the early bird special

Last month I took an extremely horrible cooking class for French Pastries with Julia and Anne. Technically, it wasn’t painful or intellectually insulting to be there, but I couldn’t help but feel cheated that I was paying a lot of money for two sessions of essentially watching a woman make mediocre desserts in the common room of a depressing apartment complex in Everett. I hate Everett so much. Looking at the class fee, I had mistakenly assumed that we were paying for an experience that involved a commercial kitchen with plenty of counter-space for everyone to try their hand at lemon custard and crème brulee, when in fact, the seven of us were huddled around an island taking notes on a flaky pastry recipe that, frankly, was vastly inferior to the recipe my grandmother passed along to me years ago. But the real rub was revealed ninety minutes into the first class period when the teacher decided she had done enough teaching for one day and that we would have a better time watching a Rick Steves video about Paris. She claimed she’d seen it and that it was a really good way to learn about French food, but she was clearly lying because aside from the video beginning when Mr. Steves emerges from a Parisian butcher shop, there was not a single mention of food or technique. Not to outdo herself in ineptitude, the following week she was done cooking again before the allotted two hours had elapsed, so we watched the video again. From the beginning. Again. The same video. And her crème brulee didn’t set up and her cream puffs tasted pasty. Thank god there was wine.

In the end, I’m walking away from that experience over $80 poorer, with no recipes I would reprise to impress my friends and family and having wasted 5 hours of my life that I’ll never get back.