Looking for a way to surprise your loved one? How about taking him or her to a cooking class? Ripe Food and Events owner Joshua Riazi fills us in about what most cooking classes entail, and explains whether you need to be a pro in order to attend.
For so many people, cooking has become so stressful that they avoid it at all costs. People tend to make cooking a lot harder than it is, though, and it really can be much more simplified than people think.
One fun thing we do at Ripe Food and Events is offer private cooking classes that can be held inside people’s homes. Whether someone is looking to surprise his spouse by making a favorite dish himself, giving a couple’s cooking class as a gift, or hosting a small group of friends and letting everyone get involved, cooking classes are popular for many reasons.
The menu items that we make at these classes often depend on people’s skill levels going into the course, but we can pretty much make anything if the host or people taking the course have a special idea or dish that they would like to try making.
As long as you are using simple ingredients and techniques, anyone can create great meals. And the cost to make a meal, even an elaborate one, at home is usually far less than what you would pay at a fancy restaurant.
At a lot of restaurants these days, people are spending an arm and a leg almost just to eat a basic meal. That is part of the reason why cooking classes have gotten so popular — because people, and especially couples, want learn to cook well for themselves rather than going out to eat every night of the week.
For the most part, the cooking courses we offer are geared towards people who either have a specific interest in culinary things and cooking, or people who don’t know much at all and want to learn more. The beginners just want to learn the cooking basics.
Because most of the cooking classes we do are actually private at-home events, we don’t schedule any courses ahead of time. We will wait until we are contacted by someone who is interested in a private course, and then we will go from there. So we will base it around our clients’ schedules and not the other way around, which is nice for people who have busy lives and might not be able to make it to a pre-scheduled course at our catering facility.
Another fun thing we will do is have cooking classes for kids, where they can invite all their friends over and make something fun. And then of course they can eat it themselves at the end. For example, we might have a group of kids going to a friends’ house. So one of our chefs will show up and show them how to cook things.
We can do this with grownups, too, where it is actually like an intimate gathering of friends. When grownups are involved, we really put our clients and their guests to work. Every guest will get a different job, and we will show one person how to chop things, and another how to mix things, and all that type of fun stuff. People like these types of parties a lot because they are hanging out with friends, eating great food, and learning how to make the food at home, all at the same time.
Finally, I should mention that although we typically come up with a menu for our cooking courses and cooking class parties, we are totally open to suggestions from party hosts as well. If the person hosting the party in his home has a specific dish that he wants to make with his friends, then he can definitely call us and we will make sure we have all the right ingredients to make it fresh that night.
