Cooking School Vacations

Culinary Vacations I Have Taken

Cooking School Vacations are a great way to immerse yourself in cooking, food, and culture.

I love to combine relaxation with education and since I love learning about food and cooking tend to gravitate toward culinary focused vacations.

Through the years I have attended many recreational cooking sessions, all over the country and even spent some time assisting with Sur La Table cooking classes in Scottsdale where I was paid for attending classes, gathering recipes, meeting great chefs and honing my cooking skills. Here are some of my favorites.

When I first moved to Phoenix in 1998, my brother gave me a gift certificate to Sweet Basil Gourmet, a great little cooking school and culinary shop in Scottsdale. There I met, Hallie Harron, gifted chef, instructor, and food writer who ran a wonderful restaurant called Quiessence at South Mountain and spent the next couple of years assisting her part-time at the restaurant, with cooking classes and catering events.

My first true cooking vacation was Hallie's Unpolished Paris Tour, a fun food-based City of Light tour that further ignited my love of great food. She has since moved her base to a little village in the heart of Provence, so another adventure awaits me someday.

Culinary vacations give you the chance to learn at the source, away from everyday distractions. Their a delight for the senses.

I've visited centuries old pottery operations, wineries, mustard mills, goat cheese makers, French bakers, chocolatiers, and bustling markets.

In the process you acquire skills and recipes you can use again and again,  all while meeting like-minded people in lovely locations.

In June of 2006, my sister Brenda and I attended Deborah Krasner’s Vermont Culinary Vacation, where we spent five days of cooking, touring, and exploring wonderful food from the James Beard Award-winning cookbook author’s 18th century renovated barn in southern Vermont.

In 2008 my sister and I opted for  The Conscious Gourmet’s Sedona retreat, a program that focuses on the relationship between our food choices and our physical, mental, and emotional health and included cooking classes and lecture/workshops that immersed us in the hands-on preparation of health-supportive foods as well as an ever-expanding array of nutritional approaches, such as Chinese 5-element theory, Ayurveda and macrobiotics.

As time and money permits, there are several more Cooking adventures on my bucket list.

Culinary Vacations & Programs I Hope to Take:

A La Bonne Cocotte

Ballymaloe 12 Week Certificate Course

Cooking with Friends in France

Italian Cookery Course at Casa Umbuto

La Comb en Perigord

La Villa Bonita School of Mexican Cuisine