MussoLOLen is Always Right! |

Despite being hopelessly inept at the kitchen, I found myself at the Center for the Culinary Arts’ Kitchen Discovery Class (KDC) last Friday. The KDC is a six-hour introductory class where you get to cook and bake in a commercial kitchen and figure out which one you’re better at. Not that I need a class to discover that I suck at cooking but I’m all for throwing myself into all sorts of odd situations and learning from them, even when I already have a general idea of how they’ll turn out.

What I ended up discovering at the KDC is not so much any hidden cooking skillz0rz (I seriously don’t have any) as little revelations about myself. I had several of them during the course of six hours:

I’m not a food person.

I don’t have much of an appetite to begin with, and I’m not at all prissy about where my food comes from or how it’s prepared. I rarely ever eat at expensive, trendy restaurants because I’m a total cheapskate – it feels like a waste to spend over 300 bucks on something I’m just going to crap out the next day. Perhaps my lack of culinary appreciation is why I’ve shown little or no interest in cooking the proper way. As far as making my own meals is concerned, cooking should only involve three ingredients: canned food, a can opener, and a microwave oven.

Of course, I kept all those things to myself during the class. Why? Because the chef instructor was absolutely dreamy and I didn’t want to be the only unsophisticated, uncivilized, unappreciative-of-food lout in the room. I hope it wasn’t obvious that I was inwardly freaking out when I glanced at the handout and saw that we were to make caramelized salmon with orange-shoyu glaze, served sauteed mixed vegetables, soba noodles, lemongrass beurre blanc, and balsamic soy reduction. I’m told that I have a very expressive face.

Seriously though, since when did cooking get so complicated? I missed my can opener already.

I like being alone in the kitchen.

In a commercial kitchen, you have to learn to work with other people and make do whatever utensils are available. Making do with resources is easy enough for me, but please don’t make me work with other people – at least, not in a kitchen anyway. I don’t have anything against my classmates, but have you ever tried chopping vegetables with someone hovering over your back? It feels a lot like someone peering at your screen when you’re writing – unnerving, distracting, and downright irritating. Not to mention that a kitchen is already suffocating enough without fourteen people sharing the same small space with you and taking the ingredients right when you need them. I don’t care if I don’t know my ass from my elbow in the kitchen. I like figuring out the recipe and preparing all the ingredients all by myself.

Clearly I’m not going to be a commercial chef anytime in the near future.

If I can’t pronounce it, I sure as hell can’t cook it.

My groupmates asked me to do one simple thing: make the lemongrass beurre blanc sauce for the salmon. It involves throwing a bunch of ingredients together and putting them over a fire – nothing too difficult, even if my cooking experience doesn’t amount to much.

Naturally, I ended up burning the sauce. Don’t ask me how that happened. One minute, it was cooking quite nicely; when it checked up on it again, it turned into this black crusty thing at the bottom of the pan. I blame it on the fact that the sauce contained fancy French words I couldn’t pronounce.

I was hoping that Chef McDreamy wouldn’t chew me out when I sheepishly owned up to burning the sauce. To my surprise, he commended me for my honesty. Most students, he said, would have lied and said that they put the beurre blanc sauce somewhere in there. I wanted to impress him with my wit and intellect by saying something about how lying takes too much effort and that the world would be a far better place if everyone just said what was on their minds, but he moved on to the next group before I could even open my mouth. Damnit.

I’m pretty damn good at making desserts.

There is one thing I’m fairly good at in the kitchen though: baking. Besides the warm childhood memories I associate with raw cookie batter and the scent of bread in the oven, I love the exact, almost-ritualistic rhythm of the baking process. During the afternoon baking session, I insisted that I make the saffron panna cotta – which I did with absolutely no difficulty. I even shaped the almond tuiles that we used to garnish the panna cotta. Of course it took my groupmates and I four times to make the caramel sauce because the damn thing kept burning in the pan. The end result, however, was kick-ass, restaurant-quality panna cotta that tasted just as good as it looked.

I still suck at making sauces, but it’s good to know that there’s one kitchen-y thing I can do right and that I actually enjoy.

The Kitchen Discovery Class is a 6-hour class that takes place every Friday. If you’d like to try it out, call way ahead of time because there’s only a limited number of slots per class. For more information on the Kitchen Discovery Class and other courses, visit the CCA website.