By Adriane Quinlan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 20, 2006; M01
At 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, in the dead of summer, when most college kids are still asleep, I shuffle into a classroom set up like a science lab, pick up a course pack and pen, and prepare for eight hours of strenuous instruction.
There are 10 of us, ranging from a 17-year-old future freshman to a 24-year-old law student. We pull up stools to five rows of smooth countertops, which face a demonstration counter at the front of the room. An angled mirror above shows the action on the table below. Instead of Bunsen burners, we bow before stovetops. Instead of pipettes, we're armed with basting brushes, spoons, tongs and knives. L'Academie de Cuisine's upstairs kitchen is a pastel, scrubbed down version of Iron Chef's "kitchen stadium." We're ready to learn.
Josh Levinson came to class because at school in California, all he eats is Dell Taco take-out. Max Tanzer's here because he's moving into his first apartment. Anne Laughlin just graduated, and suddenly needs to cook for herself. And I came because the only recipe I have the patience to follow is on the back of a Styrofoam cup of noodles: pour hot water, stir, enjoy. Pretty pathetic for a senior at Yale.
Enter instructor Robyn Alexander, her kitchen whites starched, a bag of knives in tow. She's overheard a snippet of conversation between two students in the front. "Don't even talk about Shake 'n Bake," she warns, wagging a finger. "That stuff's loaded with sodium."
A mother of four, personal chef and a Stanford grad, last year Alexander attended her 15th college reunion. "It got me thinking about all the gross stuff everyone used to eat," she says. "My husband had a roommate who went out and bought 30 cans of Chef Boyardee and came home declaring, 'Dinner for 30 days!' "
So she designed L'Academie de Cuisine's "College Prep Cooking" with a difficult audience in mind: students with tight budgets, hectic schedules, new kitchens and the added challenge of cooking for one. Alexander, who describes herself as "kind of like a cross between a valley girl and an old person," has taught cooking classes for kids, adults and even parents and their children -- but strangely never for anyone in between. This first-time class -- taught over two days in four-hour chunks -- is not the typical offering for the cooking school, whose gourmet courses usually fall closer to "Lobsters and the Wines that Love Them," an actual class actually offered this fall.
Alexander's instruction begins as every meal does: with a trip to the store. To be savvy consumers, we need to know the standard price for ingredients, so we're sent on a scavenger hunt -- not to an adorable outdoor market, but to somewhere we might actually shop when school starts in the fall: the local Safeway. In teams of two, we wander fluorescent aisles, holding forth grocery lists and scanning price stickers.
I team up with Samantha Tanzer, a lanky prospective Swarthmore freshman who's nervous about feeding herself for the first time. I'm amazed at Tanzer's math genius -- she briskly calculates weights and multiplies figures. But I'm a salad junkie and find I'm a step ahead of her by simply knowing the difference between Romaine and, um, all those other green things.
Together we traipse from the salad bar, where lettuce is $4.99 per pound, to the produce section, where the same goes for $1.50. Ah-ha! When Alexander sees us weighing the head of lettuce, she swoops in. (Alexander, we should note, is one of those teachers with eyes in the back of her head. Later in the day, she tilts back her head back, fills her nostrils with air and shouts, "Who's got their burner too high?") In this case, holding the lettuce aloft, Alexander sees me in the moment of renunciation for years of buying packed, washed lettuce. "Have you learned your lesson?" she asks, a kind hand on my arm. "Grocery stores are in the business to make money."
Zig-zagging around produce, Alexander pokes and prods the fruit, showing us how to tell when each is ripe. "Scratch and sniff," she says, holding aloft a honeydew. "It should smell like how you want it to taste."
When it's time for questions, everyone raises their hands like we're in grade school. I ask when to spend the extra bucks on organic. The answer? "Only if you're eating in vast enough quantities that a trace of pesticide is gonna make a difference," says the teach. She suggests a fruit and veggie scrub, which should be used to wash all produce.
"What about meat? I never know what to do with meat,'' asks Moira O' Connor, a senior at the University of Georgia who sought out the class because she spends too much of her budget at chain bakeries like Panera and Cosi. "Ah, meat," Alexander says, whisking her drowsy troupe through the aisles to explain the different grades of beef and point out with a pinky how much cheaper it is to buy, instead of individual cuts, an entire chicken. (An entire chicken? Riiiight. The very idea conjures up the nightmarish Mr. Bean sketch, where, as he's basting a turkey for a Thanksgiving dinner, it somehow ends up on the comedian's head.)
Back at L'Academie's kitchen, cooking assistants scurry about like Santa's helpers, plopping down bowls of pre-measured ingredients and the naked, pink flesh of one dead, de-feathered bird. My new partner, Ben Schneider, a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, is a chicken lover who has never actually stared its flesh in the face. He pokes it curiously, as if it could somehow be resuscitated, coddled back to life. I feel like we should pull out a scalpel and start dissecting.
This is such a simple skill, it feels absurd not already knowing it. It's one thing, along with ironing a shirt, sewing a button, balancing a checkbook and driving stick, that Alexander thinks every teen should know before they pack up and move out. What's wrong with my generation, that we know so much useless information and so little that we actually need to survive?
Alexander thinks too many latchkey kids are greeted by too many parents toting takeout.
"The reason you need to learn all of this is that you all eat out too much with your families. It's no longer a priority to eat in, or to learn how to make what you eat."
Alexander is sympathetic. "My own mother was perfectly fine with a bowl of cereal or a sandwich for dinner," she says. That's why she first took up the spatula and cooked for herself. Her own four sons get a hot dinner every night. When she looks around the L'Academie kitchen, she sees kids like herself, who want to eat right but who never got the classic training. "You guys are more motivated than the usual cooking class," she tells me. "You're not here to learn a fancy dish, you're here to survive."
We're here not only to survive, but to avoid the freshman 15. Making your own food, Alexander argues, can be a lot healthier than eating out: You can balance your meals, control how much oil you use and control sodium levels (tip: watch canned produce).
In addition to going over basics, like how to divvy up a chicken, cut an onion without crying and stock your first kitchen, Alexander thinks it's important to teach us a few recipes for comfort food that will make our new homes feel like home. Beneath the angled mirror, Alexander flurries like an octopus with eight arms in eight pots at once, always one step ahead, turning out the sort of flawless dishes that would look great on the cover of Cooking Light magazine. She candies carrots, reduces a creamy sauce for tarragon chicken and purees an absolutely fabulous tomato basil soup. Back at our countertops, we try to mimic her, only in slow motion, learning recipes by preparing them ourselves.
We also try our hand at some dishes designed to impress -- a soy glazed Asian salmon to be dressed with a tangy wasabi mayonnaise, Szechwan noodles loaded with ginger and fresh squash, a shortcake oozing with mixed berry filling and topped with homemade whipped cream. They're all easy as . . . pie?
The only recipe I manage to flunk is, strangely enough, the mashed potatoes. My Irish ancestry appears to be no help: I don't cut my potatoes in even pieces, so they cook unevenly. When I start to mash with the back of a fork, my goop turns gray because I failed to properly remove all the potato "eyes." And when I add some butter, it flash cooks on the side of the pan before it soaks into my under-cooked mass. Luckily, with enough salt and pepper, it still tastes like mashed potatoes.
After preparing six full meals in eight hours, we are pleased to discover that it's actually pretty difficult to mess this stuff up, and we're surprised that nothing takes longer than a half-hour to cook. So why didn't I have time for this before? Why, in my college kitchen, did I so frequently turn to the golden chalice of a Ramen cup, as if such a meal could really satisfy?
What College Prep Cooking gives me is not only an arsenal of recipe ideas, but the confidence to cook them, having already succeeded once (though I won't be trying mashed potatoes anytime soon). Everyone has a different favorite recipe. I love the honey-roasted chicken. It's sweet with a tangy kick, and the flecks of green from chopped rosemary make the dead bird seem almost . . . elegant. I would serve it to a prospective date, or a roommate, or the president of the United States if he wandered back to his alma mater.
"I cannot believe this chicken cordon bleu," says Josh Levinson, shoveling it in. My partner, Ben Schneider, shuns the whipped cream: "This shortcake is the most amazing thing ever and I want to eat it just plain," he says, crumbs in his teeth. Anne Laughlin can't get enough of the Greek pasta salad. "This is absolutely the best." And Max Tanzer is most amazed by the soy-glazed Asian salmon with wasabi mayonnaise. "It was cool how all the bad stuff burnt down and went away," he says, "and then all that was left was the most delicious thing."
Listening to the sighs of a well-fed class, Alexander wipes her hands on her apron front and leans casually against a countertop. "Don't worry guys," she says, "I was once like you. I would stick a bagel on my thumb and eat it as I biked to class."
Everyone laughs the laugh of a changed man. Never again . . . L'Academie de Cuisine (http://www.lacademie.com) has two locations, in Gaithersburg and Bethesda, and offers a variety of food courses.