For Christmas this year, I was considering some special gift that involved Berta and I as a couple, rather than (really, in addition to) single for-her gifts.  While I was looking through the West Chester Night School catalog, I saw their couples cooking classes and knew that I had found the right thing.

The couples cooking classes take place at the Kitchen Workshop in Paoli.  It's a store-front location, with all of the available floor space dedicated to cooking classes.  There is a kitchen area with a large island and many cutting boards.  In the back is a large dining table for guests to eat at.  And the walls are covered with cooking books of all types, apparently given to Art, the owner of the place, as gifts - that he doesn't seem to need - and put out in the Workshop on sale for $5 each.

Last weekend was the first of two classes that I registered us for, a cajun cooking class.  We were the first to arrive, having planned to meet at the Workshop separately due to our proximity to the place from work.  There, we were provided glasses of wine or tea, and allowed to mingle with the other chefs-to-be until the class was ready to start.

We didn't get to learn too much about the others attending the workshop, but what little we learned, we liked.  It's odd that when you come together for a one-shot workshop like this, you never really expect to see the people again, and can both relax about being who you are and not really making an impressive impression.  Or maybe I'm thinking too much of it.  Still, I'm amused by the thought of this casual intimacy.  After all, we were all slicing up food that we would eat later in the evening.

And that's mostly what we learned to do: slice up food.  I find recipes easy if they work, and there are very few recipes that I've made that failed because of the recipe itself.  But what was new that I learned from the class were a few preparation tricks that I can use in the kitchen.  Particularly, the information that Sandie, our teacher, conveyed about knives was interesting to me.

We don't really have good kitchen knives at home.  Most of ours are the serrated edge kind that tear your food up.  I suppose if I've been getting the job done this way for this long, it can't be too bad, but the knowledge we gained about honing knives, their handling, and how you can use a single knife of a certain kind for practically anything you do in the kitchen is useful and has me wanting to look for a similar knife to use in our kitchen at home.

There was also some useful information about vanilla extract, which you can make on your own at home just by putting some vanilla beans into a bottle of vodka.  We also learned a quick way to grate garlic with a knife and some salt that doesn't use an impossible-to-clean garlic press.  Lessons were a little light on learning not to chop your fingers off by curling your fingers in.  I think this is a completely unnatural way of holding something to cut, and will likely never learn to do it right now that I'm in the habit of doing it incorrectly.

Thankfully, none of the five dishes that we prepared for our cajun cooking lesson contained any fingertips from knife accidents.  We made green peppers stuffed with cream cheese and wrapped in bacon, a chicken/andouille sausage/shimp jambalaya, red beans with rice, andouille succotash, and bread pudding with brandy apricot sauce.  Of these, I think I liked the jambalaya best, but everything was good.  The red beans had a nice kick to them.  I didn't think I would like the succotash, being what it is, but it turns out when cooked in this style, it's pretty good.  The bread pudding was tasty too, but as Berta pointed out, this recipe is mostly the same as the one we use for our Christmas stuffed French toast, just with brandy and apricot jelly added instead of cream cheese.  Still, tasty.

After we all chopped up our ingredients, threw them in various pots, and finished cooking, we sat at the dining table and ate the food.  It was delicious.  After dinner, we talked about various topics, as if at a large dinner party.  Like I said, it was a nice no-pressure environment for casual talk, over the setting of food.

Probably the best part of the whole evening - certainly worth a separate mention - is that they had a couple of nice ladies there to clean everything.  If you get a container dirty, they clean it.  Cutting board?  Wiped off.  Knives?  Cleaned.  And all the dinner plates go to them to be rinsed and placed in the dishwasher, so there was virtually no cleanup on our part.  Everyone commented on how nice it would be to have that at home.  This will likely be the cause of many home-chef's confusion over why the experience at school was so much better than when they tried to reproduce it at home.

In all, it was a great time.  We didn't learn a whole lot in the way of "Cajun Food" (apart from Cajun being kind of like the people's food versus Creole, which is more aristocratic) but the little tips were well worthwhile, and the company - both Berta and the other couples - was certainly worth the adventure.

It's no secret that we like to grill food and that people like to eat food that we've grilled. That's why the slow and ultimate demise of our grill over the past year was a bit upsetting.

The grill didn't survive the move very well. I think it's also possible that something broke inside it, but every time we used it after the move it essentially caught on fire. The insides would flame long after the gas was off, and it would happen every time we cooked with it. The flames were high and uncontrollable, and we just couldn't use it any more.

At some point, the wildlife became aware of the fact that we weren't using the grill any more, and decided to make use of this sheltered space. When Berta cut down the tall grass surrounding the deck, the local birds made great efforts in moving a ton of it into the grill to start building their second home in its confines. Yes, they did this twice.

We do a cookout every year (or try to) for my birthday, and invite everyone over. This year, we hope to invite a brand new crowd -- Some old friends, some new neighbors, some co-workers, and some other friends we don't usually invite to these things for one reason or another. But in preparation for the big cookout this year, we needed a new grill.

We shopped around a bit. Part of the problem with selecting a grill is that you don't want something that is going to fall apart after a year or two. Not that our old grill was this way - it lasted about 8 years - but I'm simply under the impression that a grill is a piece of hardware that you should not have to replace but in a rare circumstance. We have friends with grills that are very old, and I don't see why we shouldn't have our grill for just as long.

We looked at a few different brand names that we knew would last long. We wanted a big grilling surface, and I specifically wanted some different options for cooking. A griddle was top on my list beyond the standard grilling, and a rotisserie followed shortly after that.

Many of the newer grill models have this "infrared" cooking business, where they essentially heat up some ceramic element, and the radiation from that element cooks the food. It's supposed to be more like cooking with charcoal. I think it's a gimmick.

In any case, we settled on this Perfect Flame model. It has three sections of grill that can be removed for cleaning, and it comes with a griddle section so that I can cook my veggies and eggs on the grill itself. There is one of those weird infrared side burners that is supposed to be good for roasting. (I wonder if I can cook corn on it.) And there is a burner for a rotisserie, but there the rotisserie parts themselves - including the spit and turner - are sold separately.

We've only cooked a couple of burgers on the grill so far, being that it's so new yet, but they turned out alright. I'm looking forward to tossing a steak or some salmon on there to see what we can do with it, and I hope that it serves use well for this year's cookout as well as many cookouts in the future.