This past Sunday, I attended a blogger cooking class hosted by Katie from Live Half Full. She organized with the folks over at Whole Foods Market Northbrook and it was such a blast! I think I’ll let the photos do most of the talking, but I will say- it was a delicious and fun filled evening!
We started off with some drinks: fresh-pressed juices made by Whole Foods. I LOVED the Eye Opener- tasty!
Our instructors Robin and Sarah led us through the evening and were very knowledgeable and helpful! They came up with a delicious, plant-based menu for us to prepare!
We started preparing our dinner for the evening by making the dough for our whole wheat pasta noodles. Super easy…except I managed to add in an egg white as opposed to the egg yolk–whoops. #pregnancybrain Luckily, we were able to salvage the dough.
Then, while our dough was resting, we got started on a veggie-based marinara sauce. My cooking partner Amy and I went to town chopping our veggies.
So much color…and so healthy!
This sauce was seriously amazing. We browned onions and deglazed the pan by adding vegetable stock instead of oil before adding the rest of our veggies. It smelled SO good and was loaded with nutrients! At first, I wasn’t sure about having a chunky marinara sauce, but it was divine. We also had the option to put the sauce in the blender, but I don’t think we wanted to wait any longer to devour it!
After the sauce got to cookin, we started on dessert: a mixed berry cobbler. It was sugar free, although Amy and I personalized ours a bit by adding some nuts and date sugar.
After we had the cobbler in the oven, it was time to prepare our salads. We were given a $20 gift card and were told we had 15 minutes to go into the store and shop for ingredients for our salads. (I felt like a contestant straight out of Guy’s Grocery Games!)
We ended up adding pistachios and dried tart cherries from the bulk bins and got a variety of veggies from the salad bar too.
When we went to check out, we barely hit $10 bucks, which was surprising to me because I always had the mentality that Whole Foods was super expensive, but turns out their prices on the items we got weren’t bad at all!
Then, we prepared a super healthy avocado dressing using a Vitamix blender. (The Vitamix is seriously amazing, by the way.) The dressing was super flavorful and actually contained nutritional yeast, which was something I had never had before. But I read the nutrition info and it is great stuff!
After that, we finished by making our noodles- my favorite part! We used a pasta press to make linguini noodles. I had never made noodles from scratch before and loved preparing it.
Ta daa! Noodles! (Since they were fresh, they only took 90 seconds or so to cook.) And honestly, I have never tasted better noodles in my life. They were so much more filling and wholesome than the standard noodles I eat from a box. Now if I just had the time to make noodles from scratch every time….
Then, at long last, we got to eat!
Everything was delicious- it was hard to choose a favorite! But I really, really like the pasta and marinara sauce.
During our meal, we also saw two additional demos on how to make cocoa date truffles and fruit smoothies- both of which were delicious!
I had such a great time at Whole Foods Market in Northbrook and can’t wait to do another class in the future! Perfect night out idea with friends, bloggers, significant other, etc.
Thanks to Sarah and Robin and to Katie for a wonderful Whole Foods Blogger Cooking Class! #WFMPlantProteinParty
Have you ever done a cooking class?
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