Today I had my second of four cooking classes at Kitchen Conservatory. Kitchen Conservatory is a high-end personal kitchen store that happens to also give recreational cooking courses. It's also very bad because they have a lot of nice tools and you get a 10% discount on non-sale items after class.

The particular class I'm taking is "Culinary Basics", which is a basics of cooking course, but with more of a cooking school slant. There's a class once a week for four weeks, and each week covers a different core cooking ingredient area: week 1 was chicken, week 2 was beef, week 3 will be fish and week 4 will be vegetables + pasta.

The basic format of the class is the following: the instructor introduces the dishes she's planning on teaching/having us cook. We do a few "core" techniques together. We split into teams to prepare the various dishes. Along the way, we can ask the instructor questions. Also, she'll do demonstrations of various things she thinks will be important to know. Finally, once all the cooking's done, everybody sits down and eats what's been prepared.

Week 1, the basic techniques hit were chicken stock making and how to debone a whole chicken. It's surprising how simple deboning a chicken is once someone shows you the proper way. Also, we learned how to make basic beurre blanc. In addition, we made various chicken dishes like herb roasted chicken, paprika chicken and pan seared chicken. But most importantly, we learned how to make a pithivier, a slightly sweet almond filling wrapped in a puff pastry & baked.

This week (#2), the basic techniques hit were brown stock, demi-glaze and how to cut an onion. There were twp mother sauces, Hollandaise and Brown Sauce as well some of their offspring. The main courses made were beef wellington, pan-seared steak and a wickedly good french onion soup. Dessert was self-caramelized using blow-torches.

So far, I've really enjoyed the classes. They've been pretty low pressure, but I've been learning some new basic things that I hadn't really know that well in a formal way. Also, it's been good to meet new people that are also interested in learning more about the art of food. Thus far, there's been a slant towards Western cuisine (particularly French), but I don't mind. I did make a suggestion for learning how to steam a whole fish (which seems to be more of an Asian thing) next week...we'lll see how that goes.

However, to some degree I feel like this course is *too* basic...that in some ways I'm learning how to crawl after I've already begun walking Ex. my knife skills are a little on the sloppy unprofessional side, but I can cut at a decent clip pretty nicely. The other thing is that I feel like I could use more hands on instruction...even if it was in the same group setting.

The biggest thing I believe I'm getting out of this course is a confirmation that I honestly do enjoy cooking. Even the cleaning part is alright if it's part of the process. I'm about 90% sure that I want to become a chef. I know it's going to be brutally long hours and lots of work, but I think I'll genuinely love preparing dishes everyday. Barring Armageddon and Offspring of Armageddon, I plan to be either attending cooking school or apprenticing at a restaurant within two years.