US Potatoes cooking demo

The promoters from US Potatoes were back in Penang last week and in a jam-packed afternoon session at 218 Macalister, they brought along a dietician-nutritionist to bolster their mandatory and ever popular cooking demonstration. 

Georgen Thye was the dietician with more than 10 years of experience in nutrition and dietetics. He founded Georgen Cooking, a platform that aims to make healthy eating and cooking easy and fun. He sits in the editorial advisory board of Health Today magazine and is a council member of the Malaysian Dietitians' Association. He is featured regularly in the local media, including on TV and radio. 

Georgen kicked off the session with a fascinating talk on nutrition (what else?) and brought home the point that the potato is a healthy food. For example, the potassium content in potatoes is three times more than that in bananas. And I was surprised to learn that the potato can provide 38.5% of our daily requirement of Vitamin C. Of course, all these numbers do not tell you the whole story because at the end of the day. it also depends on how much potato you need to consume to achieve these figures. 

Although Georgen didn't term himself as a celebrity chef, there was no doubt that he could show his familiarity with the kitchen by whipping up some simple but interesting snacks that used potatoes, in particular, US Potatoes, as a main ingredient. His main demonstration was to make crispy US Potato snowflakes.

The appearance of Chef Federico Michieletto was the obvious highlight of the session. I must say that this Italian chef was not unfamiliar to me. In a previous US Potatoes cooking demonstration here, he had been one of the featured chefs. Last week though, he was the ONLY chef. Thus, all eyes and ears were trained on him. Chef Federico has lived in Malaysia for 15 years or so, and well settled down as the Executive Chef of Equatorial Kuala Lumpur. For his cooking demo in Penang, he had devised two recipes. The first was a Homemade US Potatoes Russet Gnocchi while the second was a US Potato Frittata.

By the way, I bumped into a number of friends at the cooking demo. It so happened that there was quite a number of ladies around. Actually, they quite filled up the room at the 218 Macalister. I found out later that they were from the Rose Charity, Penang Women Chamber of Commerce, the Joyluck club and the Penang State Chinese Association, the last mentioned now serving as the de facto baba-nyonya organisation in the state.