Philadelphia Cooking Classes (In-Home), Catering and Personal Chef Services featuring Yoon Lee.

When we go to In-Home Cooking classes- people tend to ask us
MANY questions... food related questions are obviously quite
common but many people also inquire about wanting to
hear about a crazy story of some.... crazy house hold we went to...

We have many crazy stories but we recently had an event where
we made some great lemonade with.... no lemons. That's right.
Lemonade with no lemons. Huh? What?!? How do you do that?
What kind of recipe is that?

I wouldn't call this a 'crazy' experience but it was definitely quite...
not the typical Thursday night norm for Let's Cultivate Food.

We have a company that we provide Personal Chef Dinners for.
This company is AWESOME!
They have fitness challenges with their employees every few months
and the winners receive a Personal Chef Dinner.
The "winners dinner" is what we call it. This company is located in
Philly but has a 2nd location in Bethlehem, PA and the winning group
this time around was a group in their Bethlehem location.

We arrived at the location (being told there was an oven/stove top)
BUT we quickly found out that this location only had a microwave.

Imagine standing in an office kitchen with bags and bags of food,
our mobile catering plates, utensils, infused pitchers of drinks
and ALL the ingredients while being told that there is
no oven or even stove top... for 10 people when the first appetizer
required using the oven to melt 4 cheeses on top of a bread loaf.

I was speechless BUT at the same time I knew... #wegotthis!
2 of the employees made some calls and REALLY turned on their
thinking caps and was able to arrange using the kitchen
of the Homewood Suites which was only a few minutes away.

We walked into the hotel and Rebecca (of Homewood Suites)
handed us a room key and said the kitchen was this way....

As we followed into the kitchen, I was wondering if this was a dream
I was having because it was hard to imagine that we carried some of
our food with us to use the kitchen of the hotel but as I mentioned
we were handed a room key as well - it was even more bizarre.
When I asked what the room key was for- I quickly then found out
that they only have an oven in the small kitchen area but there were
stove top burners only in the rooms.
That's when I also quickly realized that this facility was an
extended stay place. (meaning people did their cooking in their rooms
because they were often staying there for an extended period of time
rather than a night or 2.)

I cut, stuffed, baked the bread and dessert and while that was
in the oven... again of a hotel down the street (completely unplanned)
we walked down the halls to use one of the rooms to cook some eggs
(which was the topping of Bibimbap) on a stove top.

Typically eggs are cooked sunny side up for bibimbap so that you can
have the yolk drizzle on top of the veggies but being that I had to cook
the eggs, store them in a container and drive back to the office-
I figured cooking them over-hard was going to be better.
I didn't want to deal with broken yolks all over the place.

All in all the night was a great time. My sous chef conducted
a cheese taste test and had some fun food trivia as I made due
under the circumstances. I would of wanted to have the food
hot rather than the room temperature that it was- but...
we certainly made lemonade with no lemons.

Below are a few pictures that I didn't even know that were
being taken at the time due to coming to the realization
that I was literally frying eggs on a stove top in a hotel.

The hospitality of the employees of Homewood Suites in Bethlehem
was a 2 thumbs up for sure. They were so hospitable, kind,
understanding and totally went out of their way to help this company
out in a slight jam of having invited us for a Personal Chef Dinner.