Chef Lisa Futterman is not accustomed to doing one thing at a time. It’s Saturday morning at the Chopping Block, the Lincoln Park culinary shop where she teaches. As the students in her Rustic Italian class wander in (mostly young women, with a few husbands in tow), she peels and deveins a pile of shrimp, measures butter into a small white bowl, washes a stack of celery, and sucks down a spare peach, talking the whole time.
Futterman teaches her students to cook, but first she teaches them to eat. She wants people to be led by their senses, to decide what to cook based on the ingredients at the farmers’ market today, not the recipe chosen a week ago. Mostly, she wants to get her students to trust themselves. “People are too tied to cooking time, so what they do is, if the recipe says 30 minutes, they take it out in 30 minutes, even if it’s not done. I teach them how to tell if it’s done.”
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“All right. How about some roasted peppers? It’s fine to buy roasted peppers in a jar, as long as you buy good roasted peppers in a jar, which are 20 percent off this month at the Chopping Block.” She smiles and fishes one out. “Now, these are in brine–no! They’re not in brine! They’re in their own juices. You can buy them in brine and they taste all pickley. These taste nice and sweet and roasted peppery. I think I’ll use a red and a yellow. For prettiness.”
Someone always has to ask: How long should you cook pasta?
