Like me, Live Longer enjoys a good auction. Recently, she acquired a cooking class for eight and, as luck would have it, invited me to benefit from her win.
To ensure we truly appreciated her win, Live Longer hosted the class in a beautiful home with an incredible kitchen equipped with double ovens and double entendres – two things Live Longer and I both love.
On the menu was Chilled Eggplant Terrine, Braised Mediterranean Mussels, Wild Line-Caught Grouper “In Papiro,” Cocoa Panna Cotta and a lot of eyebrow raising, side commentary and giggles from us girls. It was hard not to giggle between the chef’s cooking commentary and our cutup (sans cooking knives) behavior.
As the chef prepared the mussels, he gave us several pointers, “Ripping the beard off is easy.” “Not if you’re gay and don’t want others to know,” someone quipped. “When they open up, they release their liquor…..you can’t pull it open yet,” he continued. “Sounds familiar,” another quip and several giggles. Live Longer took this opportunity to share some expertise, “They might be small, but they’re hard.”
Oper found this quite humorous, however, her favorite comments were made earlier when preparing the greens. “We’re going to toss the salad,” and “Don’t forget the salad spinner,” made her giggle like a school girl.
As dining goes, we soon moved on to dessert and our chef had more cooking wisdom. “If I may interject something about equipment…” I think the rest was about non-stick, however, I’m not entirely sure because we started laughing and the next thing we knew he advised us to, ”fill your vessel.” He showed us how to do so and then said, “I tear the rim.” Good to know. As he cleaned up the dessert ingredients, one of our other friends panicked a bit. “Did you leave me the cream?” and then adamantly added, “I will have cream on my face by the end of the night.” Apparently it’s good for the skin….that’s what she said.
Surprisingly, our chef stayed, finished our cooking lessons, broke bread with us and we officially became groper, I mean grouper, groupies.