Cooking with Mom

The Mansion on Forsyth is offering an opportunity to celebrate moms with a little bit of quality time and a lot of quality food through their 700 Kitchen Cooking School’s Mother’s Day class on May 9, plus ongoing classes every week.

Participants can join Chef Jason Winn for an intimate culinary experience and maybe even learn something along the way.

Winn, originally from Dallas, Texas, has been working as an executive chef for over 20 years and began teaching classes at the Mansion in 2019. “My mom is a retired school teacher and my dad was a college professor so I guess you could say it’s in my blood,” Winn said.

The Mother’s Day themed class will be a brunch paired with fruit, danishes, salad, peach bellinis, coffee, juice and mimosas. The four main dishes to be taught to the class are a Mediterranean-style frittata, a shrimp bisque, a roasted tenderloin with homemade horseradish sauce and croque monsieur, a French ham and cheese sandwich topped with a poached egg. Plus, dessert options including ricotta cheesecake, lemon cheese pie and blueberry buttermilk pie.

Since reopening after closing due to the pandemic, Winn said classes have been busier than ever with lots of locals joining in on the fun, most of them beginners.

“You don’t have to be an expert to come in,” he said. ”This is not a culinary boot camp. It’s just a fun night out with great food.”

Chef Jason teaches classes six-days a week, year-round and offers a Farmer’s Market tour on Saturdays where he said the class selects ingredients from the market and creates a farm-to-table meal that is a “total off-the-cuff, random menu,” as part of a three-course brunch with mimosas. The themes vary each week and include Southern classes, Italian classes, An Introduction to India, La Cocina Mexicana, Low Country Staples, International Street Food, Date Night and Ladies’ Night. Private and intermediate level classes are also available.

Winn’s diverse cooking background ensures there is always something different to try.

“It’s been fun for me to get to cook everyday because when you are an executive chef there’s days where you don’t pick up a knife,” he said. “You are doing paperwork and meetings. I’m spared of most of that and I just do things related to the cooking class.”

The 700 Cooking School invites guests of all ages and skill levels into their state-of-the-art kitchen to come together for a three-hour class and help create an elegant meal while spending time together.

“I love to see the guests interacting with each other because they find that they all have something in common, you know; food kind of brings everybody together,” Winn said. “At the end of the day we are just having fun.”

The Mansion on Forsyth’s 700 Kitchen Cooking School is located at 700 Drayton St., Savannah. For information, visit mansion.classesbykessler.com.