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‘Dance it Up’

Gretchen Teran isn’t really into cooking. But her husband loves to cook, so she decided to go along on a recent evening when the Weekend Kitchen, a small kitchen shop in Essex, held a Provençal cooking class featuring a mixed green salad with classic French tarragon vinaigrette, bouillabaisse, French bread with rouille, and a plum galette.

She left the class having learned a few new things, with a full stomach after a fun meal, and with a few new friends.

“I only went because he loves to cook,” she says. “I would do it again. I loved the ambiance of the kitchen setting, the orderliness of the instruction without feeling I was in school because, unlike my husband, I need instruction in the kitchen. I do love to bake and learned that the galette is my new go-to dessert...it was an altogether magical evening.”

The evening started at the Essex home of Nancy Kirkiles-Smith, the owner of the Weekend Kitchen shop, with introductions around the island in the kitchen, part of a renovation done in 2011 to the historic home, built in 1775, with another part added in 1824. The kitchen includes a Lacanche range cooker, a top-of-the-line, handmade, French cooktop and stove favored by many serious chefs, along with sharp knives, heavy duty cookware, and all of the equipment needed for the class. The ingredients, including saffron threads, tomatoes, fennel, and a generous array of seafood, were lined up like soldiers ready to go into battle.

Each participant had a chopping board and sharp knife, and while they chattered, getting to know each other, and listening to Chef Jennifer Magrey’s instructions, they learned the following lessons, tips, and fun facts:

• Mise en place. French for “put in place,” this is one of the first steps to executing a successful recipe, Magrey said, having each ingredient chopped to the right size, and ready to go, so it can be added exactly when it is needed.

• If you have a pan with a lid that heats up while you cook, place two corks under the handle, making sure they are a snug fit. That way, you can grab the corks, instead of having to use an oven mitt every time you need to check on the food being cooked.

• Hold the knife properly. Put your thumb and forefinger on either side of the tang, where the handle, or bolster, meets the blade. (See video posted on zip06.com/cookingschool for additional detail about how to hold a knife, and how to chop).

• You can peel a tomato without boiling it first. Cut a small slice off the top, then, using a good quality peeler, peel from the top to the bottom.

• Loosen garlic cloves from the head as soon as you get home from the market and get rid of the papery outer cover. The garlic cloves will still keep in their dried sheaths, but you will save yourself time and aggravation when you’re ready to use the garlic.

• The word sauté comes from a French word meaning “to toss,” which itself was derived from a Latin root meaning to jump, spring, or dance. And so, while sautéing that night, the chefs-in-training playfully called out “dance it up.”

• The best dishes start with great ingredients. Kirkiles-Smith sources the ingredients for the meal from, for the most part, local purveyors, including Four Root Farm in East Haddam; Walden Hill, a New England-based purveyor of acorn-fed pork; and Atlantic Seafood in Old Saybrook.

• The best meals end with old friends and new friends looking forward to the next meal together, which is exactly what happened here.

Emily Carrow, a student, agreed with Teran that the evening was “magical.”

“It didn’t really feel like a class so much as a friendly get-together with a little instruction from an expert. It was a very congenial atmosphere. The recipes were easy enough for a novice but sophisticated enough for the accomplished cook and the end result was really delicious,” she says. “My favorite part was about an hour and a half into it when the room was filled with the sounds of everyone chopping, whisking, kneading, rolling, chatting or just trying to find the olive oil and then all of a sudden controlled chaos was transformed—the salad was composed, the galettes went in the oven and the fish went in the stew. When we finally sat down to eat, it was kind of magical and I felt proud of us all for making such a delicious meal.”

Arrive as Strangers, Leave as Friends

Kirkiles-Smith says that is her favorite part of classes as well.

“I really like the fact that people arrive as strangers, and leave as friends. If they’ve gotten to know one another, if they’ve had a few laughs, and they didn’t burn the house down in the meantime, I count that as a successful evening,” she says. “They leave happy. They connect to the food, to the chef, and to each other.”

Running the cooking school is just one of several jobs for Kirkiles-Smith, who is also a research scientist at Yale during the week, with a specialty in transplant immunology. She says the cooking school is a good fit in part because she has a Ph.D in nutritional biochemistry. And as if that, and running the cooking store, wasn’t enough, she also runs a small letterpress business, Green Grape Press, where she hand-prints cards, stationery, invitations and ephemera on a 1880s Golding Official No. 4 tabletop press and Golding Pearl, one piece at a time.

How does she find time?

“Oh, I don’t have kids,” she says, laughing, “I just do it!” adding that she sometimes can do some of the letterpress work at night while relaxing and watching Netflix movies.

In addition to the cooking classes, usually offered about twice a month, Kirkiles-Smith and her chefs do birthday parties, bachelorette parties, dinner parties, and pop-up dinners. They also offer team-building classes, where groups of people from a workplace can come in and learn to work together around a meal. The team-building classes can be done like a Chopped competition, or as a regular cooking class.

In theory, Kirkiles-Smith says the cooking classes should complement her work at the cooking store in Essex, but that, in practice, since the classes are at her home, there is not a direct connection.

“It’s not at my store,” she says of the classes, “so it’s not really about selling them anything. Which is fine. I really want the evening to be about the food, and how to cook it. I don’t like it when you go to a cooking school and they try to sell you a peeler. I’m very passionate about the food, and where it’s grown, and how it’s cooked.”

That passion for food, and meeting the needs of specific communities, is the driving force behind other area cooking school operations as well.

Nicole Berube, the executive director of City Seed, says the classes the group offers in New Haven are central to its core mission of food access, food affordability, respecting the way food is cooked in different cultures, and the history of food. The Kitchen at CitySeed has a cooking event coming up on Saturday, Sept. 24 at 10:15 a.m., where local chef Lucas Zin of Junzi Kitchen will walk participants through the Wooster Square Farmers Market, showing them how to shop, and then cook, dishes based on the late summer market product. When it’s done, everyone will sit and eat together.

Betty Ann Donegan, who runs a cooking school in Branford, is about to embark on a cooking class aboard a chartered yacht traveling the Cyclades Greek islands in the Aegean sea.

“We’ll be going to Mykonos and Santorini, and all those islands. We’ll have classes on the boat, and eat at restaurants,” she says.

She also holds classes in Branford, generally a series of about five weekly sessions.

“We do a thing for the holidays, in spring we do brunch stuff for Mother’s Day,” she says. “It’s all very seasonal.”

Donegan, who’s been offering cooking classes for more than 40 years, often takes suggestions from her students as to what dishes to teach.

“We learn a lot, we have a lot of fun,” she said, echoing a theme emphasized by other cooking school operators. “Some of my students will never, ever have a big party, and cook some of this stuff, ever. They come, have a good meal, and enjoy the camaraderie. I get a lot of widows. It’s like therapy for some of them. Some cooking schools are very serious and this one is not like that. We certainly learn, and have fun along with that.”

For more information about the Weekend Kitchen, visit www.weekendkitchenct.com