Our Inaugural Class (everyone passed!)
By Rob Curran
Hottestplate.com’s inaugural cooking class has not dragged the youthful publication into any serious Salmonella lawsuits, as of press time.
A GoFundme site set up for a defense fund related to the March 20 Spanish tapas evening at Flour Power cooking school on East Hickory, Denton will be kept on a triumphantly dormant setting until the statute of limitations expires.
Meanwhile, the guinea pigs – sorry, students – seemed to comprehend the inscrutable Irish (Rob Curran) and King of the Hill (Shea Scott) accents employed semi-deliberately by their teachers (though some must have been wondering if they had walked into Irish and South Austin night instead of Spanish night), and mercifully refrained from asking for their qualifications and/or immigration papers. Students formed a circle around their omelette-flipping instructor, making it clear that they were fully prepared to carry him to an ambulance in the relatively unlikely instance that the egg-and-potato dish burst into flames and landed on his head. There was much wiping of relieved brows when the omelette landed on the dinner plate without inflicting burns of any degree on the flipper (though said flipper did ride the hubris from this experience to a four-alarm paper-towel fire on the hottest…inevitably…plate of his stove the following weekend). There were no reports of burn injuries of any kind from the class, however, not even from the flame that shot forth along with a “WTF?” when the oven door to the riblets was opened.
Both teachers would almost certainly have passed breathalyzer tests at various early stages of the proceedings and neither drank all of anybody else’s wine, not even the phenomenal tinto they made the students go across the road and buy at Steve’s Wine Bar. On the food celebrity front, it was a case of “one outta two ain’t bad.” Good & Golden Laotian food guru and Hottest Plate co-founder Lasamee Kettavong was in attendance, snapping the sweet photos you are currently scrolling down rapidly towards. Anthony “Lanky” Langford, rumored to be featured in an upcoming ‘Plate profile, commented: “dang, can’t believe I missed it! I’ll deffo be at the next one.” He graciously did not include the coda that an English aristocrat once used in an RSVP to a personal Oscar Wilde play performance invitation: ”if there is one.” (Wilde sent the man two tickets to his next play, suggested the man bring a friend, “if you have one…”).
In other words, the whole thing went swimmingly, or at least not sinkingly. Everyone had a riotous good time, and everyone ate their fill of tapas. And you can’t get much more Spanish than that. Plan is to run a series of four Hottest Plate classes in the fall. Bring a foodie friend (if you have one!) Attendees, feel free to give your takeaways in the comments section.