Need help with your cooking - use an online cooking class

Become a chef

Whilst using the college dining services is fine, after a while many of us want to just simply cook something for ourselves. So this article is aimed at all the fresher’s that are new to Hampshire College this year, or perhaps those students that have been here a while and figure it’s time they knew a bit more about cooking then just how to incinerate their toast!

It’s a truth but - anyone can cook, really you can. If you can follow a set of instructions you can cook and, what’s more, cook with confidence that you’re not going to burn down the hall of residence that you’re in.

You might not become a Michelin 3 Star chef, but their really isn’t a reason in the world why you can’t learn enough to be able to feed yourself, or prepare a meal for some friends.
Even better a meal that is balanced, nutritious and is not reliant on opening and heating up packets from the supermarket or passing take-way food off as your own.

Getting help with your cooking

Unless you’re living the life of a hermit in a cave off campus somewhere, all of us know someone who has better cooking skills than we do. All you’ve got to do is watch what they do and ask them questions, better still ask them if you can help - become their assistant.

After all, we all know ‘doing is the best way to learn’. On the learning front, we all also know the better the teacher the more we’ll learn. It would be a great idea to enroll in a cooking class either here in beauitful Hampshire County or even elsewhere in Western Massachusetts. There are cooking classes about almost every topic: Asian cooking classes, pasta cooking classes, healthy cooking classes, diet cooking classes, French cooking classes, etc.

The problem with that of course is that our commitments to our studies on campus mean we don’t really want to get involved in another formal classroom situation. Before you think you can wriggle out of this, there is another option - take a cooking class online.

Online cooking classes

If you think about this it’s an ideal solution to the dilemma you’re in. You do want to improve your cooking skills; you’re not over keen on having to go to a formal class and probably would prefer to learn on your own.

Doing the simplest of searches on the internet will return loads of online cooking classes and opportunities to download recipes. Finding an online cooking class could be just the thing for you. When looking for an online cooking class, presuming it has a webcast, you need to find out if the class is held at one time only, ie. that you have to be online for.

Or, can you access/download the class anytime you want to and can you get a hard copy, print out of the lessons, cooking catalogue and recipes. Two things arise from the answer to those questions. First of all which suits you best, the discipline of having to be ready for the class at a certain time or the flexibility of taking the cooking class when you want to. Also, don’t forget that if the lesson is a one off webcast you’ll need to have your computer in the kitchen to follow the lesson, not a great combination - a computer in a kitchen with goodness knows what flying around it!

I’d certainly recommend online cooking instructions that you can access anytime and anywhere you want to. That way you can also repeat the cooking classes as often as you want and you can print from it all the details of the lesson and also lots of cooking receipts. It might be that you’re actually not a bad cook but want to learn some new knowledge about a particular aspect of cooking; say deserts or cakes etc.

By refining the keywords you search the internet for your cooking class, you’ll be able to easily find the cooking lessons you want and at the level that’s appropriate to you current level of skills.

Practicing what you’ve learned

So, you’ve got past the boiling an egg lesson, now you have learned how to prepare a risotto and you now also understand how to make Latin American Food. There’s absolutely no point in keeping all this new found knowledge to yourself. Now’s the time to invite some friends round and cook them that meal, that’ll leave them all stunned and amazed.