Cuisine

Tilapia and ratatouille were served to fifteen with flair for Ceci’s mini-meal, but that was no surprise!

Julie admits she’d barely cooked at all before coming to the Center, but now she’s cooked and served a meal for fifteen!

And no one left hungry … no one!

On Tuesday all four Home Management classes took charge of the deep-fryer, making a “copy-cat” chicken recipe. Watch to see how things turned out!

Chaz admits he was only a little above the average college student with respect to his cooking skills. Now he’s made lasagna from scratch and fed fifteen people witt it.

We were pleased to have three professionals from Blind Low Vision Services, part of Colorado’s Dept. of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) at the Center for training this week. We spent four days together exploring every topic we could think of, including cane travel and cooking under sleepshades. We’ll let them introduce themselves and the meal they cooked on Tuesday for themselves and our staff involved with the training. For the record, it was top shelf, and so are they!

Planning, preparing and serving a three-recipe meal to 15 people is no small matter. Jackson admits at one point he was getting nervous, but he tried to treat the process as a “regular day in class”. He definitely had it going on with his mini-meal!

Before learning to carve a turkey, a blind person can greatly benefit from learning the bird by touch – how things are connected and how they will come apart. Since our students and Home Management staff started preparations for our own Thanksgiving meal (held a week before the actual holiday) Dishon Spears led students through this discovery process with turkeys that had been cooked and then refrigerated over night.

After that are some shots of all the food we ate! We have a lot to be thankful for!

We were more than ready by noon last Thursday! We’d been waiting for this meal for two weeks, smelling the roasting turkeys and the pies and so much more! Of course, all of our students had a part in preparing it, so they’d been right in the kitchen smelling what we were at last all going to be very, very thankful for!

It’s an annual event. A week before Thanksgiving we hold our own Thanksgiving gathering at the Center prior to everyone’s dispersal to families and friends across the country. We start off after morning classes with an hour or so of potluck appetizers furnished by staff and maybe a game or two. It’s our time to be together, and it’s a big deal and a big meal.

A very big meal! This year, under the guidance of our Home Management Instructors Maureen, Shon and Delfina, our students prepared four turkeys, three kinds of stuffing, 30 pounds of potatoes, green bean-mushroom casserole (and one without), mac and cheese, a ham and pumpkin and pecan pies. There were candied yams and sweet potatoes and 100 homemade dinner rolls.

Skills and confidence in the kitchen are the twin goals our Home Management instructors have for their students. So a while back they ratcheted up the expectations – and the fun – with CCB’s own version of the Food Network’s reality cooking show Chopped. The four combined classes were each divided into two teams of two or three members that competed against each other.

Like the TV show that pits chefs against one another, each team got a basket of selected ingredients that they were required to incorporate into their three-course meal. They had two hours to create and then to present their creation to the three judges.

Here’s a taste of the excitement… Enjoy!