Andy Wolfe hovers over a cooking omelet, waving a spatula at a circle of students standing in his kitchen.
“Who knows how you make your eggs fluffy?” asks Wolfe, a civil engineer who usually quizzes students on stress loads of bridges. “Anybody?”
“Add milk?” one timidly offers.
“Try water,” Wolfe says. “It took me 28 years to learn that, but it really works.”
And so it went twice a week this summer for a dozen students who took “Cooking with the Wolfes,” a course designed to get even the most diehard macaroni and cheese eaters to expand their culinary horizons.
The idea came to Wolfe when he was asking students what they usually had to eat. Predictably, selections leaned toward the fast and easy – pasta, hot dogs and the ubiquitous pizza delivery.
“We wanted to show students that for just about the same money and very little time, they can prepare some really great meals,” says Wolfe, who with his wife, Lisa, are frequent hosts to Union students at their nearby Adams Road home. “This is not gourmet cooking. It's home style. This is the kind of cooking that could impress a date … or parents.”
The course was largely underwritten by the College's Intellectual Enrichment Grant. Students paid only $7 for the entire course.
“We both come from families that like to cook,” Wolfe said. “The big Thanksgiving, the big Christmas, family reunions. We just like to cook, and we like to cook for crowds.”
Most of the students who signed up for the class knew their way around a kitchen. Three seniors – Jenny Comerford, Paula Denema and Dan Bamford – took a cooking class last spring on a term abroad in Italy. “I came here to the Wolfes to get some new ideas,” said senior Rebecca Terry. “I'm not a very creative cook.”