If you and your partner are both foodies, or are looking to cook at home more and possibly eat healthier, why not make a date night out of a cooking class?
On our recent trip down to Portland, Chris and I took a class with a long-time friend of mine, Swati. She offers cooking classes under the business name Apples and Ambrosia. Her specialty is Indian cuisine, and she offers small group classes as well as private lessons.
We opted for a private lesson since Swati didn’t have any regular classes happening on the weekend we were visiting. She gave us several options, and we chose to learn how to make an Everyday Indian Meal, since we wanted something that would be pretty easy to work into our regular meal rotation.
Ahead of our lesson, we received an email with a proposed meal and a double-check that there were no dietary restrictions or allergies.
On the day of, we arrived in Swati’s lovely home and she sat us down with some cups of chai and talked a bit about Indian cuisine and how the class would go.
Then it was in to the kitchen to cook a delicious feast!
We created our own curry using herbs, spices, onions and chilis, along with dried pomegranate seeds. This was the base for a delicious chickpea dish. Basmati rice with fragrant cumin and a fresh cucumber and tomato salad rounded out the meal. While things were simmering, we sat down to flip through our host’s collection of Indian cookbooks to get ideas for future menus.
When dinner was ready, we sat down to eat, with wine and beer alongside our delicious meal, in a dining room bathed in beautiful natural light (the sun had decided to peek out from the clouds for a bit).
This meal was vegetarian, and could have been vegan if we had not added some butter to the rice. It was very much the sort of thing that could be adjusted to taste and availability of ingredients. After the class, we received a file with the basic structure of the recipe, so that we could remember what we had done but still have some wiggle room to adapt it as needed.
If you’re not in Portland, chances are there are still great opportunities for cooking classes near you. Why do I suggest this as a date night? Well, learning something new is fun! So is cooking together. But shopping for supplies and then cleaning up after aren’t necessarily as romantic. When you take a cooking class, you get all the fun of making something in the kitchen, without the less-fun parts. Plus you have expert guidance, instead of trying to figure out a recipe from Pinterest and hoping for the best.
Cooking classes are especially a good idea if you’re looking to add a new skill or style of cuisine to your repertoire. Making curry from scratch always seemed pretty intimidating to me, but once you see that you really can work with just a few spices and still get amazing results, it becomes accessible and even fun to think about different combinations.
Have you ever taken a cooking class with a romantic partner? How did it go?
