My good friend Karen and I were elbow-deep in Eggs Bennifer at Lucile’s when it hit us: now that our kids are basically grown, our calendars have suspiciously empty patches where lacrosse practices and dance lessons once ruled. Free time. Actual free time. A dangerous thing.

Sure, we could keep throwing charcuterie-and-wine girls’ nights like confetti, but even brie and bubbles have their limit (don’t tell brie I said that). Karen leaned in with a conspiratorial grin: “What if we went to cooking school?”

Not the “watch a TikTok and pray your chicken isn’t raw” kind. The real deal: Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts—the culinary Hogwarts hiding in plain sight in Boulder.

We cracked open the calendar and instantly lost ourselves in an edible Choose Your Own Adventure. Thai street food? French pastries? Sushi? Date-night duck? Even a two-day bread boot camp (yeast stress test = not for me). After much deliberation, we landed on Spanish Tapas, mostly because the date worked best. Olé.

The school itself has the sort of energy that makes you want to roll up your sleeves immediately. Stainless counters gleamed, cutting boards with freshly-sharpened knives lined up like soldiers, and the faint perfume of roasted garlic seemed baked into the walls. Somewhere down the hall, pans clattered, and something hissed. It was like stepping backstage at a Broadway show, except the drama was edible.

Only one other student joined us: Pam, a woman with ocean-blue eyes who looked like she could sell artisanal olive oil out of her handbag. Our instructor, Chef Dallas Houle, greeted us like old friends. If you remember the Cooking School of the Rockies, this is the same space, now Escoffier. It trains chefs from around the world—but Chef Dallas runs the “civilians welcome” side, and he makes it feel like play.

And the man knows his stuff. Chef Dallas cut his teeth at Sweet Basil in Vail, cooked in several Boulder kitchens, including as Executive Chef at Leaf Vegetarian Restaurant. As he said, he has given up cooking for other people, and now they cook for him. Chef Dallas has traveled widely, bringing back flavors and tricks from across the globe. He’s excellent with students, quick to laugh, patient with clumsy knife work, and—let’s just say it—kinda dreamy.

We started with knife skills. I came in with a certain swagger: six kids, and countless Thanksgivings under my belt = graduate-level kitchen combat. But Chef Dallas casually showed me how to slice an onion into whisper-thin slivers so perfect I almost teared up, and not from the onion. That trick alone was worth the price of admission.

And that $75? It buys three hours of professional instruction, all the ingredients, a feast at the end, and an embroidered apron to keep that you get to strut around in like you own the place. Cheaper than therapy, almost as satisfying as Target clearance.

The food? Straight-up fiesta. A Spanish tortilla (egg-potato-and-onion, not taco blanket), silky from slowly cooked potatoes and onions and then baked to golden perfection. Garlicky shrimp begging for bread. Meatballs rich enough to run for Congress. Papas bravas buzzing with paprika. And a romesco sauce so good I licked the plate when no one was spying. We roasted peppers over open flames, smashed tomatoes with our bare hands like gleeful toddlers, and obliterated an entire bulb of garlic. Reader, it was glorious.

When we finally sat at the communal table, it felt less like class and more like a tapas party we’d accidentally thrown. Plates clinked, yums were expressed, and there was that blissful hush when everyone’s too busy chewing to talk. Pam declared the tortilla “better than any restaurant,” and I had to agree. Cooking alongside strangers, Karen, who has seen me at my most feral baseball mom self, was surprisingly bonding.

By the end, we were already plotting our next stamp on the culinary passport. Morocco? Korea? Maybe eclairs? All I know is this: cooking school isn’t about learning to flip a tortilla or thin-slice an onion—it’s about remembering food is supposed to be fun. And if that means smashing tomatoes with my bare hands like a toddler every few months, then sign me up for the advanced degree.

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