Tag Archives: church

Cooking class: the fun and the chaos

As I hinted in Monday’s post, the cooking class itself was a whirlwind. To this little novice, this came as a complete surprise: I went into it thinking our 6 hours of work earlier in the day would result in a relaxing, peaceful experience once the burners got cranked up. I imagined I would have ample time to take tons of pictures, interact with the ladies one-on-one, and somehow have dinner on the table within a 2 hour span. “Oh, I should be home around 10 pm sweetie–I can’t imagine it would be later than that,” I confidently told my husband on the phone. Little did I know.

Things started out calmly enough, with at least half an hour of hanging out, snacking, and meeting each other. I was instantly drawn to baby Desmond.

Hello, chubby cheeks!

Do you want to learn how to make a simple olive tapenade?

No? You just want to have some tummy time on a blankie? Well, okay, but your future wife would really appreciate it if you knew how to roast a chicken. I’m just sayin’.

We started out with simple knife skills. Cassia is a great speaker and leader, and she walked everyone through the knuckle technique, of which I was woefully ignorant.

Then, each lady assembled a personal Fruit Pizza.

They went all out and made the most beautiful arrangements with the fruit!

We put the pizzas in the fridge to chill, and then it was time to get down and dirty with some chickens. I’ll be going over the process of butterflying a chicken tomorrow, fear not!

(Thanks for the picture, Carrie!)

Cassia walked everyone through the olive tapenade–here she is extolling the virtues of the anchovy paste. I think at this point I chimed in “it looks like poop” before realizing that may not be the most appropriate comment to make. Ah, the wisdom of hindsight!

Note to self: never say ‘poop’ again when teaching a cooking class.

Note to others: please learn from my mistakes.

I walked everyone through the quick and simple weeknight chicken recipe. “Take some lemons,” I urged.

Yes, in every picture I sport a pretty ridiculous expression. I entertained myself by making up captions for each one.

“Seriously? You want me to do something with this chicken? You’re kidding . . . right?”

“Okay! This is grosser than I remembered. Who else wants to take a turn?”

“Hey! You over there! Just cram it in the boot!”

“Duuuude . . . I think my index finger is longer than my ring finger! Whoa. And is anyone else seeing swirls of color when the music plays?”

“I think, like, I’ll go now, like, because I like totally need to get manicure after this chicken juice practically ruined my cuticles!”

“Just milk the goat gently, massaging back and forth with your fingers like this. Everyone together . . . let’s practice the air massage. Okay. We’ll bring in Gilbertha the Goat in a second, and when we can get our hands on the actual udder it will all start to make sense.”

Thanks for grabbing my camera and snapping all those pictures Traci–I was blissfully unaware (really) until I emptied my memory card onto the Mac and saw the evidence of what’s called ‘Funny Face Syndrome.’ I’ve got it bad, and I ain’t ashamed of it.

At least this picture (from Carrie) makes me look like I’m in a Pantene hair commercial. Though if I was, I probably wouldn’t have one hand resting lightly on a naked chicken.

The ladies were the highlight of the class for me: so lovely! There were familiar faces . . .

(Hi Laura and Emily!)

. . . and new faces–Sarah brought her awesome sister Erika and together they attacked the chickens and stuffed them to high heaven. So-Young is helping out, too.

My friend Beth brough her friend So-Young, who fearlessly chopped and sauteed and stuffed. I figured she was an experienced cook helping out a poor hapless instructor who was desperately in over her head.

Then it came out that this was her first time cooking. Wow.

Hi Madeline! I love your scarf.

We soon reached a point at which 3 chickens were roasting in the oven (with 3 already done and ready to serve), 2 skillets of brussel sprouts were sizzling on the stove, and 2 large pots of polenta were being vigorously stirred. Between the heat and the heat and the space constraints and the heat, I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed. Then two angels came to our aid.

Carrie (in the awesome turquoise dress and the earrings that I NEED) and Jamie stepped up to the plate. They completely saved the day by jumping in and doing dishes when the level of chaos was just about to crest into a wave of destruction.

See? By then my mental balance was in a precarious state.

“Haha, is this a, hahaha, brussel, um, sprout? Get it, hahaha?”

Jamie and Carrie kept things running smoothly by making sure dirty things weren’t piling up and obstructing the use of the island or counters or stove.

By the time the ladies sat down for the first course, the Roasted Red Pepper Soup, I was in a sweaty daze. And it was late–9:30, if I remember correctly. If you figure in half an hour of mingling before we started, that’s two and a half hours of cooking. Yowza.

Don’t get me wrong–it was fun. I’d do it again in a snap. But it was so much more work than I had ever imagined.

Just being honest.

At least I can say without a pinch of a doubt that the food was delicious.

Lesson learned: next time (if there is a next time) I need to hire assistants, or something. Or just demand that Carrie and Jamie come back for more punishment.

We’re done!

After picking 6 chickens, cleaning stoves and counters, storing and distributing leftovers, and doing 1,000 million dishes (thanks again to Jamie), the end had arrived. It was getting close to midnight, and we had completed almost 12 full hours of work. And it was worth every second of it, every drop of sweat, and every goofy face.

Cheers friends, and thanks for following along with me on this journey. The first roasted chicken recipe will be up tomorrow!

Cooking class: the prep

As with any majorly fun event in my life, I am approaching the recap of the cooking class in installments. For those of you who are new here *waving enthusiastically*, my friend Cassia and I taught a cooking class two Fridays ago to 20 lovely women from our church as part of our Women’s Ministry series. Or was it 18 women plus me and Cassia? Who knows! Anyway, since neither of us are professional cooks and neither of us had done anything remotely like this in the past, we tried our best to ready ourselves by experimenting with recipes on our own, and then coming together to do a dry run the weekend before. But nothing could have prepared us for the fun, chaotic, exhausting, joyous, sweaty, overwhelming and wonderful experience it was going to be.

Today I bring you pictures of the prep work, which started at 12 when Cassia picked me up from work. Full of vim and vigor, we headed to the grocery store. Hundreds of dollars later, we had a cart chock full of goodies:

As you can tell, we were quite excited.

In order to fit all the groceries in the trunk of Cassia’s cute little yellow car, we had to lower the seat. And let me use this opportunity to share my favorite new expression: Cram it in the boot!

‘Boot’ is the Britishism for ‘trunk.’ It’s such a funny expression–really, you should say it out loud. You’ll probably start laughing. Cram it in the boot! Cram it in the boot!

Wow, I am seriously cracking up over here.

With me, it doesn’t take much.

Anyway! Our next stop was a lovely wine shop called Lush.

The woman working there was so helpful, and recommended wine pairings for each of our courses. I never realized you could just waltz into a wine shop and ask them to tell you what wine to get. How convenient!

I don’t know why I didn’t realize this before–after all, they are trained professionals.

By the way, check out those awesome chandeliers made with wine glasses. What a great idea!

Cassia made the final wine selections, including this lovely bottle for our ‘personal use.’

We figured we had hours of work ahead of us, and a nice smooth red would help moves things along, so to speak. After all, the cooks must be taken care of.

Lush had designated shelves full of wines all under $10–perfect!

We arrived at Traci’s house around 1:30. Since the event was scheduled to start at 6:30, we figured we would have oodles of time to spare.

Not!

Our first task was to organize all the groceries between the fridge, the pantry, and the counter, chill the wine, and decide what we needed to cook first: we needed a play-by-play game plan.

I thought we would be swimming in space in Traci’s large and gorgeous kitchen, but once the groceries were laid out, the space seemed oddly smaller. But there was no time to contemplate that, because it was time to cook! We started out by making the components for the Fruit Pizza, baking up rounds of sugar cookie dough for each lady to make her own individual pizza, and mixing up a simple cream cheese frosting.

The first small fiasco occurred when I attempted to soften a couple sticks of butter and instead inundated Traci’s microwave with melted butter. Lesson learned: microwave power varies from machine to machine. I wanted to take a picture to show you my misadventure (to encourage the whole ‘laughing with me’ thing), but my hands were covered in grease, and my Nikon was looking at me reproachfully.

Don’t you touch me with those buttery fingers! warned the 18-50mm lens.

I focused on the Fruit Pizza side of things while Cassia started to make a triple recipe of Roasted Red Pepper Soup.

I’ve never seen so many red peppers together in my life–I think we spent about $40 on red peppers alone. Phew!

And that picture only shows 15 of them–there were 24 total. Yowza.

We had six lovely birds to cook up and 1 1/2 ovens in which to accomplish this, so we planned on making 3 in advance, and 3 during the class itself.

Hello, little winged friends!

You’re looking mighty tasty. Let’s stuff this chicken with lemon and garlic.

Cram it in the boot!

While the chickens were roasting, it was time for a 10 minute breather and a cuppa red.

Traci’s precious daughters wandered in and out of the kitchen.

I took a handful of pictures of them that I can’t wait to show you tomorrow. They are the most beautiful and adorable girls–the kind of kids that make me want to have kids immediately. Kids with sprinklings of freckles like Bronagh’s and kids with headfuls of rampant curls like Ashling’s.

Traci and Jamie worked steadily as well, setting tables and making a run to the store for some paper products. Thank heavens for those paper products–there were enough dishes without ‘real’ plates to keep us busy for a couple hours after the event.

Hi Jamie! You were invaluable. And amazing. And you did a great job assembling those little recipe packets. I would also like to take this chance to dub you ‘The Dishes Warrior.’ I think you probably washed over 100 dishes. Maybe 1,000, I don’t know.

As 6:30 drew nearer, Traci and Jamie set three beautiful tables to accomodate the lot of us. Meanwhile, Cassia and I laid the ingredients out in groupings by recipe, gathering all the equipment we’d need to cook them.

We also had some problem-solving to do: where the heck are we going to put 6 roasted chickens without consuming the counter space? How are we going to make 4 batches of brussel sprouts when we only have 2 burners available? How are we going to handle the wine tasting during the meal when there are 3 separate tables but only 2 bottles of each wine?

The stove, piled high with pots and pans, girded its loins as if for battle.

Whoever uses the most burners . . . wins!

I win.

Here’s the ingredient grouping for the polenta and for the rosemary garlic lemon chicken (minus the chicken)–it looks like chaos, but a trained eye will soon see order.

My eye must have un-trained itself between then and now, because all I’m getting from this picture is confusion. Hmmmm. All that comes to mind is . . .

Cram it in the boot!

Sorry, that’s the last time I’ll say it.

If you’re lucky. Heh heh.

The counter was set with a cutting board for Cassia and me and 7 cutting board ‘stations’ for the ladies to share. The brussel sprouts were distributed among the stations, along with carrots and celery for the short, introductory knife skills lesson.

The knives were glinting, sharp and ready to be put to work.

Traci and Jamie set out snacks and finger food–have I mentioned that I eat wasabi peas like an addict?

And finally: everything was ready.

Cassia and I collapsed onto the couch around 6:15 and finished off the wine. (And technically, this picture was taken hours earlier during our breather, but the narrative demanded that it be placed here.)

“The hard part is over,” I told myself as I nonchalantly ate another handful of wasabi peas. “The women will do the actual cooking; we just have to tell them what to do. Everything is organized, we’ll just effortlessly float through the recipes, and we should be sitting down to eat by 8:30 at the latest.”

Right.

The expression ‘little did she know’ would be quite apt at this narrative juncture.

To be continued . . .