What is Jill’s Cookbook Club?
Jill’s Cookbook Club is a community for people of all cooking skills to come together to build community and cooking skills, one cookbook at a time! Do you know how to mince an onion? No? Great! You’re in the right place, along with you folks that have their cooking techniques down to a T. By cooking through the same cookbook each month, we come together to learn more about common recipes and techniques throughout the book to break down otherwise intimidating recipes. We have two events every month - a planning happy hour and a dinner party - with cocktail and cooking classes to go along with it all. Let’s crowdsource that knowledge and confidence, shall we?
My name is Jill - the founder of this Club! I inspired to start this Club because I felt like the barrier to entry for cooking was too high. I am a self-taught cook - a lawyer by day, who learned to cook by using cooking as my outlet during law school. I got hooked on cooking when I traded my first year law books in for a plethora of cooking books, hoping to challenge myself with a new hobby related to my one true love - food. Cooking through my “trinity” of cookbooks - Smitten Kitchen, The Food Lab, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking - led to me falling madly in love with cookbooks, cooking and using food as a way to build community. After hosting dinner parties and teaching friends some fun cooking techniques, I realized that a lot of people still felt too intimidated to pick up a knife. I’d bring a dish to dinner, only to have the response of those at the dinner be “I could never make that!” To hell with that attitude! That’s what this Club is for.
Each chapter will be cooking through the same cookbook together each month. This lets us give each other tips and tricks on how to approach and adapt recipes, and we will pick up some cooking skills along the way. I hope you will join us in making cooking a relaxing, fun, and exciting way to build community through food.