Why take a cooking class at Generous Servings?

If you're thinking about taking a cooking class, you've got several options in the Denver area.  Taking a cooking class is an investment of time and money, so it makes sense to think about which cooking school will offer you the best experience.  And from our point of view, we want to attract customers who will be happy with what we offer, so we appreciate the opportunity to tell you about the Generous Servings philosophy and unique approach to teaching cooking.

One of the most important features of our classes is that they are 100% hands-on.  We don't do demonstration classes, and we don't do lectures.  Of course we show you how to do things--that's kind of the point--but we make sure that the participants get to try everything, from the chopping to the cooking to the final tasting for seasoning.  We think this is by far the best way to learn to cook, and it will give you the confidence to apply what you learn at home.  If you wanted to watch someone else cook, you could do that for free on TV!

In order for each participant to be involved in the preparation of every dish, we keep our classes very small.  Almost all our classes are limited to 10 participants.  In a group that small you will be able to see what's going on around the kitchen, get a chance to try everything you want to do, and ask the instructor any questions you think of.  We don't cram as many people as possible into our classes.  If you're shopping around for a cooking school, perhaps the most important question to ask is, how big are the class sizes?  Most other cooking schools in the area have class sizes of 18 to 24 people, or even more!

Your experience in a cooking class will depend largely on your instructor, and we are very careful with how we select and train our cooking instructors.  There are a lot of people who are good cooks, but very few of them are good teachers as well.  A good cooking instructor will be able to guide you to success with the recipes, impart numerous helpful tips along the way, and make sure you enjoy yourself.  Many cooking schools employ restaurant chefs as their instructors, but most of those people have no training as teachers, and they aren't always good at translating their restaurant experience into information that's useful for home cooks.  Our instructors have extensive teaching experience, approachable personalities, and they love working with home cooks and developing recipes that will work in anyone's kitchen.  That being said, we don't dumb down cooking: you won't find any mixes in our classes, nor will you be told that you need to buy some silly gadget to be a better cook.  If you want to geek out about anything food-related, we are right there with you.  You should see us when we all go out to dinner together: we can analyze the food all night long.  All our instructors love to cook and experiment at home, and we're always testing new potential class recipes on our friends and families.

Finally, when you patronize Generous Servings, you know that you are also helping the less fortunate in our community.  Every single day we donate food and money to nonprofits, food banks, and local organizations, adding up to thousands of pounds of food and thousands of dollars each year.  Each month we feature a local cause for our Community Give-Back Day, and twice a year we sponsor a Cook for a Cause Cook-a-Thon to donate half a ton of food to charity.  To learn more about our donations, please click here.  We know how lucky we are to own a business and have such great customers, and we know that there are lots of people who can't afford the luxury of taking a cooking class or buying a homemade croissant.  It's not just our name; being generous is part of our business model.  Sometimes it's a challenge to strike the balance, but we think it's worth it.

Thanks for considering Generous Servings for a cooking class, and we hope to see you soon!

ISO poison tester for sprinkles--POSITION FILLED

We had a very nice Thanksgiving around Generous Servings.  Our whole family came into town and we immediately put them to work, as has been our tradition since the first Denver Brinig Thanksgiving three years ago.  One of our sisters is an expert at holiday light installation, so she was in charge of interior and exterior decoration.  The building is looking very festive now.

We also got our family to help make hundreds of cookies, which we decorated in the first of our two Holiday Cookie Decorating Parties this past weekend.  It's always fun to see how people of all ages approach the process of decorating cookies.  In this last class there were two very cute brothers who were about 4 and 6 years old, and they were really intent on tasting all the decorations--more than once.  They ate the frosting directly off the plastic knives we gave them, and they ate the sprinkles by the spoonful.  Here's one of them:

This week I've been working on a new dessert for Après: ginger crème brûlée with cranberry-pear compote.  The flavors are very good, and that's the most important thing, but the most dramatic element of this dessert is the garnish:

That caramel spiral is just about the coolest thing I've ever seen.  It took me a while to work out the kinks in making it--this is what my work area looked like a few days ago:

Smashed between the holidays is an exciting milestone for us: yesterday Generous Servings was three years old!  We always have a public celebration of our anniversary in January at our Cook for a Cause event (this year scheduled for January 30; register now to join us in this fun all-day Cook-a-Thon for charity!), but Jill and I privately observe the actual day by going out to dinner at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant.  This year we might have to order in, since we're adopting a dog this weekend (named Gravy, to be friends with Biscuit), but one way or another, we'll raise a fork to Generous Servings.