Friday, April 23
7-8 pm
NOTE: This Friday we will be making crepes, and filling them with 2 sweet fillings and one savory filling. Please see below for a list of ingredients and tools.
Registration is required. You can register below or by contacting Donald, our Adult Program Coordinator, at adult@pawlinglibrary.org.
Televised cooking programs have never been more popular.
We love to eat, and to eat well.
Good food & good company always accompanies good conversation which is another reason for this unique program.
Each month Chef Peter Gobin will be talking about our favorite subject: food, and preparing a new dish to delight you.
Please join us for Dinner Table, to not only learn but to share your thoughts on your own special recipes & perhaps make new friends who, like yourself, love to cook!
About our presenter: I’d like to tell you a bit about my evolution as a chef. I have loved feeding people for as long as I can recall. I have also loved to educate and inspire, to instruct people through new and amazing experiences. I have always felt that these experiences should bring about a change in the way we see things. They should change how we feel about the everyday mundane necessities. Eating, for example, is a basic need, but something that I experienced early in life as a pleasure not to be squandered. I was fortunate to be surrounded by people who fostered this same attitude. It was through these people that I became intensely involved in food and experienced my first eggplant, my first perfect tomato, my first sushi and eventually my first caviar, foie gras and oyster.
I was pursuing a degree in English when I began my career in restaurants. I worked first in the front-of-house as a waiter and bartender. After several years of exposure to the unique culture of restaurant life through these positions, I ventured behind the scenes and into the kitchen at age 22. Struck by an initial obsession with pastry, I took a job as pastry chef at a small restaurant in my native Providence, Rhode Island. Before long, I turned my attention to savory fare and began working at Al Forno Restaurant, also in Providence, to start my first formal training in the kitchen with Chefs George Germon and Johanne Killeen. From Al Forno I migrated to the restaurant New Rivers to train with Chef Bruce Tillinghast, who himself had been instructed in purist French technique at Madeleine Kamman’s school, Modern Gourmet.
Long an admirer of the Los Angeles landmark establishment Patina, having drawn inspiration from the pages of its much circulated cookbook, I became determined to one day train in its kitchen. In 2002, I made the critical move to Los Angeles, where I obtained a coveted position at the high-profile restaurant, initially as a vegetable cook for Chef de Cuisine Eric Greenspan. When Patina moved downtown to the newly built Walt Disney Concert Hall, I was promoted to meat/fish chef and ultimately Sous Chef under Theo Shoenagger, an acclaimed Italian Chef from Northern Italy.
A year and a half later, Eric Greenspan invited me to accompany him to his new venue, Meson G, voted “Los Angeles’ Sexiest Restaurant 2005” by Angeleno Magazine. Another year later, I was recruited by Kor Hotel Group for the position of Executive Chef at the newly opened bistro in the Chamberlain West Hollywood Hotel. There my passion for French cuisine found full expression in a supportive, creative and intellectual environment.
I returned home to New England in 2008 to raise my family and to be part of the culinary revitalization here. I want to educate people about the joys of cooking and eating. In August of 2011 I opened Mijos Tacos, serving authentic LA style Mexican street food to the people of Providence. My commitment to local food and home cooking has never been stronger.
While pursuing an English degree, I started working as a server and quickly became obsessed with the food and beverage world. I decided to try my hand at pastry, and worked at Seven Stars Bakery for long enough to know that pastry wasn’t my passion. I then moved on to work as a prep cook at Al Forno and New Rivers in Providence. It was while I was at New Rivers that I discovered the Patina cookbook and decided that someday I would work at Patina. I moved to Los Angeles to pursue that dream. I worked my way up from veg cook to sous chef at Patina under Eric Greenspan, and Theo Shoenagger. I left Patina to be sous chef with Eric Greenspan at Meson G, before accepting an executive chef position at the Chamberlain Hotel in West Hollywood. It was there that I got to flex my creative muscles and really stretch out as a cook. The one constant during my time in LA was that after work, I’d head out for a few beers (or bourbons depending on how bad I got my butt kicked at work) and inevitably hit the taco trucks for late nite deliciousness. When I moved back to RI to raise my children, we celebrated having ready babysitters but mourned the loss of our beloved taco trucks. So, I started making tacos. First I made them for us and our friends who used to visit us in LA, then they started telling other people, and before I knew it I was feeding 20+ people at a stretch every time I made tacos and getting harassed for not making them often enough. I ran my taco truck around New England for 8 wonderful years and finally sold it for a less mobile cooking life in the winter of 2018. Food trucks are a young persons game. Now I offer private cooking lessons, personal chef services, in home fine dining and food and beverage consulting services. Let's have some fun.
For the crepes
4 eggs
2 teaspoons sugar
1.25 cups all purpose flour
.5 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
About .25 cup of cold water
Room temperature butter to grease the pan and a cheap brush to apply it
For the fillings
Any jam
Sour cream
Ricotta cheese
Ripe banana
Deli sliced thin ham and sliced swiss cheese
Tools
A skillet with sloped sides (nonstick or steel or anything is fine, a specialized crepe pan isn't needed but also fine)
A good flexible thin spatula or a butter knife or a cake spatula
A brush for brushing your pan with butter
Some spoons for our fillings
A plate to put the finished crepes on
About our presenter: Marian Grudko is the author of Lucinda Snowdrop and co-author of Claudine: A Fairy Tale for Exceptional Grownups, with T.A. Young. She is also a composer and storyteller, and her work can be seen on her new and evolving YouTube channel.
About our presenter: Tommy Zurhellen is an Associate Professor of English at Marist College, and the author of the award-winning Messiah Trilogy of novels that reimagine the life of Jesus in modern-day North Dakota: Nazareth, North Dakota (2011), Apostle Islands (2012) and Armageddon, Texas (2014), all from Atticus Books. His short fiction and essays have appeared widely in literary magazines such as Carolina Quarterly, Quarterly West, Passages North, The MacGuffin, Appalachee Review, South Dakota Review, River Oak Review, Crab Creek Review, Iconoclast, Red Mountain Review, Coal City Review, and elsewhere. Tommy is also co-host of the popular writing podcast, FICTION SCHOOL. 
We thank Pawling Recreation for partnering with our library to make this very special in-person presentation possible.
About our presenter: Diane Ingram is a Master Certified Coach (MCC) coach trainer with a degree in Psychology and Human Development. She is a student of the Diamond Approach, which fosters personal development through methods of meditation, present-moment awareness, and self-observation. Diane currently hosts her own radio show and is the author of four books, the most recent being “The Gift”. 
