Extract from Saveur

Our favorite foods, restaurants, drinks, people, places, and things.

Source: Saveur

10 Home Schooling
We admit that we're forever inviting ourselves into the kitchens of people that we meet when we travel. That's why our favorite trend in culinary tourism is that of seasoned cooks' teaching cooking classes in the comfort of their own homes. Some of the best-known HOME COOKING CLASSES are given by established cookbook authors like Elizabeth Andoh, author of At Home with Japanese Cooking (Knopf, 1980) among other books, who teaches intimate classes at her homes in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan; and Faith Willinger, who wrote Red, White, and Greens: The Italian Way with Vegetables (HarperCollins, 1996) and runs classes in the kitchen of her 17th-century house in Florence, Italy. But the majority of the teachers are celebrities of a more local variety: people like Agata Amato, who offers courses on the cooking of the Amalfi coast at the estate in Ravello, Italy, where her family has lived and farmed for more than 250 years; and Nimmy Paul, a cook in the city of Kochi, in India's Kerala State, who introduces travelers to regional dishes like appam, the rice-flour pancakes commonly eaten for breakfast, and fish curry with coconut milk. Or, you can make a detour to the village of Sungai Penchala, in Malaysia, where Rohani Jelani lives. Jelani presides over a sunny, open kitchen where she teaches visitors how to use ingredients from her garden like lemongrass and torch ginger flower (a woodsy-tasting aromatic) to make local specialties like nasi kerabu, an herbal rice salad. The best part of all these classes? They usually double as lunch or dinner.