From Fancy to Finger Food

Over the summer I decided to treat myself to a cooking class, sort of like a graduation present to myself. I had several classes in mind, but I settled on "Cooking Without a Recipe". My confidence in throwing together a meal from whatever ingredients are around has improved over the last couple of years, but I still felt that I could benefit from a class on flavor pairings and techniques. It was an all-day class, with a demo in the morning and then cooking in groups after lunch. For some reason, I thought a few hours of watching someone else cook might get boring, but it was awesome. Food Network live, but you get to eat the food . We were in groups of three for the afternoon session. We were handed a list of ingredients and told to sketch out a menu (we did three courses). At first, I had really wanted to work with meat, because I feel that that's a weakness of mine, but I was itching to bake that day. I saw oranges and almonds on the list, which reminded me that