One of the coolest wedding gifts we received was a cooking class for two with a German celebrity chef Mathias Ruta. I’m not sure how much of a celebrity this guy actually is, but for someone who is not mentioned by the German Wikipedia, the dude was a gargantuan ass. He made numerous Polish jokes throughout the class, which while not a crime in themselves (husband totally guilty of this, on occasion), turned out to be an ugly thing to do. You see, at that time, I didn’t speak or understand German, and, thus, I could not smack him back with some witty repartee. Fortunately, the cooking class had an all-you-can-drink wine station, which I duly abused, while murmuring what I thought meant “you’re mean” in German, but which later turned out to loosely translate into “you are evil”. So what made this class absolutely fantastic? Well, for one, Tim learned how to properly cut and clean a bell pepper – a skill which he proudly demonstrates to anyone willing to look (it is ironic, really, taking into consideration that he hates bell peppers even more than he hates pancakes). But most importantly, we learned two outstanding dishes, one of which was the honey-glazed roasted duck breast with lentils. Not only is this dish quite simple to make and impressive-looking, tastewise, it is absolutely exquisite, stunning really… and this actually comes from someone who doesn’t even like duck.

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