The Joy of Cooking [Seafood]

Wednesday was the second of the two cooking classes I’ve taken at Michael Anthony’s this trip. The Focus was on “Spring Seafood,” and I was excited (and as usual a little apprehensive) because I am not very experienced at cooking seafood.

The menu was as follows:

Warm Shrimp and Cannelini Bean Salad

Crab Cakes with a Lemon and Caper Remoulade

Pistachio-encrusted Scottish Salmon with a Dijon Aioli

My partner this time was Marie, a Quebecois who now resides in Vancouver. Fascinating woman, very tall, who was a professional volleyball player in her younger days. She spoke English with a decided French accent. Well, technically a Quebecois accent, though it sounded very French to me. We were a good team, and the nice thing about working with a partner instead of doing all the prep and cooking yourself is that you have time for pictures.

Lessons in slicing onions

Mixing the shrimp in the marinade

Searing the salmon, Marie in the foreground

We were generously supplied with wine, a nice Alverde Pinot Grigio. The wine did not appear until after the heavy slicing and dicing was done, good planning on their part.

After everything was prepared, we sat and feasted on the results of our lesson, along with more wine, of course. The crab cakes, in particular, were unique (and I am somewhat obsessed with crab cakes). Chris uses jumbo lump crab baked in a soufflé-like matrix  rather than ground up crab in a fried cake. It’s wonderful! Both the salad and crab will become part of my repertoire for sure.

Toasting at lunch, the warm shrimp salad on the table.

One thing they have added to the classes given this year is a talk on wine parings given by PJ, the head sommelier at Michael Anthony’s. Excellent, with some surprising (to me) recommendations, like pairing savory Salmon dishes with a light red wine, like a Willamette Valley (Oregon) Pinot Noir, or with a Sicilian Nero d’Avola. 

He also recommended the “perfect” wine for the shrimp salad (which was amazing): a Grillo, also from Sicily. They sell a Furedo Maccari Grillo in the Italian food shop in the restaurant, so I bought two bottles of that plus a jar of taggiasche olives from the Ligurian region of Italy, that Chris used in the warm shrimp salad. .

So, another informative and enjoyable cooking class. Learned a lot. Highly recommend it if you are every on the Island with time on your hands.