Cooking school offers recipes, value and fun

It’s time once again to spice things up in the kitchen with some great new recipes, hints and tricks from the Taste of Home Cooking School.

The school will be Tuesday, Sept. 17, at the Flathead County Fairgrounds Expo Building in Kalispell.

The cooking show is from 7 to 9:30 p.m. although doors open at 3 p.m. for shopping at vendor booths.

With 10 new easy-to-prepare dishes, the event features culinary specialist Eric Villegas.

Returning for the second time to the Kalispell show, Villegas will bring his own unique blend of high-energy excitement and expertise.

“Thanks to my television background, I’m very high-energy and I can sustain it for the entire three-hour program,” he said. “In fact, they should install seat belts in the chairs, I’m that exciting.”

According to Villegas, “Taste of Home offers great, simple dishes packed with tons of flavor, and there’s something to please everyone at the show, no matter what your cooking skill level happens to be. People should be prepared for a lot of fun, prepared to laugh and prepared to learn. This is going to be a great show.”

Anyone who attended last year’s show knows that’s no boast. But it’s not all about energy and excitement. Villegas also has an extensive culinary background to draw upon when answering attendees questions.

Villegas said part of the popularity of the shows is due to the simple, yet tasty recipes that are presented, as well as the goodie bags of giveaways.

“The goodie bags are worth their weight in gold,” he said. “It does not make fiscal sense not to go. For that ticket price, you get it back in the bags alone, then there’s the chance to win the amazing door prizes, and if you win the recipes we make, you not only get a great meal, you get a really nice cooking vessel.

“Taste of Home offers great, simple dishes packed with tons of flavor, and there’s something to please everyone at the show, no matter what your cooking skill level happens to be. People should be prepared for a lot of fun, prepared to laugh and prepared to learn. This is going to be a great show.”

Villegas got his passion for cooking from his father and decided to make it his life, attending Anne Willan’s La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine and Steven Spurrier’s Academie du Vin in France.

“I was fortunate because my parents were really into entertaining,” he said. “My father was a physician and we traveled a lot and he loved to eat, so I got to try a lot of new things.”

Influenced by those early travels, Villegas put his own twist on things when he opened his first restaurant in 1987.

“I made my name in ‘local’ cuisine,” Villegas said. “I trained in Europe, so I took all these great European recipes like paella and bouillabaisse and those traditionally European dishes, and I pulled them apart and put them together with local ingredients.”

“Local ingredients” for Villegas included things such as whitefish from his native Michigan, where he currently lives with his wife and daughter. In fact, Villegas’ love for local ingredients and blending culinary styles led to the success of his television show, “A Fork in the Road with Eric Villegas.”

Airing on PBS, the show ran for eight years, with the first four being centered in Michigan. The last four years were aired nationally, and the show won two regional Emmy awards.

In his third year as a Taste of Home Cooking School Culinary Specialist, Villegas said he actually got his start with the program by attending a show himself.

“It was a bizarre set of circumstances that got me into it,” Villegas said. “I had no idea what Taste of Home was; I had never heard of it at all. I was asked to do a cookbook signing of my own book at a woman’s show and I did a cooking demonstration while I was there. When I had finished, they asked me if I was staying for the cooking show. I looked at them and said I thought I was the cooking show. They took me into an auditorium with something like 11,000 people and I was completely blown away.”