Family Travel With Kids Best Practice – Take A Local Cooking Class!

My friend Regine does this incredible thing with her family where she takes them to a Spanish speaking country every summer for a month to vacation, travel and attend Spanish school to work on their language skills. Regine works remotely most of the month and when her husband joins them for at least a week, they go full-on vacation mode. This year they returned to Antigua, Guatemala where among their adventures, they took a cooking class! Talk about Cooking Through Cultures – this experience epitomizes what I love about food, family and experiencing other cultures in an intimate way. Read all about it and then tell me, have you taken a cooking class abroad or in another culture?

I love to walk. Put me in my tennis shoes, push me out the door with some water in hand and I can walk all day. Trails, sidewalks, roads, big cities, small villages, you name it… I will walk it! When I am traveling around the world, walking is the way that I see, smell, and learn!

 

And yet, as a mom of two with an awesome husband, I have come to realize that my family might not like to walk and sightsee quite as much as I do. Don’t misunderstand me, they love to learn and experience just as much as anyone, it is just the constant “walking” that makes them beg for a stop.

 

Twelve years ago, when my husband and I were on our babymoon in Oaxaca, Mexico, we stumbled across a cooking class and it was awesome! We went to the market, did all of the shopping with the chef teacher, and then returned to a large patio kitchen to make tortillas, limonadas, mole con pollo (chicken mole), and some type of dessert that I no longer remember. We chopped, laughed, learned about the Oaxacan cooking culture, and then ate all of the goodness that we created. I have long wanted to recreate this experience.

 

My family and I spent a month in Antigua, Guatemala. For three of those weeks, my two girls (ages 12 and 9) attended Spanish language school while I worked remotely. My husband joined us for a week spent as a pure vacation with just the four of us. We saw textiles being woven, investigated churches, checked out the huge central market (where you can find anything!) and, of course, walked, and walked and walked! Before the family could cry out in protest I sent an email about a cooking class based on a flyer I picked up somewhere along the way.

 

La Tortilla Cooking School quickly responded to my email request for a family-friendly (and vegetarian for me) cooking class for four. We arrived at 10:30 in the morning and were greeted by our chef, Joseline, and her assistant Aldo. Over the course of the next 90 minutes, we made four dishes – a rice soup, a chicken and vegetarian pepian stew, handmade tortillas, and rellenitos (plantains stuffed with homemade chocolate sauce plus more chocolate for dipping!). With Joseline and Aldo as our guides, we learned about the ingredients, methods, tastes, and history of each dish. All four of us were put to work – chopping, peeling, roasting, blending, stirring, molding, and taste-testing along the way. The time was filled with chatter, learning about food and each other’s culture, and a hefty dose of laughter.

 

As the cooking portion of the class came to a close, the table was set and the four of us were encouraged to dig in. We tasted, talked about how the ingredients were so different from our staples at home, and generally enjoyed eating the fruits of our labor together. While taking a bite of my stew, my youngest announced loudly “I am so glad we took this class!” The twelve-year old echoed the sentiment and my husband agreed! Success all around!

 

And then we walked home!

 

By day, Regine A. Webster works to bring smart funding to disaster-affected communities across the U.S. and around the globe. By night she is surrounded by her awesome husband and two girls (9 & 12). She and her family travel frequently to Latin America to enjoy the region’s cultures, foods, sights and sounds!