Been meaning to create and post this video for a while. It's not great quality, but it gets my point across.

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.

I had a little talk with Abby at breakfast this morning, which usually consists of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and milk, about the organic food that seems prevalent in the kids' lives these days.

Here's the recording.

I can't take the credit for this one. One of my co-workers, Greg, ordered something like this when we were out for lunch one day, and I ordered one too.

It's a pretty simple construction, and I've made a couple of slight changes to the original wrap due to the materials available and the calorie content. Anyway, it starts with a whole wheat and cheddar wrap shell. I put a bit of horseradish dijon mustard on the shell, then laid a single piece of green leaf lettuce on top. For meat, today I used turkey and ham, but I'd consider all turkey like yesterday's. I'm not a ham fan.

On top, fresh sliced and halved tomatos, and - the key to the project - fresh sliced jalapenos. The whole wrap is pretty spicy, depending on what kind of mustard you use, but the jalapenos take it up the notch that make the wrap special.

You know I don't usually write "what I had for lunch" posts, so you know that this is something special. When my life is filled with endless Hot Pockets (I just bought two weeks worth last night, ugh), something fresh and springlike like this is extraordinary to me.

I can't wait until our garden ripens to use some of those home-grown veggies in this fantastic wrap recipe.

I haven't mentioned to many people that I've started a fitness program. Ok fine, it's a "diet", but I dislike the word, and not just because it doesn't incorporate the fitness aspect, but because there's a stigma attached to it. It's weird how "fitness" sounds great in my head, but "diet" sounds like I've got a problem that I should be ashamed of.

I started out on the "Special K Diet", which simply involves replacing two meals a day with bowls of Special K. Oddly enough, that works. I have since become more interested in what I'm eating and what energy I'm expending, and I signed up for Weight Watchers Online to start tracking these things. (There's another name that sucks, "Weight Watchers". They might as well call it "Fat Club". There's got to be a better name they could brand it as.)

Weight Watcher's interface for tracking food intake isn't too bad. It has a lot of commercial food that you can easily add, and it's easy to drag things around to organize them. The date settings are a little weird, but in all, it's not too bad. Their interface for exercise is poor, though.

I've been doing - although I hate to admit that I'm some kind of "joiner" - this ActiveTrainer workout on the treadmill, called the "Couch-to-5k Running Plan". The idea is that if you train as they prescribe, you can go from my starting fitness level, ala "Couch Potato", to running a comfortable 5k in 9 weeks. This isn't racing, just ramping up to the ability to run 5k regularly without having to be chased by a mountain lion. And going to there from complete Potato status would be something, considering that I really do sit at my desk pretty much all day.

The Weight Watchers program fails to provide enough feedback for me, especially with the treadmill. I'd really like to combine both the Weight Watchers site with the ActiveTrainer site and add in some pretty graphs of my progress. I want to see a graph of calorie/fat/fiber intake along with a baseline for how much I should have, and I want to see daily distance, speed, and calorie burn from the treadmill. Also, both systems fail to account for incline on my treadmill, which is a big oversight in my book, being that if you're doing this at a gym, you probably have access to a much fancier mill than I do, and even mine does it.

I don't want to be premature announcing any milestones because I fear I'll take any praise and quit. Really, the driving force behind this effort so far is simple that it amuses me, and I've been doing it for longer now than I've done any other self-organized program, which really isn't saying much, but is still something.

According to the food tracking, I'm coming in reasonably under my daily limits for intake, and I'm also doing my workouts. As you might expect, I have lost some weight. How much I've lost seems too good to be true, so I'm hesitant to say until I've done more and really notice it.

I wasn't really hungry when I started out with the Special K diet, and the Weight Watchers diet offers the ability to spread the calories from the evening meal out more during the day. Actually, I've been doing the Special K breakfast and lunch on most days, unless I get a craving, and then there are a few lean microwave lunches in the freezer to choose from. (Avoid today's Lean Cuisine chop steak flatbread sandwich! It tastes like vomit!)

I do get hungry between cereal bowls sometimes, and so apples are good. Actually, I had to break out the oranges today, since I ran out of apples. Gonna have to get some more of those. Overall that's not bad.

The couch-to-5k thing is pretty gruesome for someone who hasn't tried a real jog for a while. Thankfully, I'm familiar with the feeling of burning in a new workout routine from my experience with organized sports. (Didn't know I did that, did you?) I'm not quite at the point where I enjoy the jog, but I can see that point ahead and am looking forward to it.

I don't know how to explain all this, really. It's not a resolution. It's not something I'm announcing because I want encouragement - at least not yet. And I'm certainly not turning this site into my fitness log. I just kind of fell into this activity, wondering if I could do it. It doesn't feel good yet, but I know it will if I keep at it. I know that in a few months I could be a better physical version of myself, and that seems like a great idea. And it was exciting noticing this morning that I can run up and down the stairs a couple times without getting winded. If these milestones keep up, I'm very likely to see this thing through to a healthier overall lifestyle.