Eat, greet and learn how to cook

You know from our drunk­en con­ver­sa­tion that we love Beth of Eat & Greet Blog, and we have writ­ten many times about our love for La Boca Loca too, so when Beth invited me along to one of the Eat&Greet cook­ing classes, this time taught by Will from La Boca, it was an instant yes, even though it meant get­ting out of bed.

Yes, the Eat&Greet classes hap­pen on Sunday morn­ings, right amidst the hustle and bustle of The City Mar­ket. And I mean lit­er­ally right in it – classes are taught at the Gag­genau Kit­chen right by the doors to the har­bour, and shop­pers will swarm all around you try­ing to sneak a peak at what you’re doing. I found that vaguely dis­turb­ing for about a minute or two, and then I loved it. Every­one likes to feel like they’re get­ting some­thing a little bit spe­cial and exclus­ive, right? And it was class-goers who got to touch and sniff the chilies, seeds, masa and all the oth­er elev­enty bil­lion ingredi­ents that go into a mole sauce.

Know­ing that Beth sends out the recipes after the class meant that we could relax instead of scram­bling to take notes. First we watched as Will talked us through the pro­cess of mak­ing the mole, then we all got stuck in mak­ing our own tor­til­las, which is a pretty simple pro­cess (you just need masa, con­veni­ently sold at La Boca Loca) and water, and while you can buy tor­tilla presses, you could also do them at home between books or chop­ping boards. Then once we had our tor­til­las stacked up, Beth poured us a Par­rot Dog while Will shred­ded some chick­ens that had been roast­ing glor­i­ously behind us, and it was time to dig in. Deli­cious!

So was what I learnt repeat­able? Def­in­itely – although I might not recre­ate the mole with all its three dif­fer­ent kinds of dried chil­lies and all the oth­er things totally authen­tic­ally every day, I do feel like Will’s talk while we were cook­ing gave me plenty of ideas for ways that I could adapt it. And I am totally mak­ing my own tor­til­las too, because those things were simple and beau­ti­ful.

What I love about the Eat&Greet cook­ing classes is the vari­ety – each class is taught by a dif­fer­ent chef with a dif­fer­ent area of expert­ise, be it Bon­ing with Bos­ley, the Dough Mama pie les­son or the upcom­ing Tommy Mil­lions pizza class. With small class sizes, you def­in­itely get a good chance to ask all the ques­tions you need, and learn heaps from the chef. And to learn right in amongst all the good fresh pro­duce at the mar­ket is par­tic­u­larly bril­liant because if you wanna rep­lic­ate the exper­i­ence at home, you can grab many of the ingredi­ents right there. Eat&Greet is cur­rently run­ning an All Stars series, and I def­in­itely recom­mend that if you’re into cook­ing – or think you might be, you check out at least one of the classes.