TRAVELING TO THE MEDITERRANEAN VIA A COOKING CLASS
Heavy on fresh produce and olive oil, and light on processed foods and saturated fats, the Mediterranean diet has been touted as one of the healthiest and most delicious in the world.
Every year The Maya Kitchen holds a Mediterranean cooking class, teaching dishes from European countries like Spain and Italy, all the way to North African countries like Egypt and Morocco.
Why Mediterranean? It’s been touted as one of the healthiest and most delicious cuisines in the world. Heavy on fresh produce and olive oil, and light on processed foods and saturated fats, it’s been shown to lower chronic disease and increase life expectancy. It might even help you lose weight healthily, with its emphasis on vegetables and whole foods.
This year’s class was virtual, of course, taught by Maya Kitchen chefs Dan Libunao and Charina Cano, who demonstrated how to cook Turkish beef kebabs and Lebanese tabbouleh salad.
These dishes and the wonderfully fragrant herbs and spices they used reminded me of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, where they sell spices in rows of open sacks so colorful they resemble a rainbow.
On the family vacation we took in 1999 to Turkey, Egypt and the Holy Land, not only did we visit amazing sites like the Trojan horse, the pyramids of Giza and the Sea of Galilee, the incredible food made the trip unforgettable.
Our hotel by the Nile served not just one but two buffet spreads — one western and one Egyptian — and instead of choosing one cuisine a day, most days I ended up eating two breakfasts, preferring the Egyptian spiced porridge loaded with dates and nuts to plain old oatmeal.
We discovered a restaurant in Cairo called Felfela, which introduced us to kebabs, falafel and shakshouka.
Cooking along with chefs Dan and Charina, I learned that these Mediterranean dishes are so flavorful because they’re packed with herbs and spices. A salad like tabbouleh is an ideal dish for summer because it contains cooling vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes.
I also picked up a lot of useful tips, like how to bring out the maximum flavor and aroma of the spice mix by pan-roasting it first, and how to cut onions so that you’ll “cry” less. The secret is not to remove the root at the end while slicing so that the onion sap, which is what brings tears to your eyes, can’t escape.
On its website The Maya Kitchen is offering a series of online classes that might even help you start your own home food business, like their “Gourmet in a Bottle” class that will teach you how to make liver paté and gourmet tuyo, or satisfy food cravings like the upcoming “Tonkatsu and Katsudon” class on May 8, or “Takoyaki and Okonomiyaki” class on May 19.
Whichever class you take, The Maya Kitchen’s 57-year history guarantees you’ll have expert chefs as guides and end up with dishes so delicious you can sell them.