Let me start by saying I am not the world's best cook. I was blessed to have an amazing cook as a mother, and never took the time to learn all of her secrets. While I enjoy and delight in eating good and delicious food, can boil pasta, and make a meannnn salad, I'm not the type of person who LOVES to cook. I get by, but eating is much more fun than making for me. I acknowledge this as a weakness. As a nutrition expert and RD-to-be, I hope to share with my future clients how to make delicious, easy, healthy food, so the first step is to improve my own cooking skills. Perhaps I should do a Julia & Julia-esque cook-through of one of the many unopened cookbooks in my apartment, schedule a few more hours in my day, and just bite the bullet. But I took the first step several weeks ago, by taking a Knife Skills class at
Artepicure Cooking School in Somerville MA. Knowing how to work with your knives is the first step for any time of culinary work, so I though it would be a great starting off point.
Nestled in
an artist's building,
the room is part home, part kitchen, with assorted, fascinating knick-knacks and trinkets scattered
everywhere
pots and chairs
puppets and kitchenaids
cookbooks upon cookbooks upon cookbooks
Knife skills is a great foundation, but Artepicure has a WIDE range of classes, with everything from
vegan, tapas, gluten free, cooking around the world, molecular gastronomy and chocolate centered classes. I definitely need to come back soon!
On a more sober note:
It can be easy to feel pretty helpless when hearing the stories of devastation in Japan. I think the best thing to do is look at our resources, what we have and what we can do. If you like to eat and/or run like me, I suggest you check these out:
Support Relief Efforts In Japan with
Bakesales for Japan nationwide April 2nd! No bakesale near you? Chocolate Covered Katie is the sweetest blogger around, and she's having a huge blog bakesale for Japan April 5th!
Run for Japan: Nike has launched “Donate Japan,” a campaign designed to encourage people to log the kilometers they are running to raise money for the relief efforts in Japan after the March earthquake and tsunami devastated the country.
Have you ever taken a cooking class? What did you learn from it? What have you been able to do to lend a helping hand to Japan?
Sometimes I'm spontaneous, and decide to take 48 hour trips to New York at the last minute.
Stay tuned for posts about how I ate my way through NYC, and who I found there.
Have a wonderful week! 
