I am doing so well at blogging! Three posts in one week?? Who am I?
Anywho,
My dad’s birthday is next week and he is always super hard to buy for. I generally stick to the same few things: wine, food, cigars. It’s also hard having a birthday so close to Thanksgiving AND Christmas. However, I keep hearing about the novel idea of giving “experiences” instead of physical gifts for presents. I really like this idea so I ran with it for Marc’s birthday. He loves cooking and used to work in his dad’s pizza joint back in the day; what better gift than a cooking class? I wanted to pick something that we don’t make often, but I knew he would like. I almost chose a sushi class, but the times weren’t good so Mexican it was! We never make traditional enchiladas at home (honestly I thought I signed up for a tamale class until I got there and found out it was enchiladas).
I signed us up for one at Central Market in Southlake, Texas. Central Market, if you don’t already know, is my FAVORITE high-end grocery store. It is owned by HEB, which is another chain of grocery stores here in Texas. CM has literally everything under the sun stocked all of the time. Frog legs? Got ’em. That hard to find wine you drank that one time? They’ve got your back. It’s amazinggggg
I have been dying to take a cooking class, especially from CM for a long time and this was just the push I needed to sign us up. Marc is such a ham (I get it from him). He had made friends with the whole class by the end of the night and everyone sang him Happy Birthday. He also micro-managed the other wanna-be-chefs. He was showing people how to chop and turn off the stove aka doing the most.
Our instructors were awesome. They were super nice and knowledgeable about everything in the kitchen. They were the ones who created the recipes and they made us nice little booklets with all of our recipes and a few others to take home with us.
We ended up making three types of enchiladas: chicken, brisket, and shrimp. I think the brisket ended up being my favorite, but they were all delicious. Our instructors also made borracho beans and rice beforehand so we got to nibble on those with our chips and salsa too. We also got two pours of wine and I discovered a chardonnay that I liked! Usually they are too oak-y, but this one was totally different. It’s called Butternut and it is made in Napa, CA.
The class lasted about 2 hours and was very interactive. About half of our class was from a local finance firm and they were doing a team building outing so they were very talkative, but they were open to talking to more people than just their group, which made it that much more fun. I will definitely be back.
Disclosure: I was not compensated for my review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
I hope I’ve inspired you all to try something new (like a cooking class) in the next few weeks!
Happy Reading!
-Savvy
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