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.
