Glenfiddich Farm Cookery School serves with style

 There probably aren’t enough adjectives to describe a cooking class with Olwen Woodier at Relaxed. Creative. Laid back. Garden fresh. Organic. Savory. Homegrown.

Fun.

Ann Carey, of Leesburg, took her first class February a year ago. She comes, she said, for “the cooking, the ambiance, making friends.”

It’s been more than five years since Woodier turned the kitchen of her 170-year old converted dairy barn tucked into the Catoctin countryside between Leesburg and Hamilton, into the setting for first rate cooking and instruction. And having fun.

Woodier loves to cook, has a passion for gardening, is a born teacher, and she and husband Richard Busch had created a professional grade country kitchen, complete with eight-burner Wolf range and demo-mirrored cooking island with a Wolf cooktop. It seemed to make sense.

The first class was in February 2005. The menu that day was chickpea parsley soup; roasted pork tenderloins with sauce of sautéed peppers; rosemary lemon focaccia; composed salad of arugula, spring onion, feta and olives; and Turkish orange-honey-walnut cake.

On May 4, it was “Mediterranean Memories,” and three of the students have been in the mix since 2005.

Carolyn Wickstrom, who lives west of Hillsboro, has been coming to classes since that first one. She was busy preparing fresh morels for their trip to the sauté pan with some wine and broth and herbs.

There’s another adjective: Not too tightly scripted.

Morels weren’t on the menu that Woodier prepared beforehand. But Sandra Davidson (“been here lots of times”) brought a basketful just plucked from her Round Hill back yard. Morels went right on the menu.

And Woodier admitted that the best bouillabaisse she had ever had, in the south of France, included lobster.

But she couldn’t bring herself to drop a live animal into a pot of boiling broth. No lobsters here.

Crab legs would be good, she said. You could cook them separately and drop them in at the last minute just to warm up a little – nice briny flavor there.

“But I unfortunately just thought of that this morning,” Woodier said. Maybe next time.

So the final menu was Marseilles seafood ragout with spicy garlic rouille sauce (students engaged in preparing the rouille had to ask how to say it. That’s “roo-eee”); chive rolls; garden fresh salad greens with asparagus, orange sections, avocado, bantam eggs, goat cheese (there’s goat cheese on almost everything at Glenfiddich) and cilantro white balsamic dressing (the original menu called for lemon tarragon vinaigrette, but the cilantro growing on the desk was at full ripeness); and flourless chocolate cake with white chocolate sauce.

The bantams that provided the eggs live out back. Some bantam chicks were peeping away in a large cardboard box in the den, brought in for protection from unseasonably cold and wet weather.

Woodier’s path to Glenfiddich Cookery School was circuitous. She grew up on a farm in Cheshire in the northwest of England, went to Switzerland after college and did event planning for an American company. She lived in Switzerland and France, and commuted with some regularity to New York City. That company folded and she came to New York, eventually hiring on with Ziff Davis Publishing.

Lightening struck twice. Richard Busch, soon to be her husband was working there. And word got around that she was taking some cooking classes and had started to learn the craft in France. Ziff Davis management asked her to cook for the executive dining room every Friday.

She has written food and gardening articles over the years for the New York Times, Gourmet Magazine, Family Circle, Woman’s Day and Food Management. 

She has authored six cookbooks, most recently “Peaches and other juicy fruits.” She’s about to shop around for a publisher for her next compendium of recipes.

Richard’s second career in ceramic art brought them to the countryside just west of Leesburg, Olwen said, “where you can have a kiln without frightening people.”

The kiln at Glenfiddich (Celtic for “valley of the deer”) occupies 30 cubic feet, fired by two propane burners, each capable of putting out 250,000 BTUs per hour. But the closest neighbors are safely a woodline away (although another rural subdivision is about to rise just to the north of their property.)

Whatever is ripe and in season inspires the menus. There’s a thriving mushroom patch out back that will be harvested in the fall. Containers of spring greens and herbs crowd the deck on the northwest side of the house. When the cilantro goes to seed, Woodier said, she will just let it scatter its seeds and sow a new crop.  Tomatoes and tomatillos are started under glass, safe from the spring winds and overnight lows. Parsley, arugula, garlic, chives, oregano, mint, red leaf romaine, spinach, pansies, roses, a mesclun mix – all started from seed with recycled storm windows over the planting tubs to create a cold frame.

Woodier toured the deck garden during the May 4 class and quickly harvested some fresh thyme springs to add to the broth for the seafood ragout.

Fresh. Fresh. Always fresh. And homemade at Glenfiddich is whenever possible homegrown.

Her goal, she said, is a menu that offsets any high-glycemic entrees with low-glycemic dishes. She also wants dishes that contain little or no saturated fat and no transfats. As a result, the menus are chockfull of seafood, chicken, pork, nuts, whole grains, vegetables and fruits.

All that goes out the window when it’s time for dessert. Cakes are made with white flour and real butter.

Regularly scheduled Wednesday classes ($50 each, minimum of eight) at Glenfiddich Farm Cookery School start at 10:30 a.m and end somewhere around 2 p.m., after Woodier and the entire class sit down to the four- to five-course meal they just prepared. It’s all hands-on: the students had moments earlier been peeling garlic, preparing avocados, rinsing mussels, preparing dressings and sauces, whipping up cake batter.

Friday classes commence at 6:30 p.m. ($65, minimum of 10). Woodier also hosts special events – team building through hands-on cooking, garden and book clubs, friends night out, bridal showers. She can enroll up to 32 for a special event, but only 20 can be in the large, modern country kitchen at one time.

She is also ready to plan and lead tours to cooking schools here and abroad (minimum six month planning time), and will be inviting chefs and regional wineries to take part in the classes. And from July 19 through August 19 -- Kids Cooking Camps.

Upcoming classes include seafood paella (olive parmesan bread, spring spinach with mushrooms and prosciutto, lemon ice cream with fresh fruit), Italian (gluten-free) flavors, French classics updated, on the grill and from the smoker and vegetarian from the farm.

Go to www.glenfarmcookery.com for a complete description of classes for the rest of this summer. Send inquiries to glenfarmcookery@cs.com.