Cooking!

I want to teach a cooking class, as some of you may be aware I am not what precisely a master chef, I don't cook as much as I should and my dishes, while tasty, are best described as "functional" and also possibly "Full of garlic" rather than examples of difficult techniques or showcases of fancy ingredients.

But I think maybe that is what people need. It frustrates me when I hear about fully grown professionals who don't know how to, I dunno, make rice. A friend of mine once said in reference to cooking that "Only Marie Calendar cooks in this house." and while she has made great progress in the years since, the phrase stuck with me.

I do think it is unproductive to suggest to poor people that they should cook in for all their meals to save money. For that to be true assumes a certain baseline of resources, knowledge, and time that someone living paycheck to paycheck might not necessarily have, so I try not to judge folks for doing what they have to to get their calories.

That said, there are a number of folks out there who could benefit from some basic kitchen knowledge. who do have the time and money, but not the skills, to cook for themselves and their family.

I feel like making the basics approachable would be the way to start, get your tools; a good knife, a cutting board, a couple mixing bowls, a measuring cup if we are feeling fancy, then just some basics. Learn how to use a potato, make eggs, cook rice with or without a rice cooker, what "al dente" means when talking about pasta. Then move on to improving prepackaged or simple food, like adding ingredients to ramen, or improving boxed mac and cheese, even properly seasoning a steak. After that work on a staple dish or two.

When I cook for myself I tend to make one pot dishes that leave a lot of leftovers, my go to lately has been a pasta sauce with ground meat, but I do a pretty damn good meatloaf, beef stew, chili, collard greens, and various ramen abominations as my staples, and lately I have been working up a spicy stew sort of inspired by Korean army stew that I am starting to get happy with.

Any or all of those would be useful things to know, I can also cook a pretty good turkey, done right it is both easier than you think and doesn't take all that long really. My baking skills are limited though, that part of cooking is much more precise than I tend to work with, but I make great chocolate chip cookies and have a couple other decent items in my repertoire.

I feel like i could put together a pretty okay series of lessons based around that stuff, I wonder how to go about it.