New England Cooking School

This past fall I enrolled in a New England cooking class at the Critter Culinary Institute. The class was designed for beginners like myself. The class focused on traditional New England ingredients like farm fresh eggs, acorns and sunflower seeds. The first class involved gathering the ingredients. For the suburban critters used to dumpster diving this was a new experience. Living at the Woodpile, I was already an expert at natural foraging. However, collecting the eggs was a new experience to me. It is easy for you humans to collect the eggs, you are 10X bigger than those crazy chickens. But us ‘munks are a wee bit smaller. The chickens thought chasing us around the hen house was the most fun they had in years.

If you have never done any cooking or baking before, there is a lot to learn. We had to learn how “read” a recipe – who would have thought there was so many skills need to “read.” These recipes are written in a version of English I have never heard of before. What is the difference between a “tsp” and a “tbsp”? Next we had to learn the proper use of mixing spoons, rubber spatulas, whisks, sifters and whole host other “utensils.” Things got really interesting when we had to grease the baking pans with shortening. Suffice to say, I got more shortening on myself than the pan. I look like some punk rocker with my fur all greased. I had to take a bath in Dawn dish detergent to get cleaned up.

By the third class, the teacher thought we were ready to actually bake something. We were each assigned a cooking log counter and given our ingredients and a recipe book. We only had an hour to complete our task. I felt like I was on the British Baking Show. The pressure was on. What was our “technical challenge”? A traditional acorn and sunflower cake. The first task was to shell the seeds and acorns. Piece of cake for me although some of the suburban students struggled with this task. Our human teacher made the lesson about cracking the eggs open with one hand look easy. Even using all four of my paws, I couldn’t crack it. Finally I stuck the bowl on the floor and rolled the egg off the counter and it splattered in the bowl. I thought this was a brilliant solution until I spent fifteen minutes picking out the egg shells.

My assigned cooking log counter in class was bigger than my entire burrow. Who knew there were so many recipe books on New England cooking. These were the “textbooks” for the class

I am not an expert, but this recipe appears to be doing everything backwards

… Oh, I am reading it upside down, that could explain things.

How do you open the egg cartoon?

That’s ingenious the cover is hinged.

Yikes these eggs are as big as me, how am I supposed grab one and crack it open?

A traditional New England ingredient – acorns!

The recipe says to place the ingredients in the mixing bowl and combine.
I forgot which one is the bowl. Look this has a mixing spoon, this must be it.

What do you mean this is a baking pan not a mixing bowl?!

Can I get some more acorns … I sorta ate all of them.