Ever wonder how to add some excitement to a bowl of bland carrots? Oddly enough, I have. In fact, that very quandary landed me in Chef David Kamen’s flavor dynamics class at the Culinary Institute of America last weekend. Through lectures, tastings, and hands-on cooking sessions I learned the “physiology of taste and development of flavor.” I also found out how frying, grilling, roasting, sauteing and poaching can alter a food’s flavor and change my humdrum carrots into a sexy side dish. This was neither my first food enthusiast’s class nor my first encounter with Chef Kamen. Last spring I had taken Chef Kamen’s day-long “Food Affinities” session. There the students delved into what foods and flavors complimented and paired well with one another. We also got clued into a fantastic resource, Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page’s “Culinary Artistry.” My secret weapon when conjuring up recipes, it devotes hundreds of pages to what foods work well together. After a 2-hour classroom lecture, complete with tastings and discussions, our 15-member class had broken up into teams of three. Each group was assigned a food basket filled with ingredients from which it …