KayOne73/flickr

The case at Nick & Stef's

​At the farmers market, a couple digs through the coolers at the Jimenez Family Farm stall, unearthing plastic-encased cuts of goat, lamb, pork and rabbit. They're shopping for dinner, but looking a little less than confident. "What do you do with this again?" asks the lady, bespectacled, gray-bunned and wrapped in a sort of faux-Native American-looking shawl. She is holding up a lamb shank, a section of goat leg or a slab of pork belly. Eager yet unschooled and willing to learn, the lady might want to take a class -- and not the sort UCLA Extension offers. Thankfully, on Friday, Feb. 17, from 8-9 p.m., Nick & Stef's Steakhouse in downtown Los Angeles continues its Meat 101 series with "Lamb: U.S. vs. New Zealand."

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Barbara Hansen

A combo tagine with lamb and vegetables

​Now you taste it, now you don't. That's what happens to the tagines that come with couscous at Café Livre in Culver City.

The seasonings change as often as executive chef Farid Zadi gets a new idea, usually every week. The other day the beef tagine was slightly sweet with apricots and included almonds. Next week, who knows? Other tagine choices are lamb, chicken and vegetable. Or you could ask for a meat and vegetable combo.

Open only a couple of months, Café Livre is spiffing up with changes. One of the best is
putting couscous and tagines on the daily menu.

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Barbara Hansen

chef McDang

​Royalty just left Los Angeles. Now it's coming again. The royal personage arriving this week is chef McDang (real name ML Sirichalerm Svasti) of the Thai royal family.

Not content to rest on regal laurels, McDang has become a culinary celebrity in Thailand, appearing regularly on TV and radio, writing newspaper columns and producing a stream of cookbooks and restaurant guides in Thai and English. Over there, he's as well known as Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay are here (and he's appeared on both of their shows.)

On this trip, there won't be any barricades or hovering helicopters to protect him, because he wants to mingle with the public. That means you, if you sign up for his class this Friday, July 29th, at Thailand Plaza Restaurant in Hollywood. After the class, he'll sign copies of his book, The Principles of Thai Cookery.

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Felicia Friesema

mandarin sections in syrup

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The inaugural class of Master Food Preservers (MFPs) from the UC Cooperative Extension graduated 18 new MFPs on June 20th, and as soon as the ink dried on their certificates, they were gearing up to organize the next certification class.

This is kind of astounding, as most cooperative extensions, both here and around the country, are only able to hold an MFP class series once a year or once every other year. Along with being a significant amount of work, the MFP certification requires money and resources, neither of which are in abundance in the state budget right now. Regardless, if becoming a certified Master Food Preserver was on your to-do list, now is your chance. The application process opened today for a new 12-week series scheduled to start up in September. You have until July 29th to apply.

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J. Ritz

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Art, soccer, drama and the like are all edifying pursuits that help young people find their passions and build character. But you can't eat them for dinner. Cooking classes for kids are fun, educational, and let's face it, useful. Come summertime in Los Angeles -- and it's just around the corner, folks -- options for cooking camps are evolving and become more sophisticated, alongside our local food culture in general. Both regular adult culinary schools and programs specifically designed for youth offer various sessions for budding young kitchen talent (or not; but this is a good way to find out). It's probably better someone else with more patience and experience than yourself to teach your kid knife skills, right?

Here are seven suggestions (listed alphabetically) of where to start getting those mini chef's jackets dirty, but not with your typical playground-variety typical kid stains. Before you know it, the next generation in your household might be taking charge of family meals. (We don't mean choosing which Hungry Man meals to serve.) And then you might have one of these types on your hands.

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Robert Wemischner

Pistachio Citrus Torte

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Now that everyone's a food critic, creating a dessert worthy of a Passover feast can get extra challenging. The Jewish holiday meal requires cooks to adhere to a shortened list of kosher ingredients, which excludes leavening or any grain that can ferment.

That means dessert can get dry, flat and tasteless fast. Never fear, pastry expert Robert Wemischner is here. He's coming to the Skirball Museum on April 3 to show how the restrictions don't have to limit your dessert repertoire. The first seder of the eight-day holiday is April 18.

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Cary Conover

A scene from last year's Jeffersonian Feast at the Met in New York City

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From offal to potted preparations to in-house butchering to fabricated cuts, meat has been at the forefront of many recent food world trends. Anyone who has spent a few hours grazing at one of L.A.'s popular gastropubs can attest to this. In our case, the breaking point coincided with a Waterloo & City appetizer of escargots sauced in butter, wine, garlic, and herbs -- and accompanied by a sandwich stuffed to the hilt with shredded short rib meat. It had that stoned-at-the-bistro appeal, but matched with a charcuterie plate and a pork chop, it led us to briefly contemplate hanging up our steak knives and permanently going the way of Lord Byron, Elvis Costello, and Lisa Simpson: famous vegetarians all.

At Maite Gomez-Rejón's February 18-20 ArtBites retreat at the Hacienda Hot Springs Inn, even dedicated carnivores can get a break from the fleshy onslaught -- and explore the history of vegetarianism through the Middle Ages, Italian Renaissance, 17th and 18th century England, and finally, contemporary California.

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N. Galuten

Fariz Zadi's pâté maison, freshly sliced

​As it turns out, if you take high quality ingredients, and apply extremely well-honed French techniques, you can make some very good food. And while that may seem like a fairly obvious truth, it's still a lot of fun to double-check from time to time, just to make sure. We had just such an opportunity yesterday afternoon, as we were invited to sit in on a charcuterie and meat fabrication demo at the cooking school, Ecole de Cuisine Pasadena, put together by chef instructor Farid Zadi and his wife, food historian Susan Park.

Zadi is currently the Dean of Culinary Arts at the Ecole de Cuisine, and let us, as well as a few other writers, into their rather large kitchen to show us how they make veal shoulder pâté maison, as well as his popular Merguez sausage. It was a fascinating demonstration, in which the chef extolled the virtues of using fresh ingredients, and grinding them yourself (a truth that applies to both meat and spices). Park explained an especially crucial point about grinding your own meat, which is that you know exactly what meat is going into your food, and can avoid, "slaughterhouse scraps."

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Flickr/slgckgc

Most cooks still fry latkes in lots of grease, but not Hipcooks.

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You love your grandma, but just not her leaden matzoh balls and grease-laden latkes. With the eight days of Hanukkah beginning on Dec. 1 (25 Kislev for those of you on the Hebrew calendar), it's time for an act of self defense; it's time for Jewish holiday cooking classes.

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Eatz

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Chef and founder Niki Tehranchi likes for an evening at Eatz to feel as much like a dinner party as it does a cooking class. After nearly two-and-a-half years of running her DIY cooking school out of her house, she'll be moving into new, professional digs on December 1st.

The upgrade will find Eatz at 612 N. LaBrea Ave., the former space of short-lived pizzeria Verrazano's (sniff, sniff) and before that, The Pig. The number of classes will increase from 2-3 per week to 4-6 per week.

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