Released on = January 1, 2006, 4:12 pm

Press Release Author = Culinary Art School

Industry = Education

Press Release Summary = The culinary art school world was full of new students in
2005 thanks to the influence of TV celebrity chefs.

Press Release Body = TV cooking shows have sparked unprecedented interest in
learning how to cook. If you add to that development a dollop of old-fashioned
nurturing, you've got a recipe for the latest hot trend: culinary school vacations.

"This will be our biggest year yet for attendance in amateur classes," says Richard
Smilow, president of the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. Cooking,
once something only your mother did, now suddenly has developed sex appeal.

Sex appeal?

"Cooking is a part of the new dating ritual," observes Larry Kaplan, a radiologist
from Reading, Pennsylvania, who says that he hopes taking a five-day culinary art
school course will boost his post-divorce dating prospects. "It's a sensual
experience of tastes," Kaplan says, "and it's a way to show caring that's a more
intimate gift than taking a date to a restaurant."

And best of all, the growing number of culinary schools are offering great bargains.
Ethnic cooking classes, especially, provide an exotic adventure to foreign lands -
without the expense or bother of leaving the US.

Schools generally offer the highest-quality courses that also have affordable prices
- and better still, are located in places where there's plenty more to do when you
take off your apron.

Whether for a weekend, a week or longer, courses usually follow a similar routine:
The chef goes over the recipes the students will tackle, offering insight and
background on the cuisine, the ingredients, or the techniques required. At the end
of class, the students sit down and dine on the fruits of their labor in a luscious
multicourse meal.

"We offer the widest range of three-, four-, and five-day cooking courses anywhere -
we have nine teaching kitchens, open seven days a week, with technique classes inall
aspects of cooking," says Richard Smilow, president of ICE, which caters to
professionals and amateurs alike.

And a variety of people are attracted to the new culinary art school classes for
equally wide-ranging reasons. "We had one woman who used to work in the World Trade
Center - and our bread-baking class was the thing that helped her come back to
Manhattan without being afraid," Smilow says.

Others come for the adventure!

"I see this cooking class as part of my adventure travel and adult education," says
Larry Kaplan. "I've done motorcycle racing for a week, hang gliding, just found a
bullfighting school. Cooking is not as suicidal - except when we get to the hot
chili recipe," Kaplan says at the end of his Asian cooking class.

The culinary art schools range in size from the tiny Tante Marie's Cooking School in
San Francisco, to The Culinary Institute of America, one of the world's largest
institutions devoted to culinary education. Canadian schools Ottawa Culinary Arts
Institute, affiliated with Le Cordon Blue Paris, and the George Brown Chef School in
Ontario, Canada.

For more articles and resources on culinary art schools visit:
http://www.culinary-art-school.info.


Web Site = http://www.culinary-art-school.info

Contact Details = Colin McArthur