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.