Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel
HUDSON VALLEY, NY: INN TO INN COOKING VACATIONS: "Here you'll find a truly
moveable feast. Each day you travel through the lush green Hudson Valley a
couple of ours north of New York City, starting with a tour at, perhaps, a
local vineyard for a wine-tasting or at a shepherding farm where a French
master cheese maker explains the process and offers samples.
"Then, the main event. Over three days you travel to three different vintage
inns where the top chefs and often the pastry chef as well -- trained in
Europe and at culinary institutes -- give you their undivided attention. They take you, hands-on, through the steps for cooking up their favorite
four-to-five-course meals. Afterwards, you sit down and savor what you've
just helped prepare -- along with the chef's selection of wines."
InStyle
Vintage Hudson Valley Cooking Vacations:"What you'll learn: To prepare dishes using local products. The rundown: Two hour morning lessons, often with chefs trained at the nearby Culinary Institute of America. Who goes: aspiring chefs, couples; age range: 30-50."
The New York Times
Florence Fabricant: "Cooks whose idea of a vacation is doing time in someone else's
kitchen have thousands of choices in more than 70 countries. Among
the choices are cooking for a day or two in historic country inns in the
Hudson Valley, or spending a week in Florence with Giuliano Bugialli, whose cooking school there has been giving classes for 30 years."
Food & Wine
"Vintage Hudson Valley Cooking Vacations offer three days of classes with prize-winning chefs at historic country inns."
Gourmet
"The three-day outings are as much about bonding and having a good time as they are about perfecting your soufflé skills. Geared toward food enthusiasts who love to cook but have little professional training, the intimate vacations) generally comprising 8 to 12 participants, many of them couples) pair regional chefs with some of the valley's oldest inns. Think of them as low-impact culinary outings."
The Washington Post
"Stuff yourself like a quail with Vintage Hudson Valley's Inn-to-Inn Cooking Tours in New York State's bucolic countryside. The three-day package includes cooking classes and a daily five-course lunch with wine. Each day, you cook at a different inn with a new chef, with afternoons free to tour vineyards, farmers' markets or the nearby Culinary Institute."
Kiplinger's Retirement Report
"You don't have to go overseas to enjoy a gastronomical getaway. Vintage Hudson Valley in New York offers three-day, inn-to-inn excursions. At each inn you'll get a morning cooking class, a sumptuous lunch and time to take in the sights of the valley's wine and hunt country. The program runs Tuesday through Thursday year round, except December."
Newsday
"The basic idea of the course is to sleep at an inn (or one nearby), then cook with its chef the next day in a small group. After class, the food is served with appropriate wines, the chef presiding a la table, musing over everything from braising to brining. For those not overcome by the four courses, there is independent afternoon touring of the Hudson Valley, known for its vineyards, cheese farms, produce markets and the Culinary Institutes of America (CIA)."
New Choices
"On your next trip to New York City, why not head north for a few days and refine your culinary skills at cozy inns in bucolic settings? Inn-to-Inn Cooking Vacations, a three-day program, features classes at three historic Hudson Valley inns located from 30 minutes to 3 hours from Manhattan. Classes, which last a minimum of 2 hours and accommodate 6 to 12 students, are held in the inns' kitchens, some of which are tiny. The cooking focus varies with the individual chefs, but menus can include butternut squash bisque with apple cider creme fraiche, excellent local foie gras and cheese, and Hudson River shad and roe."
Atlanta Journal Constitution
"For the main course, we moved on to roasted bobwhite quail with apple and prune stuffing, a nice and easy exercise that included a valuable demonstration of pansearing fowl. For dessert, pastry chef Victoria Pozza entertained us by making a phyllo cup filled with winter fruit compote. When we finished eating around 3:30, I was too sated for touring and instead drove an hour south to Garrison, where I checked into the 18th century Bird & Bottle Inn. Again a canopied bed and personal fireplace made the room, upstairs from the restaurant, sweet and cozy. The next forming, I rolled out of bed into the inn's kitchen, were chef Andreas Nowara awaited in his whites."
Men's Journal
"The Kitchen is the New Garage. Friday evening, and while most men across
the land are loosening their ties for happy hour, a growing number are
instead cinching up aprons to ply their skills in professional kitchens.
And they're not chefs but bankers, teachers, and lawyers -- regular guys.
They're part of the latest wave of America's ever-expanding fascination with
food: recreational cooking. Indeed, cooking schools around the country are
reporting that their male enrollments have as much as doubled over the past
few years, especially for short-term courses that indulge man's age-old lust
for fire and meat. VINTAGE HUDSON VALLEY COOKING VACATIONS & SEMINARS: Take Inn-to-Inn cooking lessons from three local chefs over three days."
