So last time I was talking about the cooking class we had at the Sur La Table shop in 2020. I said we had chicken...and a brick.
That’s known as click bait. Or foreshadowing. Whatever.
Anyway, we got there and found our way into the shop. A nice lady at the desk told us that the cooking classes were “back there,” and she pointed us toward a kitchen area set up in the rear of the shop.
We had some time to kill, so we browsed. Great stuff, really. Sur La Table offers some pretty spectacular products. Maybe...maybe...a trifle expensive. A little rich for our blood. But, again, that’s just us. I know that our kids, who get close to being professional chefs, have no problem shopping there. The higher quality is worth it to them.
For us, well, factory outlet stores await. (Or, they would, if they didn’t keep going out of business. Dang. Ah well, I guess it’s the dollar stores now.)
Chicken (under a brick)
Anyway, finally, the class began. We all gathered around a big work table-qua-cooking surface. And then the guest instructor chef explained that we’d be doing a chicken dish -- specifically, a rosemary panfried chicken, that ...er...was flattened down. Under a brick. While it cooked in the pan.
No kidding.
Actually, it was delicious. Here’s a link to the recipe, which Sur La Table helpfully places on its website: https://www.surlatable.com/tuscan-rosemary-chicken-under-a-brick/REC-507623.html
And, by the way, the brick is wrapped up in tinfoil, so it isn’t like you’re getting bits of building material in your teeth. (Though, who knows? Maybe it would be a taste treat. Certainly, it would generate lots of business for dentists.)
I’ll spare you the details of the prep and the eating...truth be told, Martha did more of the former and I did rather more of the latter. But, it all happened two years ago, and I need to get on to 2022 at some point. Suffice to say, we really really enjoyed ourselves and we were really grateful to the kids, and we decided that soon as we could, we’d do it again.
Chicken (out from under the brick)
Except, it didn’t work out that way. As I say, that was 2020, and then along came Covid...and we weren’t going anywhere...
Okay, time passes. Finally, the vaccines are available, lockdown begins the process of ending...and it is safe to get out and at least do a little rambling.
It also so happens that it was going down just before Christmas. And...oops... I didn’t have any great ideas for a present for Martha. It is getting harder and harder to get her anything, these days. It used to be candy was good, but now we’ve got restrictions on the amount of sugar we can ingest. (Dang!) Jewelry is always fine, but sometimes it is hard to find stuff she really likes.
Long ago and far away, I could get her stuffed animal toys...which she likes...but then, sigh, even before we left Massachussets, she’d asked me to stop. There’s only so much space you can devote to stuffed animals. And, besides, after a while, particularly in the West, a big, cute, fluffy Snoopy turns with remarkable speed into the biggest, baddest, mutant Dust Bunny this side of the Mojave.
And then I remembered...the cooking class! Of course. Perfect. She’d love it.
I asked her if she’d like to do another Sur La Table thing. Sure, she said. That would be fun. So we sat down together and booked a class that a) had a menu we liked, and b) didn’t conflict with any of our other scheduled plans. We picked, of course, one of the steak offerings, and, for a date, a day in late January.
Again, you see the foreshadowing? That big ominous cloud right there on the left of the screen? Kinda has a funnel shape and there’s a sinister lady in black on a bicycle peddling around it and saying, “and I’ll get your little dog, too?”
Yeah. It’s kinda obvious.
But, I’ll save that for next time.
More to come.
Martha...but not Martha eating the chicken. It is of her having lunch with me on South Padre Island back in 2015 or there’s about. It’s got nothing to do with the story at hand, but, heck, you didn’t expect it to, did ya?
***
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~mjt
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