Making little Emerils at Create a Cook

A Create a Cook birthday party in action. Photo: Courtesy of Create a Cook

Not to start some generational warfare on this mild-mannered food website, but listen up, Baby Boomers – you’ve created a generation of young adults who don’t know how to cook beyond the microwave. It used to be that everyone (or at least every woman) grew up learning how to throw together a casserole or a stew; now, when I tell my fellow millennials that I cook, they treat it like an exotic hobby instead of the everyday necessity that it is.

At least one company is working to reverse this trend – Newton’s Create a Cook, owned by local food blogger Jo Horner, which teaches children as young as three how to make corn chowder and biscuit tortoni (to use two examples from this week). Founded by Renee Cavallo, a former Newton school teacher, she noticed students going to sports lessons and music lessons and art lessons and thought – why not food lessons?

“[...]This is a pretty competitive town,” Horner said. “And she [Cavallo] wanted an activity for kids to do who weren’t sports-oriented or weren’t musical or didn’t have some kind of niche.”

For all those busy moms and dads out there, I imagine this program is a dream come true. Not only is little Frankie involved in a supervised and creative extracurricular program, he’s bringing home dinner as well. It’s like having your own miniature personal chef! Or, less cynically, it’s a good way to teach him about math and fractions, measuring, health, foreign cultures – all those wonderfully complex ideas and issues that come together in the food we eat. These lessons can even be a bonding activity – the pre-schooler classes are for parents and children to enjoy together.

Horner, who made the unlikely jump to the culinary arts after decades in IT and retail, started teaching at Create a Cook from its inception. She bought the company after Cavallo “realized it was way more fun to have a baby than a business,” said Horner. Cavallo still teaches classes at Create a Cook, which has expanded from classes, camps and birthday parties for kids to offering programs for grown-ups as well. Date night, anyone?

Like many modern-day foodies, Horner uses her blog Amuse Bouche to experiment with new recipes and interact with the Boston-area food scene. “It gets you to try making things that you might not necessarily make,” she said. “You start looking at food differently, because you think ‘Oh, this farmers market find or this little store somewhere would be really interesting, I bet people would like it.’” Blogging at Amuse Bouche has even helped Create a Cook grow, she said – “There’s plenty of people who come in and say ‘Oh, I’ve read your blog’ or ‘I’ve discovered your blog.’” She’s noticed that many people will visit the Create a Cook website through Amuse Bouche.

In the past month, Create a Cook’s web presence attracted the attention of no less a name than Google – “They are the fairy godmothers of the internet,” Horner said. Create a Cook was one of five small businesses that received a $100,000 AdWords campaign – as well as other goodies like laptops, smart phones and an accountant – as part of Google’s Small Business Center. You can read about Horner’s experience in her own words here. She plans on working with the money to place ads aimed at both kids and adults on sites like The New York Times and Epicurious.

Create a Cook is still growing, Horner said – she’s recently hired several new chefs, and she wants to build a third kitchen at Create a Cook headquarters this year to accommodate larger parties.

She also has a dream of the company hosting a farmers market – “But I think the local farms are so tapped out with farmers markets that I’d have a hard time finding anyone who was available.” Still, Horner hopes this dream will bear fruit. She sees it as “little seeds that are sort of planted that it would be nice to act upon.”

For more information about Create a Cook classes and pricing, check out their website at createacook.com.