Cooking with Mom - Connect Savannah.com

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Cooking with Mom - Connect Savannah.com

Cooking with Mom - Connect Savannah.com

Posted: 05 May 2021 01:05 AM PDT

The Mansion on Forsyth is offering an opportunity to celebrate moms with a little bit of quality time and a lot of quality food through their 700 Kitchen Cooking School's Mother's Day class on May 9, plus ongoing classes every week. Participants can join Chef Jason Winn for an intimate culinary experience and maybe even learn something along the way.Winn, originally from Dallas, Texas, has been working as an executive chef for over 20 years and began teaching classes at the Mansion in 2019. "My mom is a retired school teacher and my dad was a college professor so I guess you could say it's in my blood," Winn said. The Mother's Day themed class will be a brunch paired with fruit, danishes, salad, peach bellinis, coffee, juice and mimosas. The four main dishes to be taught to the class are a Mediterranean-style frittata, a shrimp bisque, a roasted tenderloin with homemade horseradish sauce and croque monsieur, a French ham and cheese sandwich topped with a poached egg. Plus, dessert options including ricotta cheesecake, lemon cheese pie and blueberry buttermilk pie.Since reopening after closing due to the pandemic, Winn said classes have been busier than ever with lots of locals joining in on the fun, most of them beginners. "You don't have to be an expert to come in," he said. "This is not a culinary boot camp. It's just a fun night out with great food."Chef Jason teaches classes six-days a week, year-round and offers a Farmer's Market tour on Saturdays where he said the class selects ingredients from the market and creates a farm-to-table meal that is a "total off-the-cuff, random menu," as part of a three-course brunch with mimosas. The themes vary each week and include Southern classes, Italian classes, An Introduction to India, La Cocina Mexicana, Low Country Staples, International Street Food, Date Night and Ladies' Night. Private and intermediate level classes are also available. Winn's diverse cooking background ensures there is always something different to try. "It's been fun for me to get to cook everyday because when you are an executive chef there's days where you don't pick up a knife," he said. "You are doing paperwork and meetings. I'm spared of most of that and I just do things related to the cooking class."The 700 Cooking School invites guests of all ages and skill levels into their state-of-the-art kitchen to come together for a three-hour class and help create an elegant meal while spending time together. "I love to see the guests interacting with each other because they find that they all have something in common, you know; food kind of brings everybody together," Winn said. "At the end of the day we are just having fun." The Mansion on Forsyth's 700 Kitchen Cooking School is located at 700 Drayton St., Savannah. For information, visit mansion.classesbykessler.com.

Next up at NoHi: Akron chef owes mom for his love of cooking with a Jamaican twist - Akron Beacon Journal

Posted: 05 May 2021 03:06 AM PDT

It was really his mother's dream to open a Jamaican restaurant.

Her son Marvin Ferguson has made it a reality — first from a popular food truck and now to a weekend stint as the guest chef at the NoHi Pop-up in Akron's North Hill neighborhood.

Born in St. Catherine Parish, Jamaica, Ferguson said he learned his way around the kitchen watching his mother cook.

Her dream was to move to America and open a restaurant here.

She even attended business school to help prepare.

"Sadly, she became sick soon after she graduated and the doctors told her that she would not be able to work due to her condition," he said. "Her dream was shattered."

But Ferguson said that didn't stop her from cooking for friends and at church.

"They could not get enough," he said. "As a teenager at that time, I did not understand all of the hype.

"My preference was hamburgers, pizza, and fries. Keep the oxtail, beef patties and callaloo."

Looking back, he realizes it was his mother's dream that impacted his own life.

"I remember watching my mother cook and saw the utter joy that she had when people ate her food," Ferguson said. "I loved to see this happiness in her. I started to understand this cooking happiness that came over my mother."

When his mother died while he still in college, he said, he was "crushed" and his own love for cooking was put on the back burner.

During a later trip to Jamaica to meet some long-lost siblings, Ferguson said, his interest in cooking was sparked again.

"My sister, Marcia, cooked for me every day while I was there," he said. "When she cooked for me, I saw the same joy in her eyes that I had seen in my mother."

Following his mother's path, Ferguson said, he started cooking for friends and relatives too and even took some cooking classes in Aruba.

"I had a renewed appreciation for the oxtails, rice and peas, beef patties that I used to despise as a child," he said. "I wanted to carry on my mother's dream of owning a restaurant."

And that's where Bruce's Jamaican Fusion Soul Food truck was born.

So this weekend, he plans to honor his own mother on Mother Day's weekend with the Bruce's Jamaican Fusion Soul pop up at NoHi.

The menu is a mix of family and traditional and Jamaican recipes with each dish named after someone in the family.

"Jhourni's Festival is for of my daughter who loves to bake," he said of the cornmeal fritters dish. "She came up with this dough and adjusted the sweetness to create a perfectly fried festival."

The menu includes an oxtail platter served with rice and peas and collaloo and a curry chick pea wrap served with jerk fries and Caribbean cabbage.

For dessert, Ferguson is  serving peach cobbler cheesecake.

The North Hill Community Development Corp.took over the kitchen of the former Mexico City Restaurant — before that the Office City Tavern — at 778 N. Main St. and once a week invites a new budding chef and menu to take over the place and offer food for just one weekend.

Bruce's Jamaican Fusion Soul will be open for business for just one weekend from noon to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 1-6 p.m. Sunday, with all dishes to-go only amid the pandemic.

To order, call 234-231-1645 or visit https://ift.tt/39HOSTu.

Craig Webb can be reached at cwebb@thebeaconjournal.com.


from What to Cook https://ift.tt/3fa8lxV
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