After neglecting the sous vide precision cooker we received as a wedding gift over a year and a half ago, Chris decided to get me a sous vide cooking class as a Christmas gift. Tonight, I attended the class after work, and while it was a lot of fun and yielded some very delicious food, I could not help but be annoyed by the other students in the class.

For the most part, the instructor was probably a bit too nice, as he struggled to speak over people a lot. There were always multiple conversations going in our group of 15. There seemed to be little respect for the chef instructor. He oftentimes got the same question multiple times, or even got questions to things he already explained just because people were not paying attention. Because there was not a cooking station for every student, not everyone was actively participating in the activities, whether it was the chopping, the searing, or the vacuum sealing. So as you can imagine, a lot of people didn’t really participate at all. What’s the point of taking a class if you’re not going to be fully engaged?

One person came as part of a client/team outing, and because a lot of what we prepared was meat (via the salad with chicken, the sous vide chicken breast, and the sous vide tri-tip steak), as a vegetarian she ate only two things that we prepared. She insisted that she came for the “learning” and the company. Everyone else at least ate everything.

Then, there was the woman who was a repeatedly self-proclaimed “germophobe” who insisted on breaking her own 65-degree egg onto her salad. Um, didn’t she realize that ALL the other food that was prepared that night was touched by multiple other hands in this kitchen, and before that, the vegetables and meats were cut/slaughtered/killed/deboned by other hands? She also had the worst chopping skills of anyone I’d ever seen at a cooking class who claimed to do a lot of cooking classes. Even after the chef demonstrated how to “use your full knife blade” and not go “up and down” on the knife, she did the exact thing he said not to do and said she didn’t care.

So in the end, the majority of the students annoyed me, didn’t pay any attention, and had to impose their neuroses on the rest of us. At least the food was good and I could get out of there as soon as I could to take an express train home to peace and tranquility.