UD Virtual Cooking Club
Yesterday afternoon was such a treat for the Urban Decadence team. We ventured into the virtual space to try and revamp our cooking club, and had an absolute BLAST. For those that don’t know, Chef Lela started a cooking club a decade ago to bring some of her training to home chefs. Over the years, as UD developed, we decided to make the club an extension of the UD brand.
Since the pandemic has made meeting in person challenging, we’ve been meeting over the last few weeks to figure out a way to keep the club going in a virtual space. Yesterday was our first dry run, and while we had our technical difficulties, the end result was a really fun time with our members and with each other, sharing our home kitchen with theirs.
Each cooking club session focuses on a specific dish or dishes. This session, we decided to tackle the often-intimidating risotto. ~Oohs and aahs commence. We decided to do one of our favorites: butternut squash risotto with kale & chicken sausage. Chef Lela also found one of her - ahem - procured books from her culinary school days for those who wanted to play around with more recipes once they got the basics down.
Chef Lela’s risotto & the Risotto book by Williams-Sonoma
We had a few folks cook along with us and share their results as well! Lisa & Akilah (respectively below) both ended up with beautiful results, and we loved hearing about their delicious end results.
It was a fun time to cook and connect, and we were so thankful to those that participated! As we’ve said, we want to build a community of chefs and the cooking club is one of those ways. We’re still working out the kinks with the virtual space, and plan to do another session to test out our options. Eventually, we’ll get back to in-person sessions as well and do a hybrid of the two for those that can’t travel or are still hesitant due to COVID.
If you’re interested in becoming part of the Urban Decadence Cooking Club, feel free to reach out to us here, on the group page, or shoot us an email! Hope to teach you soon!
