Spotlight On: Min Verquist, CCAE Cooking Instructor

What do you love about Chinese cuisines? What is special about bao, dim sum, and dumplings?

There are eight major culinary traditions in China, ranging from tongue-numbing Szechuan, light and refreshing Cantonese, to rustic and bready northern style. Bao, dim sum and dumplings represent a variety of Chinese cuisines. It takes effort and skills to make them, therefore, most Chinese rely on restaurants, food vendors or freezers. Once you master bao, dim sum or dumplings, you earn bragging rights – you are better than hundreds of millions of Chinese in that regards!

What is your favorite class to teach?

Latte Art at Home. It is designed for home cooks who want to craft latte art at home with simple tools. Seeing students learn to create hearts, flowers, and animals with milk and coffee is satisfying. It’s like magic.

You have also taken some drawing and painting classes with us! What do you enjoy about painting?

Yes, the drawing and painting classes with CCAE unleashed the artist inside me! Painting is fun—it sets me free; it gives me energy; it brings me hope.

What do painting and cooking have in common in terms of artistic expression?

Painting is a visual art. In cooking, presentation matters. In that sense, cooking and painting share similar fundamentals of art: colors, contrast, textures and composition.

Find Min’s classes here!