Published: Judi Heidkamp
Published: Oct. 25, 2024
For many of us seniors living in Retirement communities, life during the Covid lockdown was pretty boring. After I had cleaned out all my closets and drawers, organized my office for the nth time, and zoomed around the country with family and old friends, what was there left to do to fill the endless hours. For me and my neighbors, it was a particularly lonely time. I live in my own free standing cottage adjacent to the main building. If you lived in an apartment in the main building, you were apt to see people regularly in the halls, at the mailbox, coming and going. If you lived in a cottage, you almost never saw anyone and if you lived alone, no spouse, you really saw no one except the staff who delivered meals and mail. It evolved into two years of isolation. To break that I started keeping blogs on a variety of subjects, and this one is about a cooking class I was privileged to join via Zoom.
The investment firm Neuberger Berman in New York City invited the world-class, renowned chef and restaurateur Jean-George Vongerichten to put on a cooking show just for their clients. A few days before the session, we received the menu and the shopping list.
The 3-course menu: fresh peach salad topped with a sweet-sour glaze and a dressing of goat cheese, roasted pistachios and crystalized Wasabi. The second course was roasted salmon seasoned with a spice mixture and placed over greens in a soup dish surrounded by a Thai broth. The broth was an infusion of herbs and that was a culinary technique I had never learned. Basically you chop the ingredients and bring them to a boil with coconut milk and water, simmer for 10 minutes, let sit for 2 minutes and then strain after which you add the herbs, bring to a quick boil and then process in a blender. The quick cooking process keeps the bright green colors.
The third course was his grandmother’s Pound Cake which I had baked earlier in the day. I followed the directions, put the cake in the oven, and took the dogs for a walk. Returning, I found my sous chef (and pot scrubber) daughter Katie had taken the cake out of the oven. It was burnt!!!
When traveling, it is said that “getting there is half the fun.” Well, shopping for this exotic list of ingredients was indeed fun. I visited three major stores and got their staffs helping me and ended up with most of the ingredients and substitutes for what was not available here. World-class chefs do not cook with ordinary ingredients! The session had been fixed at a time when a lot was going on in my personal life. My 40-plus year marriage was ending, so I was dealing with an angry soon-to-be-ex-husband with a caregiver he did not like, two small dogs under foot, and a son-in-law who spirited my husband away for several hours under the guise of needing his help for a project. The laptop computer was set up on the counter, all ingredients and tools at the ready, drumroll please…..let the cooking begin!
The picture part came through just fine. We had NO SOUND! Imagine, you are trying to follow complicated instructions and there is NO SOUND. Quickly we placed a phone call to my son in Boston who was also participating and he put the phone next to his computer and turned up the volume. Between the sound issues and the French chef’s heavy accent, it was hard to understand.
The actual dishes turned out the way they were intended to. But the broth was too spicy and everything was super complicated with unusual ingredients like kombu and kaffir leaves. The tiny kitchen that I have in my apartment home looked like a war zone and I truly felt like I had gone through a battle. I do have an appreciation for those $100 gourmet meals in fancy restaurants. Still, it was an interesting concept and I felt lucky to be included as it was the opportunity of a lifetime.
