Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Eat Real Fest 2010

The Kitchen of Champions served up delicious slow-cooked beef brisket sliders with a horseradish aioli and caramelized onions on a soft challah roll with house made slaw on the slide for the meat-eaters and polenta with a wild mushroom ragout and house made fire roasted tomato marinara topped with shredded parmesan for the veggies at the latest Eat Real Festival. We sold over 1500 of these dishes over the course of the 3-day festival at Jack London Square. During the fiasco, news heartthrob Jana Katsuyama covered our program in a brief segment on KTVU channel 2!

Enjoy the slideshow:








Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Kitchen of Champions Get an Intern!

Molly Aigner has signed on to work with the Kitchen of Champions staff through the Lutheran Volunteer Corps. Hailing from Seattle, Molly will be doing many different things including BLOG and FACEBOOK updates. We are excited to have her on board!
The first of many possibly embarrassing photos

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Fish with Kitchen on Fire

Yesterday our great friends and supporters Chef Mike C. and Oliveman of Kitchen on Fire came by to cut up 13 pounds of whole fish. Trout, snapper and milkfish were involved. In the end, 20 of our finest Kitchen of Champions trainees left with the ability to carve up a fish... along with to-go containers of freshly made Herb Roasted White Fish with fennel, corn, red onion and arugula relish and Mediterranean Seafood Stew. I have had very few seafood dishes in my life better than that seafood stew. Need the recipe? Email me!





























Tuesday, August 17, 2010

KofC Marinara Sauce Pilot and a... Film Crew?

In the not-so-distant future, the Kitchen of Champions will be making its very own shelf-stable canned goods. Our good friends at Terra Bella Family Farm are supplying us with some of their surplus vegetables this summer and we will make all sorts of delicious goods moving forward. Farmer Joe stopped by yesterday with boxes of tomatoes, eggplants, herbs and more, and 4 hours later we had our very first batch of sauce-- a roasted tomato and eggplant marinara with savory, rosemary, chives, basil, marjoram and tarragon. Not too shabby! In the next few weeks we will be processing over 600 jars of this for distribution in their CSA, so be sure to subscribe to their delicious basket of fresh, local produce!

So while this was happening in the kitchen, a supporter of SVDP called REDF came by with a large film crew to interview one of our trainees named Son. Then I went home and ate a bunch of pasta with delicious marinara sauce.




























Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Field Trip! City Slicker Farms' "Secret Garden"

The group took a field trip to the Santa Fe neighborhood of Oakland to City Slicker Farms' "Secret Garden." This garden produces most of CSF's produce that is sold at their neighborhood market at 16th and Center in West Oakland.