Where are local cooking classes in Fremont, CA?

Are there any books/blogs/classes similar to Cooking for Geeks that teach cooking fundamentals from an interesting and technical perspective?

• I'm looking for a book or a blog that will give me a progression of recipes to cook with a ton of learning attached to each to learn the fundamentals and eventually not need recipes to do most of the cooking I want to do. Im open to other ways of learning as well. I don't really want anything fancy, just balanced preferably vegetarian meals that I can cook in a moderate amount of time. Cooking for Geeks is almost perfect but didn't look like it had quite as much instruction on cooking as I would have liked.

• Answer:

  I'm interpreting the question as a sort of "how do I learn to cook" instead of a particular book/blog/class, since I haven't found a singular book or blog that's really excellent. To start with, get a solid general cookbook or two.  These are not likely to be ordered in a progressive "learning to cook" manner, but they're invaluable in much the same way as reference books like encyclopedias, dictionaries, and thesauri are.  I'm also a vegetarian, so I should warn you that you're going to fall into a gap in cookbooks: Most vegetarian cookbooks aren't good foundational cookbooks (with good base/mother recipes for common dishes and baked goods). Vegetarian-specific cookbooks tend to either be "health food cookbooks" or aren't particularly rigorous in their technique (an example of the latter are Molly Katzen's books).  The closest to a foundational vegetarian cookbook is Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, but I should mention that Bittman has an incredibly relaxed approach to cooking — he tends to say stuff like "this dish is very easy and has many variations, such as x, y, and z.  Play with it to make it work." (paraphrased) This can be encouraging when it works, and extremely unhelpful when making a new dish or looking for a mother recipe. General cookbooks are very useful for foundations, although you'll only be using a fraction of the book.  I really like the Joy of Cooking for american food and mother recipes, although I sometimes consult James Beard's Theory and Practice of Good Cooking for backup.  It seems there's now a Joy of Cooking: All About Vegetarian Cooking now, although I haven't read it yet. Don't buy restaurant or "menu" cookbooks to get started, since most of the time they're impractical.  Since you asked for a technical book, you may like The Best Recipe and The New Best Recipe, put out by the folks who make the Cooks Illustrated magazine (also excellent).  These books actually subject their recipes to systematic variation and taste testing. Let's assume you've found a book or two you like.  That's still not a starting point.  What do you like eating?  I should probably have started by asking that, but you'll need a good foundational cookbook or two regardless.  The first few things you should learn to cook really well should be simple things you can imagine eating regularly, since cooking takes practice.  Whatever it is, you probably can use it to practice universally important aspects of cooking, such as mise en place, proper application of heat, sourcing quality ingredients, and knife technique. There's more to say, but I've already diverged from the question. Happy cooking!