Between cooking school and work, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to decide what it is I really want out of all this. The false glamor of a television show has lost its appeal (& no I didn’t, finally, send a tape in). At work I’ve met literally hundreds of people with one thing in common – they love to cook.
Not in a restaurant, not for the adoring millions out in TV Land (Gods forbid), but for their families & friends and maybe for the occasional party if the catering bug has bitten them. Another thing they have in common is they don’t have enough time to cook how they would like to.
You don’t spend $1000 on Mauviel copper pans to cook Rachel Ray’s 30 minute meals. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t think Ms. Ray is contributing much to the art of cookery (but she isn’t as bad as a Sandra Lee and her semi-homemade nonsense).
There is another large majority in the customer base — those who have enough money to buy their hearts desire in the store and take it home to showcase in their magazine kitchen and who don’t know which is a Dutch oven and which is a grill pan or how to turn on their $15,000 range. They want to learn — they know it’s important, but how and when exactly?
That’s where I’ve decided I want to come in. Yes, I still fully intend to write cookbooks, but I want to give these overachievers the opportunity to learn how to cook in their own (often decadent) kitchen. I like the idea of one on one instruction with one’s own stuff in one’s own kitchen.
It doesn’t have to just be those few with roasting pans full of disposable income, but men and women out on their own who never had the opportunity to peer over the countertop at Mom or Dad’s alchemy in the kitchen. Ours is hardly the first generation of non-cooks.
I suspect if you’re reading this — a blog called foodieporn — then I am already preaching to the choir, but if you know someone in the Nashville area who wants for some instruction in this specific, finer art of domesticity — give them the URL and tell them to e-mail me at classes@foodieporn.com
