First post

So as I have gone through my journey in food I cant help but feel that I should catalogue all that I have been doing in a more productive form than facebook.  Something to look back on for myself as well as something for others to see some cool food or get some ideas from. 

For those who don't know who I am my name is Marco and I am a student at kendall college.  Ive got my associates degree already and am right around the corner for my bachelors degree.  You will quickly learn that I am a pretty competitive person and love to learn about food.  I truly feel that food is an every day adventure and one can never learn enough.  I like to compete in as many food competitions as I can and practice constantly for them.  I guess you'll learn more about me as I write, so for now heres some of my most recent food.  This will be a bit of a big one since its my first one and its been quite an exciting month or so...

Green city market

So this was a mystery basket competition which was actually with a partner.  Sabrina worked on the pastry side and I did the savory food.  The interesting thing about it is that the final competition would be outside at the green city market.  So we wouldn't have any type of oven and only had some dinky portable burners.  

My dish title:
Rosemary scented goat chop with White sweet potato puree, kale wrap of heirloom eggplant and little darling cheese, crispy kale, pickled shallot, red wine reduction.

Sabrinas:
 Mini doughnuts with yogurt zabaglione, thyme and white wine poached apple, macerated pineapple cherries and raspberry jam.

 My first big check, how exciting.

 Competition judges, Carrie Nahabedian from NAHA, Sarah Stegner from Prairie Grass, Ryan Poli from Perennial.

 We worked hard practicing and ended up winning.  We got the scholarship money as well as a nice whustof knife kit.  Not bad for just cookin some food =)


Kendall student competitions
 So at school we had a couple small competitions that was amongst a few hand selected students.  We each made a small appetizer dish that the guests for that nights dinner then would vote on which was their favorite.

 This was my dish for the first one.  It was a porcini crusted lamb loin with smoked kale and cabbage roulade, and micro cabbage and basil salad with concord vinaigrette.  I really liked this dish, I didn't win with this one but people seemed to like it.  really classical flavors and traditional method which I really like.

For the next event I did a much more contemporary style dish.  The focus for both of these events was to use products from the green city market as well as the kendall  garden.  So with that in mind I wanted to try and show the product with as natural flavors as possible.  Concord grapes are in season and really tasty right now so I wanted to highlight those again.  Though the thing everybody hates about them is the seeds.  So it made sense to me to make a sphere of concord juice using calcium and alginate in order to get that great intense flavor, without those pesky seeds.  It then had fresh jupiter grape juice, raspberry, opal basil and a white balsamic gelee.  Picture doesnt do much justice, but i ended up actually winning this time.