Lunch Outing: Gourmet Gallery

In downtown Minneapolis, there is a little known lunch spot. It is only open Monday through Friday from 11am - 1pm; the menu is quite limited, as is the seating. However, there is no need for a reservation or a big withdrawal at the ATM because as I said, it’s a little known lunch spot and it’s incredibly affordable.

I’m talking about the Gourmet Gallery at the Art Institute International Minnesota. A “dining lab” where students in their final quarter of culinary school are able to practice in real life situations. The hosts, servers, and chefs are all students aiming for that “A” grade.

I was lucky enough check out the Gourmet Gallery last week with a friend of mine and was quite impressed. We were seated quickly, our waiter was very personable and comfortable making recommendations and the food was very enjoyable.

I ordered the Gnudi: Spinach ricotta pasta, toasted pine nuts, wilted spinach in a parmesan brodo (broth).

I have never tried gnudi before, but it’s very similar to dumplings or gnocchi (without the potatoes). The parmesan brodo was a bit salty for me, but gave the dish more depth in flavor. Surprisingly, these little gnudis were quite filling!

My friend got the Pork in Adobo: Braised pork, rice, avocado, La Perla tortillas, crème fraiche and cilantro.

I tried a bite of her dish and the pork had just the right amount of smokiness from the adobo and I liked how it was served with local La Perla tortillas.

I would definitely return for lunch to try some of the other menu items (menu found here). Everything was so affordable. Our total bill, including 2 drinks, was $16 – that’s $8 a piece! Surely beats a skyway burrito or sub sandwich.

If you get a chance, check it out for yourself:

Gourmet Gallery
15 S. 9th Street
Minneapolis, MN 55402
(612) 656-6881‎
http://aim.aiiresources.com/ggmenu/
Open:  Monday - Wednesday, 11am - 1pm

660 Curries: Mathura Palak Paneer

When I first had the opportunity to meet award-winning chef, Raghavan Iyer, I admit I was quite nervous. He has multiple cookbooks, is a known authority when it comes to Indian cooking and he was about to open a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis. Of course I was nervous!

However, as soon as I shook his hand and heard his calming voice, all my nervousness washed away. We chatted for a bit, exchanged business cards and promised to meet again, and we did meet again, many times. Each time I learned more and more about spices and other ingredients used in Indian cooking and always walked away with a fun fact.

Did you know that a whole spice can produce 8 distinct flavors?

I had to wait until Christmas because I was hoping to get Raghavan’s latest cookbook, 660 Curries, as a gift. Sure enough, I am now the proud owner of this 809 page cookbook!

It is pretty overwhelming, but is divided into sections by the main ingredient used. I had recently purchased paneer, India’s only cheese (another fun fact from Raghavan), so I turned to the “Paneer Curries” section. Paneer has a texture that is very similar to tofu. I even tried a paneer dish at OM thinking it was tofu. So much for my tasting skills.

I chose to make Mathura Palak Paneer (aka Cheese Cubes with Spinach and Mustard Seeds). First off, I had to make a Punjabi garam masala and decided to grind it using a mortar and pestle.

It took me about 15 minutes of hard work to eventually turn it into this:

The cinnamon was the hardest and I ended up sifting it a little to remove the large pieces of cinnamon bark. Now I have a jar of garam masala to use anytime!

The rest of the recipe was a breeze compared to the spice grinding. I served a mixture of spinach, cherry tomatoes, paneer, and spices over brown rice to complete the meal.

It was such an amazing dish! The flavors had depth and complexity. It was amazingly satisfying for dinner (and lunch the next day too). I can’t wait to try more recipes from this book. In fact, we’re having dinner guests over this weekend and I sure hope they like curries!

**OM is currently offering cooking classes with Raghavan.  He is incredibly knowledgeable and a great teacher.  I encourage you local folks to check out the classes here.

Vermont Cheddar Bread - I Baked!

I baked bread! Finally. I’ve owned Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day for almost a year and have watched Catherine (aka Food Snob) bake beautiful bread loaves, pitas, english muffins and more from it. I was so jealous of her creations that I needed to have the book right away. I dug in and read all the instructions, but never actually made anything.

I know I needed a push, so I joined the Bake-A-Long that Catherine and Victoria started. I missed the first assignment, but finally got started on our second assignment (with some encouragement from Catherine and Victoria), which focused on Vermont Cheddar & Oatmeal breads.

Behold, my first loaf of Vermont Cheddar:

Who knew I could make bread without a breadmaker? It was so incredibly easy that I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner.

I’m super excited that there’s another batch of dough waiting in my fridge. I’m totally going to make these cute cheddar rolls that Catherine made.

If you’re interested in joining the Bake-A-Long with Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, just let one of us know. We’re looking forward to discovering new recipes from the book and would welcome suggestions.

Heart-Healthy Cookies? Yep.

Cookies! Who doesn’t love cookies? Over the years I have been pretty loyal to one kind: chocolate chip. No, I don’t want oats and I especially don’t want nuts in my cookies. Just give me the plain chocolate chip kind and I’ll be good. Until now…

I was paging through a Vegetarian Times and came across a recipe for “The Heart-Healthiest Chocolate Chip Cookies in the World” and thought, “yeah right, they probably taste like chalk.” So, I kept paging through the magazine only to land on the recipe again, this time realizing I had all the ingredients and should give it a try.

Um, hello, delicious! With only 3 tablespoons of oil and 1 cup of brown sugar, I couldn’t believe these tasted so good. I love how some of my chocolate chips melted just a tad to make the batter a bit chocolaty too.

The Omega-3's from the walnuts and whole grains from the oats make these much heart-healthier than normal chocolate chip cookies.  Forget white flour and white sugar, make these soon! The recipe makes 30 cookies, so be prepared to share.

The Heart-Healthiest Chocolate Chip Cookies in the World

Note: Make oat flour by grinding it in a coffee grinder. Also, I had to bake my cookies a little longer than called for in the recipe.

Enjoy!

Helping Those In Need

Tuesday evening I participated in something wonderful. I was one of 40 Minnesota bloggers who came together to help people in need at Feed My Starving Children.

The blogger volunteer event was put together by Missy at The Marketing Mama, a person who I had never met in person or online. However, her offer was impossible for me to resist. I volunteer on a regular basis through my fantastic service sorority, Gamma Sigma Sigma, and I am constantly on the lookout for other ways to volunteer in the community. Of course I wanted to join other bloggers to help those in need!
Before we went to FMSC to bag meals, we had a networking session at Houlihan’s. I was eager to see a few people I knew, Kate (Kate in the Kitchen), Molly (Tastebud Tart), Liz (Kitchen Pantry Scientist & Creative Mama), Andrea (Blah Blah Babycakes), Paul (MN Headhunter) and Kate-Madonna (Girl Meets Geek). I was also excited to meet a few people whose blogs I’ve been introduced to lately. While I didn’t get to talk to everyone as in depth as I had hoped, I have no doubt we’ll be getting together again in the future.

Red Gold & Annie’s Naturals were so excited about our volunteer efforts that we walked away with some swag too:

(I have to admit, I was already sent a giant can of these and have yet to blog about it. Perhaps a giveaway soon?)

(I ate the bunny grahams and half the fruit snacks already – delish!)

Volunteering at Feed My Starving Children was an eye opener. While many countries already rely on meals from FMSC, the recent earthquake in the struggling country of Haiti has only deepened the need for support.

After a short orientation, we got to work at our stations to assemble the meal packets:

For those who haven’t volunteered here before, each meal pack consists of the following:

1 scoop of dehydrated chicken powder:

1 scoop of dehydrated veggies:

1 cup of textured vegetable protein (TVP):

And 1 cup of rice:

After the bags are sealed and labeled, they look like this:

Our group along with other volunteers packed 13,824 meals that will feed 38 kids for 1 year.  While those numbers are exciting, the reality is that we used $2,350.08 in raw materials.  Ouch!  That's a lot of money!  Our hands helped pack those meals, but our pocketbooks need to do some helping too.  So, what else can you do?

Log onto http://www.fmsc.org/ and click on the "donate" button in the upper right hand corner.  A $30 donation will feed 6 children for a month.  Don't have $30 to donate?  Sign up to volunteer onsite.  Bring your spare change and dump it in the bucket.  Buy merchandise.  Spread the word.

Do something.

*Read blog posts from others who participated here.