By Kitty Jay
FoodConnect New York
myhusbandhatesveggies@yahoo.com

Chances are, if you live in the New York metropolitan area, you’ve seen a commercial for ICE, the Institute of Culinary Education. About 50 times a day on the Food Network, or throughout episodes of Top Chef, ICE advertises their professional culinary programs. What they do not mention in the commercials (at least I have never noticed) is that they also have nighttime and weekend recreational classes, covering a huge range of cuisines and techniques. The selection is dizzying - anything and everything from designing your own wedding cake to mastering Szechuan cooking to walking tours of New York’s Jewish delis. When my husband’s cousin gave us a gift certificate to take a class (best - holiday - gift - EVER), I had the difficulty of choosing from the hundreds of courses on offer. It was a good problem to have.

I settled on The Essentials of Tuscan Cooking. Lucky for me, my friend Rebecca decided to come along for the fun. When we first arrived, we were greeted by Chef Jane, who gave us and our fellow 12 sous chefs the run down on the night’s menu. We were split into teams of 3 or 4, and our group quickly got to work on our assigned task of roasted eggplant crostini, pork chops with olive and fennel, and cipolline agro dolce (sweet and delicious roasted cipolline onions). I have to say, it was thrilling to cook in a professional kitchen. Everything was so jumbo sized, like the baking sheet on which I assembled our crostini.

It was also exciting to get a chance to use an indoor grill, while Chef Jane taught us how to achieve the perfect grill marks on this Bistecca alla Fiorentina…

Which we later made into this delicious platter with arugula and parmigiano reggiano…

The other teams worked on this fantastic wild mushroom risotto…

And, perhaps my favorite dish of the night, this pappa al pomodoro (bread soup)…

My team managed to get the crostini out in the nick of time…

But our biscotti dough took quite a while to finish in the oven (by the way, it never occurred to me that this is what biscotti might look like before arriving with my coffee)…

But there were no complaints, as ICE makes sure that everyone is sufficiently buzzed by night’s end…these bellinis that Chef Jane is pouring were just a warm up for the copious amounts of Chianti that followed…