hold and use a knife correctly (thumb and two fingers on the base of the blade – don’t use the tip of the knife to chop food), and how to toss food in a skillet (pull back – I still can’t do it very well).  Setting skillets and pans on cutting boards is a no, no. (My bad!  They had to tell me this rule more than once.)

Chef ?? demonstrated how to make colcannon (potatoes and cabbage) and the rhubarb crumble. On other posts, I will give you these recipes, but for now I want to share the soda bread recipe.

A cute little Irish lad ( He said, “The hangover  just proves I’m Irish”.) demonstrated how to make the soda bread, and told stories of his grandmother and mother making soda bread.  The recipe card did not call for raisins, but he said his mother and grandmother always made soda bread with raisins, so of course, we made our soda bread with raisins.  Later our helper, who was a pastry student, suggested we add a little cinnamon, and we thought that sounded good also.  So we made soda bread with cinnamon and raisins.

After the demonstrations, we were sent to our stations in a professional kitchen to duplicate the dishes.  It is just like on TV.  Most of the ingredients are already prepared for you to use.  How cool is that?

Oh, my gosh!  Excellent Cook Nancy and I thought we were okay cooks, but we did have our mishaps.

First, Excellent Cook Nancy and I opted to try the soda bread.  We mixed the soda bread, and it looked so pretty in the pan.  As we headed to the giant oven with our beautiful bread, the sweet helper told us that the soda was not in the flour as we had been told.  That is not a good thing for soda bread.  They set our pan of sodaless bread aside (as an example I presume), and we were told to try again.

Try again we did, and this time our Cinnamon Raisin Soda Bread was delicious.  It is so easy, and you will like it with a cup of tea.

Blessings to you and yours,

P.S.  I am looking forward to sharing more recipes from our day at the school.  The really neat thing is that they sent us home with all the food we cooked.  We also got to keep our aprons.  It was a fun day, and I am looking at the schedule for other classes.