If you’re like most college students, you probably aren’t a master chef quite yet. Maybe you’ve got scrambled eggs and boxed mac & cheese down, but chances are you’re not making Coq au Vin every night. Enter, DU Cooking Club! This club has monthly meetings that give students the opportunity to cook a full three-course meal, all from scratch!
1. Basic cooking skills
One of the greatest parts about Cooking Club is that they don’t just throw you into a kitchen with a bunch of ingredients and expect you to make something amazing. The meeting I attended was called “Cooking 101” and introduced us to basic knife-handling techniques and some beginner cooking skills like roasting chicken, sautéing onions and making caramel.
2. Try new foods
I don’t know about you, but I personally had never eaten ratatouille before we made it at Cooking Club, and boy is it tasty. Also, I got to emulate Remy (from Ratatouille) while slicing up the vegetables, which was quite the bonus.
If you’re a picky eater, or if you just don’t like eating outside your comfort zone, going to a cooking club meeting is a great way to push your culinary boundaries without getting too crazy. Maybe ours wasn’tquite as pretty as Remy’s, but it was pretty darn close.
#SpoonTip: if you want to try making your own ratatouille, check out this easy recipe
3. Meet new people
Like most organizations on campus, the University of Denver’s Cooking Club gives you yet another chance to meet new people and make new friends (because that’s what college is all about, right?). If meeting new people isn’t enough of an incentive for you, maybe these reasons why you should be making food with your college friends will convince you.
4. It’s Cheap!
Although Cooking Club’s dues aren’t quite as cheap as Grilling Society’s (hello, free!), but they’re pretty much chump change compared to other clubs. You can pay $20 for the whole year, or just pay $5 per meeting if you don’t think you’ll go that often or just want to try it once. If you think about it, that’s the equivalent of eating out twice, but you’ll get almost 10 meals throughout the year instead.
5. A chance for creativity
There are those people who are naturally gifted artists and can draw an aimless doodle that looks better than something I would work on for 10 hours and still not finish (e.g. these amazing cookie artists who are life goals). If you don’t happen to be one of these people – or even if you are – and you want another creative outlet in your life, look no further than Cooking Club. With a literal crate of spices to explore, you can experiment to your heart’s content with different flavor combinations. If you want to change something about a recipe, you can do that too. Even though the club officers give you recipes, don’t feel like you have to follow them exactly if you want to go a little crazy and mess around with it a little.
Our full menu for the night included Spinach Blackberry Salad, Butternut Squash Soup, Ratatouille, Lemon and Thyme Roasted Chicken, Caramel Apples and Virgin Bloody Mary’s. If you have any dietary restrictions, don’t worry — at least one station always makes an allergen-free version of each dish, so you’re covered. Since the club only meets once a month, you’ve really got no excuse NOT to join. Not to mention, it might lead you to become a famous chef like Linguini here.