Our fifth Cook for a Cause!

Yesterday we held our fifth Cook for a Cause Day, our 12-hour cook-a-thon benefiting the Carpenter's Cupboard Food Bank in Wheat Ridge.  More than 70 great volunteers joined us to cook over the course of the day, and we were able to donate almost 500 pounds of wholesome, handmade food.

We made shepherd's pie and a special squash lasagna (named "squasagna" by our friend Kathryn) using all the squash donated from people's gardens this summer.  The food turned out delicious, we had a good time, and more than 700 people will eat a little better over the next few days, thanks to everyone who helped out. It was nice to cook with some old friends and meet lots of new ones who we hope to see again soon.  Here are some pictures from the event:

All these carrots were hand-diced (and this is a fraction of the total)!  Luckily several volunteers had taken our Knife Skills class and led the charge!

We boiled 150 pounds of potatoes...

...and riced them all to make the most fluffy mashed potatoes ever to top a shepherd's pie!

Lots of pans of sauce being cooked!  That's me checking things out, second from the left--not sure why I look so serious, since everything was turning out great!

More pans of sauce!

We had lots of mozzarella, thanks to a generous donation from Leprino Foods.

After hosting this event five times, we've got a good system for packaging and labeling the hundreds of pans of food!

If you give a kid dry ice...

Happy New Year!  It's exciting to be saying that for the third year as a business owner.  At this time last year we were still imagining how Après would look, and now we're planning a celebration of the Dessert Bar's first birthday (a fun dessert wine tasting on February 13)!  I'm looking forward to 2011 as the year we don't add any more extensions to our business.

We had a nice holiday season around Generous Servings, including a couple of days off (we were closed on Christmas and New Year's Day), which feels weird when you work seven days a week almost every week.  Last week I taught only two cooking classes, both for teens.  The first was a bread baking class, during which we made several great bread recipes, the runaway favorite being monkey bread (which is mostly sugar with some bread dough inside it).  The second class was a food science class, which was a lot of fun.  It was not the neatest class: here's a picture of the remnants of one "experiment" (playing with cornstarch and water):

We also cooked with some cornstarch, made a gelatin dessert, and did some spherification (a classic molecular gastronomy trick):

And of course, we used some dry ice to make ice cream:

The kids came up with all kinds of other things they wanted to test with dry ice (they tried freezing the spheres we made in the other experiment, making carbon dioxide-filled soap bubbles, etc.).  They were excited to learn that you can buy dry ice at the grocery store, and disappointed that you have to be 18 (they were all under 15).  Several of them assured me that they could easily pass for 17 at the movies, and personally, I think using a fake ID to buy dry ice is probably better than using it for cigarettes, so I wished them luck.

I'm not sure anyone really learned any science in the class, but the more important point is to be excited by something you don't really understand, and I think we accomplished that.  That seems like a good way to start a new year.