My last birthday was all kinds of special, primarily because it was the last birthday of my roaring twenties.  It was also the day of Kitchen Crush’s official launch and finally it was a birthday when I made out like a bandit in terms of culinary gifts.  Among the things I received were: the cutest heart-shaped crème brûlée ramekins and a kitchen torch (thank you, Axel), a gourmet meal at Dusseldorf’s Monkey’s West restaurant (thank you Mimi and Ned), a  book on the history of taste and a DVD of Julie & Julia (thanks Gosi), a set of beautiful amuse-bouche spoons and a beautiful cookbook by Tessa Kiros called Falling Cloudberries (thank you, Marion and Uli) and finally the coolest gift of all: a South African cuisine cooking class (thank you, the best of all husbands).  This last gift was finally consumed last weekend and it reminded me just how much I love to cook.  It has also motivated me to get off my derriere and start posting again.  I have been neglecting Kitchen Crush for the past month, mostly because I was just so absorbed by my new job, and somewhat because I have caught a severe case of “the lazies”.  I can’t explain it, but the fact that I started working and being productive in one area of my life, sent a treacherous signal to my brain which said “it’s okay to bum around for the rest of the time”.  And so I bummed, and I bummed, and then I bummed some more, all the while feeling guilty about abandoning Kitchen Crush and my readers.  A month has gone by and I think that the bumming period is over… it is high time to get back on track and to keep on doing what has made me so happy throughout February and March.  So, I thought I would start the month by writing a bit about the cooking class that gave me that little kick I needed to get back on track.

The class took place on a beautiful sunny afternoon at the Kochschule Düsseldorf, a cooking school located in the part of the city called the Japanese Mile.  Düsseldorf has the third largest Japanese community in Europe and the Japanese Mile is where all the sushi restaurants and Japanese stores are located.  (A quick note on Düsseldorf’s sushi joints, they are really quite amazing; they are typically filled with Japanese expats, the food is great and fresh and incredibly authentic and sitting there feels like a mini-trip to Japan).  Our cooking class started at 11am.  As we walked into the school, we were welcomed by Chef Dominik, his assistant and a very thoughtful bottle of Prosecco (a great start to a morning, if you ask me). 

We talked for a little while, put on our aprons and assumed our positions by the cutting boards.  Chef Dominik described the menu for us, and what a menu it was.  We would start with a Cauliflower-Curry-Coconut Soup accompanied by Springbok Skewers in Peanut Sauce, followed by a Chicken Curry with Chili Beans and a Fig Chutney, followed by Ostrich Steak with Green Beans and Rice and we would end this food orgy with a delicious Macademia Nut Cake and home-made Amarula Ice Cream.  Did I mention that throughout the meal we munched on freshly-baked bread and that our glasses kept magically refilling with wine?  It was really a great class, the food was beautiful, our classmates were very cool (we got invited for a strawberry picking trip in June, which is just the coolest and most random thing… I haven’t picked strawberries since I was a kid) and despite combining copious amounts of wine with the use of very sharp knives, nobody lost any of their fingers.  We learned a whole bunch of things, from where to buy inexpensive but good knives to how to sharpen them properly, as well as, how to make your own vanilla sugar in perpetuity and how to cut veggies in that “magical” chef way, that is just very cool and very scary at the same time.  Overall I think we had a great meal and learned something in the process, although frankly we did not overexert ourselves with the cooking… It seems like Dominik did a lot and we just cut a few strategically placed vegetables.  Or maybe it was just me, running around with my camera, trying to document as much as I could so that I can later post it on this blog.  And post it I will, all the food mentioned has been photographed and will be featured shortly, now that I’m back to my old, hard-working self.

Kochschule Düsseldorf – Immermannstrasse 50 – 40210, Düsseldorf – tel: (211) 1717 9676 – www.kochschule-duesseldorf.de

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