Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Cooking Class

I don’t know if it has something to do with the economic downturn that more people are home cooking and registering for cooking classes. Or perhaps the fact that for a few hours on Sunday night, my op-ed was on the front page of the Jerusalem Post website. No matter the reason my confidence is up, and with my confidence soaring, I offered to teach two good friends how to make pastry from scratch. Previously I had spent ages contemplating the pros or cons of teaching anyone anything.

Pros:

1. My pastry-making skills are relatively good. During my first pregnancy I had a thing for apple pie. Not only did I make one twice a week for nearly ten months, but I also ate them (my son was well overdue).
2. My kitchen – though nobody’s dream – is user friendly. I can get a nice number of tushes bouncing around, each in its own little station, without anyone invading anyone else’s personal space.
3. I wasn’t charging my friends, so even if my lesson was, as the Israelis say, “on the faces” (say this with Adam Sandler’s pseudo-Israeli accent from – ‘You Don’t Mess With The Zohan’ and it sounds more intimidating), all I really would be wasting would be about an hour and a half of their time, and a whole lot of flour. With my tail between my legs, I could go back to my semi-agoraphobic life.

Cons:

1. My friends, after being bored out of their wits, may never talk to me again. A great loss since both are friendly and funny.
2. My pastry-making skills may be mine alone, and translating them to someone else may be impossible, like the thought of teaching someone to drive. I know how to drive fairly well but, for the life of me, I don’t think I could teach someone else to do so.
3. I may be great at it, and my friends will love it, and encourage me to teach others, and here comes the con – I will need to open myself up to criticism from less friendly people. Agoraphobia is sounding better and better by the minute.

But Joy of Joys; on Monday morning, I woke up, threw my Pro/Con list in the recycling bin and called my friends. By Tuesday, my kitchen was covered in a fine mist of flour.

The lesson went astonishingly well. We learned how to make lemon curd, flaky pastry and rugelach. A strange syllabus, I assure you, but it all made sense.

Both Michelle and Debralee wanted to learn how to make pastry, and their biggest problem was rolling it out. Michelle wanted a suggestion for using fresh-from-the-market strawberries, and thus my syllabus developed.

Pastry for pastry’s sake, rugelach for rolling experience and lemon curd for filling the blind baked pastry and topping it off with fresh berries.

The class was fun, and informative, and my friends can now roll pastry with the best of them.

Perhaps next week I can teach an unsuspecting friend how to drive.

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