Thursday, January 04, 2007

Cooking classes - interested?

This is on a subject I always like: Food!

Here is an email I received from Greg Baker asking for input from the blog audience:

"My wife and I are feeling out a new business idea and would like your feedback. We'd like to start offering cooking classes to the neighborhood in a friendly, get together type of environment. To start off with, we'd like to offer classes that range from simply learning some new dishes to how to throw a stress-free dinner party. By Valentine's day we'd like to offer classes for the kitchen inept and classes for couples who want to impress with a romantic dinner. Classes will focus on healthy, preferably organic, yet affordable foods and will be taught by an executive chef with 20 years in the business. We'd like to offer a casual, dinner party type atmosphere where guests can bring a bottle of wine and, of course, eat what they learn to cook. Any feedback would be appreciated and we look forward to hearing from you"

7 comments:

YesterDazed said...

I would love this...bring it on!!
Also, I have wanted to participate in one of those cooking classes that help folks prepare and package up meals to freeze for future use. Most that are offered are too far away....like S. Tampa or Carrolwood (I try to avoid those areas...LOL). How about something like that?

Anonymous said...

How cool! Where do you plan on teaching these classes? And are they personal classes or wil they be larger?

Chair said...

What yesterdazed said, but please let's not make it a "Dinner Done" type of place. The food is good from there, but what you get is a large room full of workstations containing premade and premixed ingredients. Not much teaching, since just about everything in their freezer-to-oven repertoire is a braise of some sort. And did I mention it's pre-mixed?

I would love more help in starting stuff from scratch.

Jay McGee said...

Great idea. And I'm done with the "Dinner Done" style place, too. With even the smallest packages available, the 2 of us couldn't eat all the food in time (or just got sick of eating the same thing) and much of it went to waste.

It'd be much more cost-effective for couples to learn how to do it for themselves -- with the possible option of buying food "packages."

Either way -- I think your idea is a sound one.

YesterDazed said...

That's interesting input from beerwulf and torgo, I never did the 'Dinner Done' type of thing, so I had no idea that it wasn't a wonderful thing. Maybe, as stated, some modified type of cooking program/lesson....I need all the help I can get!
This is very exciting....when do we start???

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the input. I guess that we're on the right track, because your suggestions are almost exactly in line with our business model.

We hope to be up and running offering classes in a temporary location in the next 2-3 weeks until we can hammer down a permanent retail/kitchen space.

Schedules, website address and more details will follow soon.

Chair said...

Cool. I'm learning on my own right now - Iron Chef America, Boy Meets Grill, Molto Mario, and Good Eats, plus several cookbooks - but it's very bootstrapped and I'm just following recipes and doing a few things on my own. I would love more practice and instruction.