My mother is a great cook even if cooks just simple dishes. I bet my life on them that they’re tasty. But it’s been years since the last time we savour her dishes as she is now old and weak and no longer able to do so.
Now we prepare food for each of our own family but their incomparable with mom’s cooking. It’s in out bucket list to improve our cooking skills but time doesn’t permit as we’re busy with our careers.
We were really thankful when Eden Nature Park and Resort invited us, along with other moms and even dads, for its Mamma Mia Mother’s Day cooking demo with Chef Bianca Delgado of the Center for Asian Culinary Studies (CACS) and Chef
Mahal Baghucan of Eden on Mother’s Day.
Me and my sissies let our hair down and had fun doing something new to us.
Donned in our Eden apron and armed with our mini cookbook, Chef Mahal taught us how to bake margherita and four-cheese pizzas. We made them from scratch – from making the dough to topping the ingredients.
Any excellent pizza starts with its dough. Everything is held together and the texture and flavor of the pizza are provided by the dough. Furthermore, freshness is a crucial component that may make all the difference when it comes to dough.
Fresh dough is made from scratch using flour, yeast, water, olive oil, and other salt. We mixed, kneaded, and allowed to stand for five minutes before being shaped into a pizza crust and placed into the pizza pan. For the margherita, we spread it with pizza sauce, sliced tomato, and basil leaves over pizza sauce while for the four cheese flavor, we topped it with cheddar cheese, parmesan, mozzarella, and quickmelt.
The staff of Vista Restaurant collected our pizza pans to bake them. After our pizza-baking skills were honed, Chef Bianca showed us how to cook various pasta recipes namely Napoletana, chicken Alfredo, and spicy Asian (vegetarian), also from scratch – from making the noodles to the sauces.
Like fresh dough for pizza, freshly made noodles have a unique texture, which is described as decadent.
Using our hands we mixed the flour, eggs, olive oil, and salt. We then kneaded the dough until smoothened and let it rest for 30 minutes. Then we cut the dough into two and flattened each portion with a rolling pin. Some of us used the pasta flatten machine and we blanched the pasta in a pot of boiling water.
We also prepared the sauces for each pasta flavor.
Hand kneading the dough made our arms tired, it was likely as we kneaded sufficiently. The most exciting part was we also sampled and brought home the pizzas and pasta we made.
After the cooking demo some of the moms also availed the free facials available in the resort.
It was super fun and we enjoyed the satisfaction of a job well done.
