COOKING : Store Serves Lessons in a Fast Lunch

A small retail store in a Laguna Niguel shopping center that specializes in cooking utensils gives new meaning to the term “brain food.”

A series of lunch-and-learn classes, sponsored by A Store for Cooks, is held year-round every Wednesday from 12:05 to 12:55 in a store chockablock with kitchen gadgets and cookbooks.

The classes enlighten people about working with new foods, explore exotic recipes or simply expand culinary horizons. As students follow along with the demonstration, they get to taste the goodies being prepared, which are passed around on plastic trays and paper plates--hence the lunch part of the series. And it’s a bargain at $12 per session.

Susan Vollmer--teacher, store owner and cookbook author--holds forth in a demonstration kitchen at the back of the store, where on this rainy afternoon 18 people are crammed into the quasi-classroom on folding chairs. It’s standing room only, which is not unusual for the sessions that have been going on for more than 10 years. (If a Wednesday class is booked solid, another session is usually scheduled for Thursday to handle the overflow.)

Most people here appear to be fitting the class in on their lunch hour, and Vollmer is keenly aware of schedules; she starts right on time, not waiting for stragglers.

Today’s recipe is ahi tuna cooked in a pumpkin-seed crust, served with a roasted pepper salad. Dessert is honey mousse with candied pine nuts.

Vollmer is a study in relaxed efficiency as she works while chatting with the group, periodically encouraging questions, flipping hunks of tuna, crushing pumpkin seeds or showing the class how to strip the bitter-tasting skins off red and yellow peppers (you cover them for 20 minutes after roasting).

One minute she is advising the group to use sea salt--she recommends a brand called Sel de Mer--rather than regular table salt because it tastes better and is less refined, thus healthier. Next she points out that she is using a combination of three kinds of freshly ground pepper for seasoning on the fish instead of just plain old black--it imparts more complex flavors.

To perk up a salad dressing, she says, include a touch of anchovy paste--looks ugly, tastes great.

And she wouldn’t think of using any other kind of vinegar in her dressing but balsamic, or any other kind of olive oil but extra virgin.

She holds up a mixture of something called herbs de Provence, whose key ingredient is lavender. Mix it with butter or olive oil and slap it on bread sticks or baguettes just before warming, she says. Or use it to season chicken.

And just when Vollmer looks as if she is mired elbow-deep in a jumble of olive oil, fish and pumpkin seeds, she dips a hunk of raw red bell pepper into her dressing, says, “Tastes good to me,” and begins serving.

Few crumbs linger on plates. The audience doesn’t tarry, either. Most are out the door before the clock strikes 1 p.m., departing with a head full of new cooking knowledge and a satisfied stomach.

The lunch-and-learn classes, which are $12, are Wednesdays from 12:05 p.m. to 12:55 p.m. at A Store for Cooks, 30100 Town Center Drive, Suite R, Laguna Niguel. Reservations are recommended. For more information, call (714) 495-0445.