Millennium Class: Fall Harvest 2008

This Sunday saw another fabulous vegan cooking class at Millennium, the gourmet vegan restaurant in the theater district of San Francisco. Taught by executive chef Eric Tucker, with trusty assistants Thomas, Claire, and Jen, these cooking classes are awesome, team-building, hands-on lessons in making the most of the best seasonal produce available at the SF Farmers Market with the expertise that can only come from an executive chef of a top-notch vegan restaurant.
Sunday is my only free day day of the week and I can't think of a better way to spend it than at a cooking class at Millennium. And there's nothing like a team-cooking experience to bring you together with other, cool, like-minded people.

OK. Enough gushing. Let's talk about the food.

Above, the heartier of the two soups: a mushroom gumbo with potato. Mushrooms included portobellos and cauliflower mushrooms. Below the lighter mushroom soup: with mirepoix, cauliflower and oyster mushrooms, with orange cauliflower. Both soups used cashew cream to add a creaminess and depth. And both were garnished with shaved matzutake mushrooms.

A delicious carrot and cabbage Curtido pickle:


To-die-for Heavenly Blue corn Papusas with pumpkin and roasted poblano filling:

Left-over papusa filling with extra corn meal and flour, deep fried into delicious dumplings:


Apple and habanero relish:

Wheatberry wild rice salad with black lentils and nuts with orange flavours:

Squash and carrot tagine:

Galette filled with greens (Stinging Nettles (which give a seafood flavor), Dino Kale, Escarole) with caramelized onions and cashew cream in a shortcrust pastry:


Fruit compote filling for crepes:

Crepes with creamy pumpkin filling:


(Sadly) not pictured (but heartily eaten), the delicious persimmon and cookie dough sorbet and the coconut and pomegranate sorbet, both of which were so good I forgot to take pictures of them! And the hazelnut -chocolate sauce! Divine!

Everything we made was delicious. The wheatberry salad was outstanding. I'm not big on grain salads, but this salad converted me!

Enjoy!

Links to previous posts on Millennium cooking classes:

Fall Harvest 2008

Southern Comfort Cooking Class

Spring Cooking Class

Fall Harvest Cooking Class

Chiles Class

Tomatoes Class