Annual food and wine festival held at Lakeview
t’s all about making it your own.
Such was the advice of several chefs at the 27th Festival of Food and Wine held last weekend at Lakeview Golf Resort and Spa in Morgantown, W.Va.
The yearly event brings in chefs from a myriad of restaurants together with foodies from surrounding states for a weekend that focuses on experiencing new cuisines and learning how to make them.
The dishes ranged from items such as an African peanut soup to pumpkin tiramisu and from oysters au gratin to French Quarter beignets.
Maria Daniele, who prepared a vegetarian soup, said that she played around a bit, making it several times to get the seasonings right where she wanted them.
Daniele doesn’t make a habit of measuring ingredients, instead relying on her palate to dictate what something needs or doesn’t.
And that’s the fun of cooking, she said.
“I just like to wing it. Cooking is like an experiment. If you don’t like it, you add to it or take something away, and it’s really interesting what you come up with,” she said.
Her recipe makes a big batch of the soup, but Daniele said it can be cut down or frozen. The spicy concoction also raids the spice cabinet for a unique blend of seasonings, including nutmeg, allspice and cumin.
It’s finished off with peanuts and scallions at the end.
Her brother, Alfredo “Fred” Daniele, prepared pasta carbonara, a recipe he developed after someone at their restaurant asked for it. Having tasted that style of pasta all over Italy, Fred Daniele said he relied upon experimenting with the recipe and finding out what tasted the best to him.
That, he said, is the way to cook.
Fred Daniele is the head chef at the family’s restaurant, Franco’s Lounge in Williamsport.
He said the restaurant’s version of the pasta dish has been a hit with customers and is simple to replicate. Pasta carbonara is a rich dish that includes smoked ham and is finished off with eggs.
“They’re great flavors and it’s a great comfort food. We love it,” he said.
Jonathan Buchner, executive chef at Quail Hollow Resort in Painesville, Ohio, calls it “intuitive cooking.”
While recipes are nice and can be a good guide while learning how to make a dish, after the first time, it’s unnecessary to follow one to the letter.
“Make your own dish,” he said.
Brian Yarborough, the food and beverage director at Lakeview, agreed.
“After you make it once with the recipe, make it your own,” he said. “You can never go wrong at home.”
Chef Marion Ohlinger taught a recipe-free class on fusing Appalachian and Japanese cooking. He prepared a kaiseki, which is a traditional Japanese meal that involves several courses, using ingredients like ramps or fiddlehead ferns, which are found in the area.
If the combination sounds strange, Ohlinger doesn’t care.
“If some people like it, that’s enough. If everybody likes it, you’re pretty boring,” he said.
Ohlinger said he is dedicated to making the freshest possible foods and to getting his ingredients as locally as possible.
Ohlinger runs Richwood Grill, a farm-to-table organic restaurant in Morgantown.
He said he believes in getting back to the basics, making food that tastes good. In one dish, he steamed catfish with ginger and pickled ramps. The ramps were pickled in part to preserve them but also in part to mellow their rather strong flavor, Ohlinger said.
“Ramps are particularly potent. + They make garlic taste like cotton candy,” he said.
Like the other chefs, Ohlinger said he doesn’t measure when he cooks.
“I don’t believe you cook from the head, you cook from the heart. You cook from the soul. You cook by instinct,” he said.
And like anything, cooking is like practice. If anyone in the audience did it 70 hours a week, Ohlinger said they would also be good at it.
He believes in the “slow food” movement, and is moving toward starting a chapter of Slow Food USA in Morgantown.
He described the movement as the opposite of fast food – a movement structured around getting people into the kitchen making their own food with fresh ingredients.
“The cavemen did it. Why can’t we?” he asked. “The whole idea of eating what you have, where you are + is becoming lost in what I call a suburban society.”