Cooking Demo with Kent Rathbun

These days, it's funny the things that will entertain us. We'll watch entire shows about house hunting or redecorating. We get excited to see tomatoes growing in our garden. We are giddy about an Amazon delivery that contains a new cooking utensil, diapers, and some toilet paper. We are domesticated!

So, when our neighbors invited us to a cooking demo at Tre Wilcox Cooking Concepts (Top Chef, Iron Chef) featuring Kent Rathbum (Jaspers, Abacus), we were all about it. We love eating. Step it up a notch with a first-class chef making the meal right in front of you.  At first I thought this was a cooking class - meaning, we would be following along and making what Kent made. After we got there I was quickly corrected that it was a demo. Even better! We sat on our butts, drank wine, and listened to some amazing cooking stories from Kent -- and a 3-course meal!

Here's our group! The Allens and Bloems are foodies like us. We're very hungry in this pic.

Happy to have a night out #threenagerproblems

Watching Kent prep the appetizer. Notice the monitor above - we could look down on his workstation. He made everything look simple. 

First course: Chilled green cauliflower soup with Texas goat cheese.  Spoiler alert: the perfect green color comes from a tiny bit of spinach pureed and mixed in.

During all the food making, Kent would come out and share amazing stories from his restaurants, travels to Thailand, and just general experience cooking

Main course: Gal-Bi short ribs (with Thai chilis - hot!) and a chayote-green mango slaw. The slaw was a fabulous combo of sweet and spicy and those short ribs...woah.... Even Kent was drooling over them!

And let us not forget dessert! Citrus shortbread cookies with a blackberry-rhubarb compote. This dessert leaned more citrus than sweet so it was the perfect end to that spicy dinner. Bonus: the cookies are EGG FREE! I can't wait to make these!

Here we are with Kent. Even though we didn't actually do the cooking, we learned so much! He shared great tips about cutting, how to cook veggies (sweated or caramelized), and my favorite tips about how to perfectly mix cookie dough and cook them the perfect consistency!
We would do this all over again with Kent or any other chef! It was such a fun experience (and a way yummy dinner!) FYI - this one happened to be $75 per person, but there are multiple different classes and options through Tre's place.