Learn to cook in a way that works for you.

Build-Your-Own Cooking Classes

Cooking is a skill, sure.

But it’s also a collection of smaller skills:

• Knowing what to buy
• Understanding what ingredients can do
• Organizing your time
• Trusting your senses
• Recovering when something goes wrong
• And, eventually, feeling comfortable enough to cook without following every instruction to the letter

If some of those pieces never quite clicked, a standard cooking class may not be what you need.

Online or in Toronto, the Ellery’s cooking classes are practical, one-on-one sessions built around the way you actually cook — or would like to cook.

There’s no fixed curriculum. No assumption that everyone needs to start in the same place. We begin with what feels difficult, frustrating or mysterious now, then build the knowledge and habits that will make everyday cooking easier.

Classes are informal and usually held online over Zoom. (In-person sessions are also available in Toronto.) They’re led by Anna Gedalof, who brings two perspectives to the kitchen: twenty years of professional cooking experience, and formal training as a certified nutritionist. That means we can work not only on how to prepare food, but on how to make cooking fit your life, your tastes and the way you want to nourish yourself.

What would make cooking easier?

We might work on:

• Kitchen confidence — becoming less dependent on recipes and more comfortable making decisions as you go.
• Core cooking techniques — roasting, braising, sautéing, seasoning, knife skills, sauces, grains, vegetables, proteins or whatever foundations would be most useful to you.
• Meal prep that you will actually use — finding a realistic way to prepare ahead without spending your entire Sunday filling identical containers.
• Cooking for one or two — shopping, portioning and using ingredients efficiently without producing a refrigerator full of leftovers.
• Understanding ingredients — learning how unfamiliar vegetables, grains, legumes, cuts of meat, herbs, spices or pantry staples behave and what to do with them.
• Adapting recipes — learning what can be substituted, simplified or changed without ruining dinner.
• Cooking from what you have — looking at the contents of the fridge and pantry and knowing how to turn them into a meal.
• Eating well with limited time or energy — developing a small repertoire of genuinely manageable meals for busy weeks.
• Making vegetables more interesting — moving beyond a handful of default preparations and learning techniques that make produce something you want to eat.
• Building a useful pantry — choosing versatile staples and understanding how to combine them rather than accumulating one-off ingredients.
• Planning better meals — putting together meals that feel satisfying, varied and nourishing without overcomplicating them.
• A particular project or cuisine — if there is something specific you have always wanted to learn, we can build the sessions around that instead.