I'm just saying

We just did one of those cooking school things at the work conference.

You know, one of those things where you and your big group go to a cooking store with a foreign name that people always pronounce wrong, so you can all cook your own dinner instead of going to a real restaurant where you can get drunk and point haphazardly at a menu.

I believe we were doing this under the guise of team bonding, but with the underlying purpose of legitimizing the drinking we really wanted to be doing.

So we all went and immediately made a bee-line for the wine and too-small plate of cheese, and then got yelled at for talking while the "chef" instructed us on how to properly tie an apron.

I don't think these were really chefs. They acted more like elementary school teachers run amok with their weekend hobbies. I don't think I heard anyone describe any of the ingredients with anything more scintillating than, "It's really good." And even me, and my non-professional chefness, can find something better to say about a fine looking piece of sushi grade tuna than, "It's really good."

Whatever, there was a lot of wine (thanks to our enthusiastic team who provided it) and we weren't sitting around conference tables in a beige room, so I was content to people watch and snack on the occasional passed appetizer. And then get yelled at because I wasn't, like, helping a station, or something similarly naggish. My thought was that rolling up some rice and crab in an old beach mat was helping because it looked nice on the plate and looked remotely like a California roll.

I ended up staying close to the Sushi Station since the dude running it was the most un-tool-ish of all the "chefs" and he let me eat crab right from the bowl instead of having to go through the tedium of rolling it up with the beach mat first. Don't worry, I had my own bowl and didn't funk up anything actually going into the apps.

I believe that throughout the evening the sum of my dinner included a lot of crab meat, a couple of small stuffed peppers, a stray shrimp, a molten lava falafel and two gallons of Napa Cabernet. Me thinks that going the route of a cooking store vs a real cooking school for one of these events (having done both) isn't ideal if you actually want to, say, get schooled on cooking, eat a decent meal or be treated like an adult.

I'm not sure what the moral of my story is here. But at the end of the day, I've made it through another work conference and am at home where I can now cook and eat in peace. Amen.