One of the things that we had been excited about doing on our honeymoon was taking a cooking class. Fresh from a good night's sleep, in spite of the songs of the coyotes out our window, we road some torn up bikes down Canyon Rd and into town to the Santa Fe School of Cooking; sitting under the tutelage of none other than the pride of Santa Fe, Rocky Durham. We had a blast learning how to make three different salsas. Rocky has started a bunch of Santa Fe style restaurants in Europe and is also the host of his own TV show. He had a lot of personality to say the least; he only refers to his girlfriend as “the woman that I love,” as in, “oh, the woman I love is a vegetarian!” (If you want to know where to eat well in NM, email him, he's happy to tell you.) Not only did we learn to make some great salsas but he also showed us tips about everything from chopping cilantro to taking the seeds out of the center of a pepper in one second. He gave us carte blanche to do what we wanted in his kitchen.
First a roasted tomato salsa. Roasting one's ingredients isn't something we had done before when making salsa so we kind of freaked out with the first one, charring the skin of all of the veggies. It had a nice roasted flavor but lacked the freshness that makes salsa so great. The second was a pineapple salsa. Kate's last minute decision to add add cumin to the mix made this one much better than the first. A salsa to be proud of. The final salsa was roasted tomatillo. This turned out to be our favorite. We decided to go a little heavier on the jalapeño and balanced that with some sugar which sat nicely with the tomatillos. The class was so much fun. We learned so much. We met some friendly people. It was a great way to start our day.
The weather was beautiful and we had our minds set on eating at Flying Star Cafe so we walked down to the city's rail-yard district and checked out their from-scratch menu. We had a greek salad topped with fried cheese, avocado and tomato and a tempura cauliflower dish topped with a jalapeño chutney. We washed that down with some local beer; Marble IPA and Kate's favorite: Eye of the Hawk!
Then we walked back up into town and toured the Georgia O'Keeffe museum. O'Keeffe grew up in Wisconsin and later lived in New York City but after visiting northern New Mexico and connecting with its rugged beauty decided that it was her new home. After her husband's death she moved here permanently and created most of the abstracted desert inspired works that we know her for. One thing that the museum stressed was that the erotic connotations everyone associates with her work only represent a small portion of her creations. She did a large number of completely abstract pieces and even cityscape paintings that are nothing like the vaginal flower macros that we associate with her name.
After an exciting morning of cooking and a lot of walking we decided to buy some produce, stay in and cook something that would go well with the morning's left over salsas. We made some delicious tacos and warm figs with goat cheese. We are looking forward to incorporating more chiles in our day-to-day cooking; Jason's hot campaign continues!
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