52 Changes - Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is!

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear"

I first started this program of making a change a week over three months ago.  I didn't really know what I intended to change about myself, but I had a nagging feeling that I wasn't quite living life to my potential, and that I wasn't actively spending my time on things that I really wanted to do, instead whiling away time lazily watching TV I didn't care about and goofing off on the internet.  I wanted, in the words of Dr. Dreyfuss (The Apartment, a Zinkthink favorite movie!), to "be a mensch."  I didn't know exactly how, but I was going to start making some changes.

And those changes have gone fine, as evidenced by my recap last week.  After a quarter-year, some modifications have been made, but they're mostly all there still.  But I still hadn't made any game-changing paradigm shifts.  I wasn't snoozing my alarm clock, but was that truly all I wanted to accomplish?  Then, for whatever reason, the universe aligned, and the Big Change was made visible.  As in the Buddhist maxim at the start of this post, perhaps I was just finally ready, or maybe it was a really big coincidence, but a great opportunity came up.

For some inexplicable reason, I was poking around the Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) website.  I've done that a few times in the past year or so, since I know they have a culinary arts program, and I've thought it would be great to take a class or two if their schedules allowed.  They never do, since DMACC wants people who will take the full program, not jokers taking one class in the evenings.  Or so I thought, until I stumbled upon this listing: HCM 550 Food and Wine Seminar, will cover topics such as: food-wine pairing, stocks/sauces, meat cooking methods, poultry preparation, shellfish cookery, cheese, dairy products and bakeshop principles.  This was everything I'd wanted to learn, in one class!

I have intensely wanted, for the past year or so, to truly learn to cook.  To make that transition from one who can follow recipes, to a professional who can create dishes from whatever is fresh or on hand.  To know the essential techniques so I wouldn't have to color by number from a cookbook, but simply know how to treat a piece of meat or a batch of produce fresh from the garden to fully utilize it.  Right now, I like to cook, but I still don't think I know how.  With this class, I think I can bridge that gap.

Of course, one class for the masses is not the same as all-out going to culinary school.  But it's a heck of a lot better than the free offerings at Williams-Sonoma (bleah!), and it's just enough given that I don't actually want to work in a restaurant.  I'm trying to temper my expectations, but if we even begin to get into the fundamentals, I think this course is the kick-start that can get me on the road to cooking skill.  If they get me comfortable enough in the shallow end, I think I can use what I've learned to gradually work my way deeper on my own.

As the title implies, this class wasn't free - it cost $375.  That's going to hurt if the class isn't up to par with what I'm hoping.  But if it is, over a 16 week semester, that's less than $25 per three-hour class session.  If I gain the kind of knowledge I envision, that's a small price to pay.  And it lets me shift from talking to doing.  For ages, I've talked about how I wanted to learn to cook, but looking at what I did, there was no real progress, no action on my part.  The DMACC class gives me a way to go from a talker to a doer, and I think I'm ready as a student.  Class, and the journey to being a mensch, starts tonight.