I am one of those people who is lucky enough to celebrate my birthday and Christmas in the same month, my birthday is exactly two weeks before Christmas – to be precise. As my fellow Sagittarians can relate, often birthday gifts might be combined with christmas gifts, and birthday parties may be celebrated during other festive parties. I am not complaining by any means, after all, this is all that I have known. During university when I wanted to plan a birthday party, I would compete with everyone’s final exam schedule; and now that those days are gone, I compete with work holiday parties and other festive plans. No big deal.

But this year, I decided to celebrate a little bit ahead of the game to ensure I could actually organize a gathering. I wanted to share with my friends and family what a night of cooking in a professional kitchen would be like – and enjoy a great meal (of course).

I called up my culinary school and booked a private cooking class, at Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver. It was SUCH a fun night, I highly recommend you consider this for your next party idea.

Here are a few photos from the fun we had on the weekend. Everyone left super full, learned a few new culinary tricks, and took home new recipes.

As the host, I was able to choose the menu, of three courses. Then one of my former Chef instructors, Chef Warren, instructed the class. For each course we received a demonstration of what to do, then we made it our selves, and ate it. We did this for each course. Most of the preparation was done ahead of time too, so we were not there having to do a ton of time consuming components – they essentially let us do all the FUN stuff. Several culinary assistants were also in the kitchen roaming about our stations to offer assistance to anyone in need.

I highly recommend planning a private class at Northwest if you are interested for your next birthday or social. Here are my reasons why:

1) You get to choose the menu for your group, and allergies can be accommodated too

2) You get to cook with your family and friends, so it is easy to socialize – better than in a loud crowded restaurant anyway.

3) The food is amazing and fresh

4) You learn to make new recipes, learn new culinary tricks, but don’t have to do ALL of the prep work necessarily

5) The staff are super nice and helpful

6) You don’t have to do any of the clean up (BONUS)

7) It is just plain fun…

I might be making this my new annual birthday tradition; and I am already debating between a middle eastern themed menu for next year, or indian. What would you choose? Oh wait, or, maybe I want to go with Italian? Looks like I have the next few years already mapped out!

Learn more on the NWCAV website.

Earlier this week I enjoyed an afternoon with a friend of mine while we canned some fresh peaches she brought back from a recent trip to the okanagan. Ripe for canning, the peaches were soft and perfect.

I took a canning class once, a while back, at Save-On-Meats through a Groupon. I wrote about it in another blog post. Anyway, I remember there were a lot of steps by they were not too complex.

So I did a little search and came across this super handy site, full of recipes to for using local produce. BC Tree Fruits – peaches in light syrup. As I read through the steps, I thought, this is gonna be fruity-fun!

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