New York Times Business Section 6/16/07
EXECUTIVE PURSUITS
Well, He Did Get an A on the Eating Part
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
Jane Brock, with hat, teaches Cooking 101: The Course for Absolute Beginners, which ends with
consumption of the course materials.
By HARRY HURT III
Published: June 16, 2007
I HUNKERED over a six-burner commercial stove, my pulse pounding and my hands dripping with extra virgin olive oil.
It was half past noon on an otherwise auspicious Sunday inside a 12th-floor teaching kitchen at the Institute of
Culinary Education in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Eight chicken breasts marinated in fresh garlic and herbs
were sizzling on a cast iron grill pan atop the stove — and I was feeling the heat.
“What do we do now?” I asked, wiping sweat from my bow. “Flip or rotate?”
My assigned partner, George Bassil, peered at the grill, clacking his steel tongs. George was an environmental safety
manager, 38, with a bald pate and a stubble beard. Like me, he was wearing a full-length white apron, the requisite
uniform of students in Cooking 101: The Course for Absolute Beginners.
“Chef Jane!” George hollered. “We need help!”
Jane Brock, a longtime instructor with sparkling blue eyes and a tall white chef’s hat, scurried over to our stove.
“Better take them off the grill, guys,” she said. “You can finish them in the oven so they don’t get too dry.”
I held my breath as George raced off to find a parchment covered sheet pan, wondering why I was getting so worked
up over a bunch of chicken breasts.
I reckoned it ultimately boiled down to a matter of manhood and parenting. My wife runs a restaurant that keeps her
frantically busy during the summer high season. It’s often up to me to see that our 9-year-old son eats a proper
dinner. Ordering take-out pizzas and hamburgers gets tiresome, and isn’t especially nutritious. Dining at restaurants
other than my wife’s is expensive, and I’m reluctant to freeload off of her more than once a week.
The obvious solution was for me to serve our son home-cooked meals. But our Sub-Zero had developed a classic
case of bachelor refrigerator on my watch. My repertoire was limited to peanut butter sandwiches, scrambled eggs,
bacon, toast, and a recipe for thrice-cooked French fries I learned from a golfing buddy two decades ago. With Father’
s Day fast approaching, I needed to learn my way around a kitchen or I’d find myself back in Chateau Bow Wow, a k a
the Doghouse.
The Institute of Culinary Education seemed to offer immediate gastronomical gratification. It was founded in an Upper
West Side apartment in 1975 by Peter Kump, and was originally known as Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School.
After Mr. Kump’s death in 1995, it was purchased by an entrepreneur, Rick Smilow, renamed and relocated to its
current headquarters at 50 West 23rd Street, which sprawls over 42,000 square feet and boasts 12 fully loaded
teaching kitchens.
The institute offers a culinary arts program for would-be professional chefs that includes 440 hours of classroom
training and 210 hours of externships at restaurants and catering firms. But in contrast to some of the snootier
schools that don’t admit amateur students, the institute also offers the nation’s largest recreational cooking program.
There are more than 1,600 courses available to the general public like Techniques of Italian Cooking, and Sushi
Making for Couples, and Truffles, Truffles, Truffles.
Cooking 101 charges tuition of $315 a person, and assumes absolutely no prior cooking knowledge. “In three relaxed,
fun-filled classes, we’ll get you on your cooking feet, teaching you how to prepare simple, healthful, delicious food,”
the syllabus promises. “You’ll learn about basic cooking equipment and menu planning; knife skills, including
vegetable chopping and paring; how to make salads, vinaigrettes and other easy no-cook dishes; how to roast garlic;
how to prepare delicious pastas; how to grill meats and other foods; and how to make desserts in minutes.”
I reckoned all these how-tos had to be child’s play for our 42-year-old tutor, Chef Jane. Born in Florida, Chef Jane had
trained at Cordon Bleu in France, and earned a master of arts degree in gastronomy at the University of Adelaide in
Australia with a dissertation entitled “God Is Not a Vegetarian.” In addition to teaching cooking classes at the institute,
she was an oenologist and wine course instructor.
“Recreational cooking should be fun,” she declared at the outset of our first three-hour class. “At least it shouldn’t be
a big hassle or a pain in the butt.”
My half-dozen classmates proved to be as good-humored as Chef Jane and almost, if not more, gastronomically
ignorant than me. They included Mike, a 48-year-old computer engineer who lived alone; Liv, a 30-ish equities
specialist for a major bank; and Bianca, a 24-year-old Brazilian-born cosmetics marketing executive. Each had his or
her own reasons for enrolling, but in light of my own parental plight, I found George’s the most empathetic.
“My father’s 85 years old, and my mother’s too sick to cook anymore,” George confided. “After serving him steak three
nights in a row, I figured I better learn how to add a little variety to the menu.”
To our chagrin, Lesson 1, which covered hors d’oeuvres and buffet platters, required absolutely no cooking. Chef
Jane passed around several varieties of herbs for us to identify by smell, and demonstrated a few basic knife skills like
slicing, dicing and fanning with emphasis on not severing a digit or stabbing anyone else in the kitchen. Then she
divided the class into groups with specific menus to prepare.
George and I were assigned to make a Mediterranean platter comprising radicchio, Belgian endive, olives, grape
leaves, roasted peppers, chickpea purée, eggplant and puréed fish roe. The closest we came to dealing with flame
was toasting triangles of pita bread. But we bonded like the lead characters in “The Odd Couple,” alternately playing
the roles of Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar.
As per Chef Jane’s advice, we arranged the ingredients of our Mediterranean platter in odd numbers: 11 triangles of
pita bread rather than 10, three globs of hummus rather than four. We juxtaposed contrasting colors by placing green
endive next to red radicchio, and we piled the olives and the grape leaves high on the platter to create what our
instructor called “movement.”
“Breathe and fly, baby!’ George hollered as he circled a mound of pink puréed fish roe with a strip of red pepper.
Lesson 2 put our nascent partnership to the test. As with the final session of the course scheduled for the following
Sunday, which covered pastas, Lesson 2 required real cooking. We were assigned to produce a mesclun salad with a
vinaigrette dressing and toasted goat cheese croûtes. At the same time, we were supposed to marinate and grill eight
chicken breasts, sandwich them in French bread slathered with a pesto mayonnaise made from scratch, and have
them ready to serve before the wall clock struck 1 p.m.
Chef Jane showed us how to scorch the skins of the chicken breasts with professional style cross-hatches by rotating
them from a 10 o’clock angle to a 2 o’clock angle relative to the ribs of the grill. After toasting the French bread,
however, George noted that we had neglected to conceive of a suitable platter arrangement.
“Presentation is everything,” I moaned. “What are we going to do?”
Fortunately, our classmate Bianca noticed our crisis and offered us several handfuls of parsley left over from her
assignment. Breathing sighs of relief, George and I sliced the sandwiches diagonally, and arranged them in
symmetrical wedges around our borrowed parsley bed.
Moments later, we all sat down to the best part of Cooking 101 or any other gastronomic exercise: a feast. It featured
our chicken breast sandwiches and mesclun salad, and our classmates’ croque-monsieur, hamburgers, Cobb salad,
Caesar salad and blueberry crisp. George and I raised glasses of California chardonnay to toast Chef Jane and
Bianca.
“Breathe and fly, baby!” we exclaimed.
Chef Jane grinned at my odd couple cooking partner and me. “Tell me when you guys are going to get married,” she
said. “I’ll cater the wedding.”
EXECUTIVE PURSUITS
Well, He Did Get an A on the Eating Part
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
Jane Brock, with hat, teaches Cooking 101: The Course for Absolute Beginners, which ends with
consumption of the course materials.
By HARRY HURT III
Published: June 16, 2007
I HUNKERED over a six-burner commercial stove, my pulse pounding and my hands dripping with extra virgin olive oil.
It was half past noon on an otherwise auspicious Sunday inside a 12th-floor teaching kitchen at the Institute of
Culinary Education in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Eight chicken breasts marinated in fresh garlic and herbs
were sizzling on a cast iron grill pan atop the stove — and I was feeling the heat.
“What do we do now?” I asked, wiping sweat from my bow. “Flip or rotate?”
My assigned partner, George Bassil, peered at the grill, clacking his steel tongs. George was an environmental safety
manager, 38, with a bald pate and a stubble beard. Like me, he was wearing a full-length white apron, the requisite
uniform of students in Cooking 101: The Course for Absolute Beginners.
“Chef Jane!” George hollered. “We need help!”
Jane Brock, a longtime instructor with sparkling blue eyes and a tall white chef’s hat, scurried over to our stove.
“Better take them off the grill, guys,” she said. “You can finish them in the oven so they don’t get too dry.”
I held my breath as George raced off to find a parchment covered sheet pan, wondering why I was getting so worked
up over a bunch of chicken breasts.
I reckoned it ultimately boiled down to a matter of manhood and parenting. My wife runs a restaurant that keeps her
frantically busy during the summer high season. It’s often up to me to see that our 9-year-old son eats a proper
dinner. Ordering take-out pizzas and hamburgers gets tiresome, and isn’t especially nutritious. Dining at restaurants
other than my wife’s is expensive, and I’m reluctant to freeload off of her more than once a week.
The obvious solution was for me to serve our son home-cooked meals. But our Sub-Zero had developed a classic
case of bachelor refrigerator on my watch. My repertoire was limited to peanut butter sandwiches, scrambled eggs,
bacon, toast, and a recipe for thrice-cooked French fries I learned from a golfing buddy two decades ago. With Father’
s Day fast approaching, I needed to learn my way around a kitchen or I’d find myself back in Chateau Bow Wow, a k a
the Doghouse.
The Institute of Culinary Education seemed to offer immediate gastronomical gratification. It was founded in an Upper
West Side apartment in 1975 by Peter Kump, and was originally known as Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School.
After Mr. Kump’s death in 1995, it was purchased by an entrepreneur, Rick Smilow, renamed and relocated to its
current headquarters at 50 West 23rd Street, which sprawls over 42,000 square feet and boasts 12 fully loaded
teaching kitchens.
The institute offers a culinary arts program for would-be professional chefs that includes 440 hours of classroom
training and 210 hours of externships at restaurants and catering firms. But in contrast to some of the snootier
schools that don’t admit amateur students, the institute also offers the nation’s largest recreational cooking program.
There are more than 1,600 courses available to the general public like Techniques of Italian Cooking, and Sushi
Making for Couples, and Truffles, Truffles, Truffles.
Cooking 101 charges tuition of $315 a person, and assumes absolutely no prior cooking knowledge. “In three relaxed,
fun-filled classes, we’ll get you on your cooking feet, teaching you how to prepare simple, healthful, delicious food,”
the syllabus promises. “You’ll learn about basic cooking equipment and menu planning; knife skills, including
vegetable chopping and paring; how to make salads, vinaigrettes and other easy no-cook dishes; how to roast garlic;
how to prepare delicious pastas; how to grill meats and other foods; and how to make desserts in minutes.”
I reckoned all these how-tos had to be child’s play for our 42-year-old tutor, Chef Jane. Born in Florida, Chef Jane had
trained at Cordon Bleu in France, and earned a master of arts degree in gastronomy at the University of Adelaide in
Australia with a dissertation entitled “God Is Not a Vegetarian.” In addition to teaching cooking classes at the institute,
she was an oenologist and wine course instructor.
“Recreational cooking should be fun,” she declared at the outset of our first three-hour class. “At least it shouldn’t be
a big hassle or a pain in the butt.”
My half-dozen classmates proved to be as good-humored as Chef Jane and almost, if not more, gastronomically
ignorant than me. They included Mike, a 48-year-old computer engineer who lived alone; Liv, a 30-ish equities
specialist for a major bank; and Bianca, a 24-year-old Brazilian-born cosmetics marketing executive. Each had his or
her own reasons for enrolling, but in light of my own parental plight, I found George’s the most empathetic.
“My father’s 85 years old, and my mother’s too sick to cook anymore,” George confided. “After serving him steak three
nights in a row, I figured I better learn how to add a little variety to the menu.”
To our chagrin, Lesson 1, which covered hors d’oeuvres and buffet platters, required absolutely no cooking. Chef
Jane passed around several varieties of herbs for us to identify by smell, and demonstrated a few basic knife skills like
slicing, dicing and fanning with emphasis on not severing a digit or stabbing anyone else in the kitchen. Then she
divided the class into groups with specific menus to prepare.
George and I were assigned to make a Mediterranean platter comprising radicchio, Belgian endive, olives, grape
leaves, roasted peppers, chickpea purée, eggplant and puréed fish roe. The closest we came to dealing with flame
was toasting triangles of pita bread. But we bonded like the lead characters in “The Odd Couple,” alternately playing
the roles of Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar.
As per Chef Jane’s advice, we arranged the ingredients of our Mediterranean platter in odd numbers: 11 triangles of
pita bread rather than 10, three globs of hummus rather than four. We juxtaposed contrasting colors by placing green
endive next to red radicchio, and we piled the olives and the grape leaves high on the platter to create what our
instructor called “movement.”
“Breathe and fly, baby!’ George hollered as he circled a mound of pink puréed fish roe with a strip of red pepper.
Lesson 2 put our nascent partnership to the test. As with the final session of the course scheduled for the following
Sunday, which covered pastas, Lesson 2 required real cooking. We were assigned to produce a mesclun salad with a
vinaigrette dressing and toasted goat cheese croûtes. At the same time, we were supposed to marinate and grill eight
chicken breasts, sandwich them in French bread slathered with a pesto mayonnaise made from scratch, and have
them ready to serve before the wall clock struck 1 p.m.
Chef Jane showed us how to scorch the skins of the chicken breasts with professional style cross-hatches by rotating
them from a 10 o’clock angle to a 2 o’clock angle relative to the ribs of the grill. After toasting the French bread,
however, George noted that we had neglected to conceive of a suitable platter arrangement.
“Presentation is everything,” I moaned. “What are we going to do?”
Fortunately, our classmate Bianca noticed our crisis and offered us several handfuls of parsley left over from her
assignment. Breathing sighs of relief, George and I sliced the sandwiches diagonally, and arranged them in
symmetrical wedges around our borrowed parsley bed.
Moments later, we all sat down to the best part of Cooking 101 or any other gastronomic exercise: a feast. It featured
our chicken breast sandwiches and mesclun salad, and our classmates’ croque-monsieur, hamburgers, Cobb salad,
Caesar salad and blueberry crisp. George and I raised glasses of California chardonnay to toast Chef Jane and
Bianca.
“Breathe and fly, baby!” we exclaimed.
Chef Jane grinned at my odd couple cooking partner and me. “Tell me when you guys are going to get married,” she
said. “I’ll cater the wedding.”
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