“Go. Have no fear.” Cooking Lessons from a Professional: a Q&A with The Cooking Studio’s Trish O’Neill
Trish O’Neill is the founder and owner of The Cooking Studio, a studio that offers cooking lessons for people in Fort Collins of all ages and all skill levels. I spoke with her to learn how someone can start a path to good cooking, how she became such a great cook, and what her favorite things to cook are.
Q: How did you first get into cooking? Were you an early starter? Were you a late bloomer?
A: No! In fact my mother was a terrible cook! I grew up as most people of my generation — I was in the baby boomer group — right at the beginning of the processed food surge in America. So my fondest memory of my childhood is when they came out with frozen TV dinners and I got my very own choice of what I wanted to eat. So first time ever, I could actually choose my own meal because it was just always family meals. So that was very exciting which is very sad, to think that that’s my first memory of food being exciting, was when I had a frozen Swanson TV dinner. They’re terrible! But that was big. You know, the whole idea that family food could be created by someone else and given to you in frozen form or in cans or whatever else brand new thing. So it took me year to get away from that. So I was traveling a lot, I’m a nurse consultant, or I was, with corporate hospital systems. So I was traveling a lot and I took a cooking class in Boulder, Colorado one winter and I just loved it and I thought, “Oh you can learn to do this, you can cook from scratch it’s really fun. Wow!” And so as I traveled around the country on my consulting gigs I started taking cooking classes in different cities because every city’s got a place you can take cooking classes. Like, every single city in the world’s got a place if you know how to find them. And so I started taking cooking classes. So I took classes for about, oh I want to say over like eight years. So I took likely over 300 hours of cooking classes. And it was mostly just for fun, because it was way better than having to go out to dinner all the time with people when I was consulting. Or eat by myself. I mean you take a class, a cooking class in any city, the people there are usually the local rules and they tell you everything. It’s really great. So then I got really tired of traveling and business travel got more and more obnoxious and I wanted to put down roots. So I actually was living in Boulder and I moved to Fort Collins and started working with the small business development center on if I could figure out a way to open a cooking school in Fort Collins. So I worked with them for probably a year and a half and finally came up with a model that would actually work and quit my job and started The Cooking Studio.
Q: Wow. That’s great. When did you first know that you wanted to start teaching cooking? When did that spark interest?
A: Yeah, I didn’t ever really think I wanted to teach it until I started thinking about opening a cooking school and then I realized I needed to teach it and if I was gonna be able to run the school because even though we have now… now we currently have professional chefs teaching most of the classes. I still teach once in awhile. So it was mostly a business decision more than anything was. I’m going to run the school, I better know how to teach the classes! But I had taken so many, I knew exactly how I wanted it to happen. Like that was the nice thing is that I’ve been taught by so many different people in so many different models that I could pick my approach, the one that I liked the most, and use that. We’ve, since we’ve opened though, we’ve kind of switched around the way the classes run based on feedback from people.
Q: And when did you first open this again?
A: We just had our fourth year open house anniversary. So a sign that we opened up in 2016.
Q: Great! So, what do you see as the biggest difficulty for new chefs?
A: For new chefs or new home cooks?
Q: New home cooks I guess is a better term.
A: I think it’s just intimidating. Like, unless somebody has taught you, and you have to learn to cook, you don’t just know it. Although people give you a kitchen when you move into a house and then you buy pans and you have to eat. So you just start cooking, you know, and you don’t have any idea what you’re doing. So I think the biggest challenge is finding a way to learn to cook and starting with things that you really liked. Then moving, stepping out into different kinds of foods and different ways of eating.
Q: Yeah. So what ‘practically’ would you give as advice to someone who’s new to cooking specifically? Maybe for a younger person?
A: Yeah, I would say I would learn, in fact, I think this was just good advice for everybody: I would learn like probably three or four go-to things that you can make. Like, you can just know how to make them, make them all the time. It can be anything. Can be eggs and bacon , it can be a certain kind of casserole. It’s could be how to cook a good steak. It could be how to make lentil soup. And it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s just something that appeals to you that you know you’ll eat and you can share with people. So it just becomes not stressful. It’s like, “Oh yeah, here’s my, here’s my five things that I make,” or my three things. And then once, you know, once you get tired of those, you can all add another couple. But don’t try to learn it all at once because it’s too much and you just end up boiling hot dogs.
Q: What would you say is the best way to learn those new dishes?
A: Yeah, well I would of course tell you that take a cooking class is the best way. But if you can’t do that, you know, there’s lots of YouTube videos or whatever, but they don’t help you because they don’t tell you what to do when you mess up. Like, if you do a recipe and something’s wrong with it — if you’re by yourself — you can’t figure out like what went wrong, which is why I like taking cooking classes so much because somebody in the class would always messed something up (they still do) and the chef comes over and says, “Well, did you forget to put in the flour?” or, “It looks like you took it off the heat too soon,” or, “Oh, don’t worry, we can fix that. Here’s how you do it.” So that’s the best way. I mean, there’s YouTube videos and there’s classes you can take online. If you can find somebody to teach you, like, that’s the best thing. Otherwise you’re just some trial and error with recipes and can just keep working on them. I usually don’t recommend people try to work without recipes when they first start cooking because you don’t know the properties of the food, you don’t know the ratios. You don’t know anything. So you’re gonna eat a lot of really bad food right in the beginning.
Q: What would you say is the biggest mistake then for new cooks that you see?
A: I think their biggest mistake is thinking that if you buy a piece of equipment that’s gonna solve your problem. Cause really if you, if you know how to cook, you cast iron pan and a good night oven. I mean basically that’s all you need to make almost 90% of good food. But you know, there’s lots of gadgets. It’s kind of like people who go buy a gym membership and new shoes and a running outfit, and they haven’t even walked through the door yet or gone out for a walk. So I think that’s, that’s a big mistake. People think, “Well if I buy this new crockpot I’m gonna be a good cook.” Although crock pots actually are pretty, it’s pretty hard to Google a crock pot recipe.
Q: Right. Okay, great. I’d like to get into the practicalities of cooking, like budgeting and time. What would you say is a great way to budget your cooking in your experience?
A: I think almost, there are several things to budget. One is that you decide what kind of food you want to eat. Now that goes back to me. If you’ve learned your four or five dishes, then you’re not going to waste a lot of things because you know exactly what goes into it. You just buy that and then you make those dishes. So if you want to be budget conscious, the best thing to do is learn some things that you cook well, and then you have all the ingredients for those things. Like if you want to stay super low cost. If you start out like for Christmas or something and ask everybody to give you Thai spices or Indian spices and then you start cooking Thai or Indian food, you don’t need to go to the store for very much at all because you just need rice and some protein, some vegetables, and you have all the spices. You already have them. So it’s easy to throw anything together. Your spices can be a big expense. So I guess one piece of advice is to not try to cook Thai on Friday night and then decide you want to cook Indian on Saturday and then do a Cajun meal on Monday because it’s going to cost a lot to go and buy the special ingredients for those moments.
Q: Are there any meals that you love that you would say are always worth taking time for it? Maybe they can be specific meals, maybe it’s something else, but is there something that’s always worth taking time for?
A: Oh, there’s a million things that are always good. I think cooking, especially cooking for others, you know, when you’re cooking for not just yourself… It’s a very — to me — cooking is a very Zen kind of thing to do. It’s not a chore. In my mother and grandmother’s day cooking was a chore that you try to not have to do. But for this generation and the upcoming ones, it’s, it’s a joy! It’s just a way of giving and a way of working with your hands and doing something that’s not all at the theater. It’s just really nice. Ithink truthfully, I think French food is always worth taking time because it’s so freaking delicious. Like they, the French — I know like you know, we have a Western palette — but like French food, they studied the science of cooking for so long. And then like anything you do, if you do it right, in the French food, it’s not just, you cook a lot of sauces or whatever, but you cook the food correctly for that exactly. So the technique is really important. And then you add enough fat to make it super delicious. So I think French food is always worth the effort. And some of it can be really complicated. Most of it isn’t. But I think a French omelet is maybe the most perfect thing that you can make. But it’s not just like… easy. It’s not easy. Once you learn to make it it’s easy. In fact, most restaurants, if they hire a chef, they ask them to make a French omelette to see if they understand how to do something exactly right and not just say, “Well, it’s an omelette in the French way so it must be good.”
Q: Okay. Wow. Okay. Is there a dish that you think anyone can cook that from beginning to end, is kind of that universal dish that you think anyone could cook?
A: Well, anybody can cook anything if they have been taught how to do it. When we do the kids’ classes, we teach them some things that, in our beginning competing or our basic skills, we teach to make ’em a chicken paillard, which is… basically chicken breasts that you pound flat and then you cover it with breadcrumbs and you fry it. So it’s basically chicken fingers, but it’s, but it’s not deep fried, it’s sautéed in a pan and you put some spices in the the covering of it. We usually use panko flakes now, which are kind of rice or Japanese breading and they’re delicious. And if you do them right, every single person you know — unless they hate chicken — will think they’re wonderful and you can put sauces with them. So I would say that’s one recipe. And definitely he should know how to make an omelette. Eggs are eggs are easy once you understand them. Um… Mousse! Everyone should know how to make mousse. It’s so easy. My favorite is lemon mousse because it’s so fresh and you can freeze it and put a red currant jelly on it. It’s fantastic. Chocolate mousse is a little harder just because you have to melt the chocolate and it gets a little bit tricky sometimes. But if I was going to make the perfect meal for someone, like for the first thing that they could go home and make all the time, I’d definitely have chicken paillards on there, I would probably just have a fresh green salad with a homemade vinaigrette. We always teach people to make their own salad dressings. It’s so easy and so great and you can put whatever you like in it ince you learn how to make it, and it’s so much better than what’s in the jars. And then I would have them make a lemon mousse then maybe, I would teach people to make a rice with herbs in it. You know, when you make rice you can put whenever you want in it. Rice and vegetables, rice and herbs, rice sauces. Once you know how to cook rice.. rice goes with everything. And it’s easier than potatoes.
Q: Yeah great. Is there any last final advice that you think new or young cooks should definitely know?
A: Yeah, the piece of advice. Like the youngest cooks generally just bully in. They have no fear. They have no preconceived ideas. They just start. You tell them to do something and they just make it. Kids learn so much faster because they don’t feel like they should know it. Whereas people get older, they start feeling like they should know it and now everyone’s gonna find out they don’t know it and maybe they learned it wrong. So like, go. Have no fear. It’s just food. If you mess it up, who cares?
