This is the first in a series of cooking classes on making healthy and delicious meals with Chinese Herbs. Learn authentic Cantonese style cooking from a Cantonese Chef.

Class Information:
Eating healthy doesn’t necessarily mean you have to compromise on taste. Over thousands of years, the Cantonese from Southern China have refined and mastered the art of integrating food with medicine to make tasty dishes that you and your family/patients will love to eat.

Beginning with How to Cook Chinese Herbal Chicken Soup, chef/instructor Henry Jun Wah Lee will introduce you to Cantonese cooking and how it can help you make wellness, and longevity a normal part of your everyday life.

Benefits of the Chinese Herbal Chicken Soup:

The herbal soup you will be learning to make is a tonic that is perfect for the coming winter as it warms the body, boosts your Qi or vital energy, builds blood, and strengthens the immune system. You will also learn several modifications include one for post partum women to aid them in their recovery after child birth.

In the class How to Cook Chinese Herbal Chicken Soup you will:

1. Enjoy a bowl of Chinese Herbal Chicken Soup. Trying to buy this at a quality restaurant can cost you $15-$25 a bowl, if you can find it.
2. Participate in a live demonstration of the entire preparation and cooking process. The class will be taught in a working kitchen.
3. Learn where to shop for ingredients – including how to get sulfur-free, pesticide-free and/or organic herbs.
4. Learn the philosophy behind Cantonese cooking.
5. Gain a deeper understanding of the properties of foods which will help you decide how to shop and modify dishes for your specific constitution or condition.
6. Receive useful handouts and a bag of herbs you can take home and make your own soup with right away.

This is a beginner cooking class for people who want to play an active role in their own health and well-being. You don’t have to be a good cook nor do you have to have any knowledge of Chinese Herbs or Chinese Medicine. Henry will guide you through the whole process in this fast and fun half-day class.

Class Fee: $58.00 (before Dec. 1) or $68.00 (on or after Dec. 1). Fee also includes a bowl of soup, handouts and herbs you can take home.

Day and Time: Saturday, December 12th, 2009 from 9 am to 1 pm.

Location: Los Angeles, California. Exact location to be determined.

Class size is limited to 12 people maximum so reserve your space early!

For more information or to register, please contact Henry at 310-980-8645 or email info@henryjunwahlee.com

About Henry Jun Wah Lee
Henry Jun Wah Lee is a Medical Qigong instructor with a Masters degree in Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine. He has been cooking since he was a child, learning and honing his skills in his family’s Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia, PA where he grew up. His bicultural background provides him with unique insights on bridging the gap many westerners face when learning Chinese Medicine, or integrating Chinese wellness practices into their lives. For more information, please visit www.HenryJunWahLee.com

About Cantonese Cuisine:
Southern Chinese (Cantonese) cuisine is renowned both internationally as well as across China for its delicious flavors, diverse and exotic ingredients and health benefits. Cantonese cooking has been refined for more than 2,000 years – much longer than most civilizations have existed. Its depth, history, and wisdom are revealed not just in its flavors but also in its integration with other aspects of living – health, culture, art and philosophy.

For the Cantonese, food isn’t just something tasty you put in your mouth. Food is life. Food is medicine. It is how we can nourish our bodies as well as our minds and spirits. Thanks to the influence of the Taoists, developers of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Cantonese cooks look not just for flavor and freshness but also for taste, temperature and other medicinal properties of foods. Chinese herbs are a natural part of everyday cooking and goes into soups and dishes. They can be used for prevention, overall wellness, longevity and for specific illnesses.

Weasel Picked Coffee Truffles
Want to taste one of the most expensive coffee beans in the world but don’t want to pay $200 a pound? Now you can try it in my Coffee and Almond truffle. These coffee truffles were made using the old fashioned Vietnamese style of brewing to give it a nice deep flavor and aroma, plus a tad of grit. Paired with Valrhona Alpaco dark chocolate from Ecuador and organic almond extract. Yum!

So why is weasel picked coffee so good? From Wikipedia:

A popular and intuitive hypothesis to justify this coffee’s reputation proposes that the beans are of superior quality before they are even ingested. At any given point during a harvest, some coffee berries are not quite ripe or overripe, while others are just right. The palm civet (weasel) evolved as an omnivore that naturally eats fruit and passes undigested material as a natural link to disperse seeds in a forest ecosystem. Where coffee plants have been introduced into their habitat, civets only forage on the most ripe berries, digest the fleshy outer layer, and later excrete the seeds eventually used for human consumption. Thus, when the fruit is at its peak, the seeds (or beans) within are equally so, with the expectation that this will come through in the taste of a freshly brewed cup.

Human Picked Yuzu Truffles
Made with Yuzu juice from Japan and dark chocolate from the Caribbean! The fruit was most likely picked by human hands. This fruit is something of a blend between a grapefruit and a mandarin orange. Sour and aromatic, it is used a lot in cooking. Ingredients: Fair-Trade & Pesticide-Free Valrhona Caraibe 66% Dark Chocolate from the Caribbean, organic heavy cream, organic butter, yuzu juice from Japan, unsweetened cocoa powder, and lots of love. Enjoy!

I love to make things. Cooking is one of my favorite ways to do it because food can be creative, spiritual and practical. Cooking is an art form in that you are only limited by your imagination in how you can bring ingredients together to make good food. The final product can inspire and delight the senses. In fact, it is the only art form that can satisfy all 5 senses. The cooking process is like a moving meditation, one that gets you connected to nature and allows your love and energy to flow into your cooking. Your guests will taste and appreciate that difference. Cooking is also practical because, at the end of the day, we all need to eat. And it is always better to eat good healthy food made with love than crap processed by a machine.

Recently I’ve been expanding my cooking into candy making. I have a sweet tooth, especially when it comes to dark chocolate. But I am very picky about quality, flavor and social responsibility. I am also tired of compromising on one of those values as I passively wait to find the right one made by someone else. So what better solution than to make my own?! Read on to learn my recipe.

Great tasting food starts with high quality ingredients. For my truffles, I start with the finest chocolate in the world made by Valrhona. Valrhona is a world renown French chocolate manufacturer founded in 1922. They produce vintage chocolates made from a single year’s harvest from a specific plantation. Valrhona’s chocolate is used by top chefs around the world and their cocoa beans are Fair Trade and, while not organic, they are grown without pesticides. Because they have a wide range of chocolates grown on their plantations in South America, the Caribbean, Oceania and Africa, I recommend you sample and find out the right one for you. For this recipe I will be using their Guanaja 70% dark chocolate, which is a blend of Criollos and Trinitaros cocoa beans from South America. It has a very chocolate taste, exceptional bittersweetness, and stays very long on the palate. It is regarded as one of their best.

Ingredients List:
10 oz Valrhona Guanaja 70% dark chocolate
8 oz Heavy Cream (hormone free or organic)
1.75 oz Organic Butter – room temperature
Unsweetened Valrhona Cocoa Powder
Melon Baller

Directions:
1. Finely chop up the chocolate and put into a large bowl or mixing bowl.
2. Put the butter in the bowl as well.
2. On a medium flame, heat up the heavy cream, stirring occasionally, and bring to a boil.
3. Pour the boiling cream onto the chocolate and butter.
4. Using a whisk, stir the mixture together until smooth. Stir vigorously but you don’t want to beat it because it will introduce unwanted air bubbles into the ganache.
5. Place bowl in the refrigerator to cool for 15 minutes. Then put into freezer for 30 – 40 minutes so the ganache becomes firm. Then remove from freezer.
6. Use your melon baller and scoop out balls of the ganache. Roll them between your hands to make the shapes smooth. Remember these are truffles and imperfections are ok. They don’t have to be perfectly round. Also, the longer you roll them for, the more that melts on your hands. You don’t want that!
7. Roll the balls in a plate of unsweetened cocoa powder (or other toppings such as nuts).
8. Place in freezer for 15 minutes to set.
9. Cover or wrap and then place in refrigerator for extended life. But eat them at room temperature!