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I don’t think I realized just how many ingredients exist.

Looking for a fun and interesting culinary class? ICE offers more than 1,700 recreational classes each year. Here is a round-up of some of the classes happening this month:

New Yorkers have a unique love affair with brunch.

Chef Instructor Ted Siegel’s Culinary Arts class is learning techniques for frying this week and the smell of this Southern chicken was too much for us to resist.

No one can dispute the beautiful rusticity of a carrot or a potato in its natural, whole state. Yet when vegetables are formed into the geometric, elegant shape of a tourné, an ordinary fine dining experience leaps from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Firsts of anything are nerve-wracking. A first date. A first interview. A first pastry class.

Originally, I was drawn to this recreational class was the promise of cheese, guacamole and tequila, but I took away from it so much more:

For over two years, sitting on the sixth floor in ICE’s Career Services department, I have had the great pleasure of taste testing a variety of cookies, croissants, soufflés, tarts, donuts and cakes as they come out of our fifth floor pastry kitchens. And now, three nights a week for the next nine months, I will be in one of those very same kitchens as a student in ICE’s Pastry & Baking Arts program.

These days modern cooking techniques include turning carrots into foam and squeeze bottles are filled with hydrogenized fluids rather than familiar red wine or a plain tomato coulis. But on Saturday evening 17 ambitious foodies traveled back in time and came together to celebrate the remembrance of things past at ICE’s Carême and the Grand Art of French Cooking in the 19th Century recreational class.