Fun Interesting Informative and Delicious!

My big present to the family was a cooking class we all took together. I set it all up via email, and printed out some info from the web pages and wrapped them up in a box. I also warned everybody a week in advance that I had scheduled a family thing for Friday evening so they should plan around that.

Added this in an update: photo sent by the chef so I'm in it.

I stumbled onto this while searching for a present for the boys, both of whom like to cook a lot. Actually, all three kids like to cook. It was actually hard finding something that either the two boys, or all three kids, could do together. My middle guy is 17, so purely adult classes at most venues don't want him, but he's really too old for the "teen" stuff, and certainly his older brother is as well. Knowing my boy, I thought he would have a lot more fun if he did it with his brother rather than with strangers. So through the magic of google, I found Ben Tehranian, a personal chef, who also teaches classes in his house.

We were all a little awkward at first, but then everything thawed and we started to have a lot of fun. I had picked one of his set menus in advance:

Maryland crab soup
Baby spinach salad with hot bacon sauce
Gulf shrimp with anchovy butter sauce
Duck a la orange served over saffron risotto
Braised celery with Madeira sauce
Pistachio and almond Baklava

He started with going through each of the dishes, and what was involved. (We each got a packet of recipes, which were then set aside until the end.)  But of course, we didn't make one thing at a time - he had set it up with some prep work, but we started with the soup because it would take the longest.  So early on, he gave us each a knife and some vegetables, and had us chopping away.  Good to get the interactions going first.  

We were on our feet for about two and a half hours doing the prep. One of the most fun things was he had us tasting everything along the way. We started with the soup, and as things were added along the way, or time simply did its thing, we tasted again. It allowed us to start to figure out how individual ingredients affected the taste of the whole dish.

He was also focused on presentation.  Some of the ingredients were only for show, for color or texture, and he explained that. He plated one of everything with a good presentation, for the photo op, then we sat down and ate there, family style.

All in all, this was a terrific way to spend time together.

We had left over baklava, which was sloppier than usual baklava.  Nevertheless, the leftovers were all consumed in the car on the way home, using our fingers.  (Yes I did too!)






The summary comes from one of the kids:  Fun, interesting, informative, and delicious!

[Updated to add one more photo at the very beginning: 1/5/13]