Even the non-culinary experts got to sample gourmet summer dishes at the Cookin’ for a Sizzlin’ Summer event on Friday night from 6:45-7:45 p.m. in the Fritz Knoebel School of Hospitality Management.
The free event was the first collaboration between student organizations DU Programming Board (DUPB) and the DU Cooking Club. According to hotel, restaurant, and tourism management junior from Steamboat Springs, and co-chair of the DUPB special events committee Kylee Swiggart, DUPB realized they had extra funds for the remainder of the year and wanted to put on a smaller event students would enjoy.
“We got in contact with some people from cooking club and they were really easy to work with,” said Swiggart.
On Friday night, the first 50 students in attendance got to sample the prepared five-course meal and watch the president of Cooking Club, senior economics major from Pueblo, Zach Gonzales, demonstrate his culinary skills to the audience by showing how to prepare everything from salad dressing to garnishing a plate. Each audience member got to take home a recipe booklet filled with summer recipes, including some of the courses from the event, prepared by DUPB.
“DUPB and I sat down and they gave us some recommendations of ideas of dishes that they were interested in and then we talked to our chef mentors and had our own ideas and we combined what we thought into five dishes that represented the spring time,” said Gonzales.
The taste-testing event allowed audience members to sample dishes prepared by members of the Cooking Club.
“We worked for four hours last night and three hours earlier today to put everything together so there is definitely a lot of action,” said Gonzales.
The audience came hungry and anticipated each new course. The first course, a homemade red pepper hummus, was served with roasted vegetables and the second course was a mixed green salad with a champagne vinaigrette dressing. Following this came a summer favorite, bruschetta with cherry tomatoes, mozzarella and a crostini with a goat cheese, apricot and onion purée topped with a fig and balsamic glaze.
The main entrée was Israeli couscous with corn, braised chicken, parmesan cheese and basil. The dessert, inspired by French cuisine, was a mix of berries on top of banana foster, caramelized bananas accompanied by a drizzle of sabayon sauce.
Each course came on a separate plate and was passed around to the audience members. While they ate, audience members watched Gonzales and his fellow cooking club officers as they taught different culinary techniques. These ranged from how to cut, mince and dice an onion and garlic using different types of knives, to making a champagne vinaigrette dressing.
In the time between courses and the cooking advice, there were different trivia questions that audience members could answer for a variety of kitchen-related prizes including measuring cups and a vegetable peeler.
Unlike regular cooking club meetings, this event was less about audience participation and cooking lessons and more about taste testing. Some of the audience members were regular cooking club attendees and others just wanted to enjoy the free food.
“It’s fun, usually our events … cost money because we try and get premium ingredients, but it was fun to do a free event and clearly there were people that showed up,” said Gonzales.
The audience went home fully satisfied with a handful of recipes to try out themselves.
“We filled the place and we were actually a little bit over capacity, and there was enough food for everyone and we were 100 percent successful,” said Swiggart.
