The Three Sisters Global Gourmet Cooking School shows its stuff at a benefit for a library in San Carlos

Reinhild and Glenn Gamboa, after both of them each accumulated decades of cooking experience at restaurants, hotels and clubs, in a wide variety of culinary styles, moved to El Valle from California and set up the Three Sisters Cooking School, which also does catering.

(So who are the three sisters? They're swine, and this is not a commie radical epithet. You'll have to visit the website to find out those details. If you visit that place, you may want to suggest some better and more extensive Panama links to these relative newcomers.)

On this occasion Glenn and Reinhild were catering for a dinner and concert benefit at Finca La Maya, to raise money for a library for San Carlos. To start out the facility is planned to be a reference library --- to get beyond that phase, contributions of the labor and resources of people like you will be necessary.

On this occasion the menu included tostada of black beans and cactus, scaloppini of pork, shitake mushrooms with Panamanian rum, curried chicken Mumbai, grilled steak in a green peppercorn sauce, Thai spicy peanut noodles, baked plantains en tentacion and more. It was quite a tour through various world cuisines and all wonderful. This reviewer ate some things he really shouldn't have but lucked out on the gout risk. Having tried and liked everything, top billing for the night's fare would have gone to the lime chutney and the curried chicken --- but others might have different but equally valid preferences.

So do YOU want to learn to cook this way, or train someone else to do so for you? Well, getting this good is a labor of many years, but the Gamboas offer cooking classes in El Valle in the Chinese, Mexican, German, Italian, French, Thai and Vietnamese styles.

dining