Depends on the “cooking.” Knife skills class - ok, bringing in an oven for cookie making class - not so much.
Just be reasonable. We have made fried turkeys out back for a pot luck, pulled in a smoker and made BBQ, I have made Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream and coated a few kids in chocolate with a Jet Cream Rig. OK, never mind about being reasonable.
In doubt ask anyone that is a director or officer. I’m sure they will help you out any way they can.
TLDR: If the fire marshall (or whoever) says it needs to have a UL stamp, clarify if it specifically needs to be UL or if any NRTL will do.
Just as a note here (not that I know anything about this specific situation), but if an inspector says that something needs to be a UL [appliance, equipment, etc.] they usually mean it needs to be certified by an Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory (NRTL). There are several competitors to UL (Underwriter’s Laboratory), such as CSA and ETL whose certifications are just as valid in the US. It will be marked with one of their stamps. Chances are any piece of electronic equipment you find will be marked with one of their stamps.
Basically what these NRTLs do is test the equipment to a specific set of safety standards that apply to the equipment type. Having a safety mark doesn’t mean that there’s no way it can hurt you (under normal use), but it does mean that the safety issues foreseen by the standards body have been assessed as acceptably reduced or eliminated.
Now, I worked at CSA for a few years so I have some bias about which labs do better work, etc. and I learned a lot about forged marks, but in general if it has a stamp its considered safe. There are some very very specific situations in some areas where an inspector will only accept a mark from a specific NRTL for valid reasons, but most of the time its because UL used to be essentially a monopoly in the US and its what most inspectors are familiar with.
It was a lease thing.
That hot chocolate does not meet city code. 
So we can’t have a toaster oven but we can have a kiln??!
I assume we can have a toaster oven, we just can’t make cookies in it.
This is interesting discussion about Cooking @ DMS given all the potentially much more dangerous stuff heat, flames, airborne particles , toxic chemicals. Look out! Somebody’s going to put an eye out.
If we need to we’ll design the classes so the actually cooking is done at home or we do the whole thing from our respective kitchens via zoom if that if viable.
I also have a friend and colleague with a very nice commercial kitchen and classroom set up less than a mile from DMS that we can most likely use. We can even livestream from there.
As my late Dad always said, “Where there is a will, There is a way!”
Thanks for the suggestions on possible classes. Sounds like there are some really good knowledge and interest there. It could be fun. I have a large list of ideas. I need to pare them down and put some meat on the bone.
My plan is to try to get some of my friends and colleagues who are experts in certain topics to give the intros on whatever topics we choose – to give some of the “Why’s” as well as the How. Not just offer up recipes to make something edible.
Still need a week or so before I propose some classes to offer some things after the new year probably.
Good to know. About the stuffer. We’ll take a poll of all the equipment folks have that we can share.
I’m sure Sprite is pretty challenging to match. Citrus flavors are very diverse.
We can figure it out. I thought the same If need to, we do it out back or offsite. There are options.
I just wanted to accentuate the possible x-over between these threads and this one…
https://talk.dallasmakerspace.org/t/august-culinary-appreciation-thread/73697
A couple of us were actually discussing this since we can’t have a real kitchen at DMS. We wanted to find out how much renting a commercial kitchen would be and then splitting that cost as a class fee. I would love to do classes in an actual commercial kitchen (after the pandemic is over of course).
This sounds very interesting, I would love a class like this.
I stopped posting them because life got too busy and it slipped my mind. Is there a way to automate those?
Not to my knowledge, but maybe I should look into that… Might be nice for the S&T threads, too…
I was wondering why they stopped! 
If anyone wants to take up the task I relinquish it. I am too preoccupied right now trying to move back into our house after an unplanned renovation to take up the responsibility of remembering to do it right now, unfortunately.
Well – dang. It didn’t want to quote the middle section, which wondered if there was a legal requirement.
While I don’t have any solid data, speculation when this came up previously was that we’d need to tick all the boxes on having a legal commercial kitchen. This might be why the landlord doesn’t want us cooking officially – they don’t want the full-on set-up for commercial kitchens in their space. I’m betting that we’d need a grease trap, and given how very spastic the plumbing is, that could be problematic.
And we’d probably need a health inspector to come by and inspect us. Otherwise there’s probably a liability issue.
Since it’s in the lease that it’s a no-go, we should probably stop there.
AND Just to put it out there for consideration, honorarium is not available for classes not held at DMS. My only rejected class was the field trip to JoAnn’s to discuss fabrics and patterns. That said, it could go on the DMS calendar. Just don’t make it an honorarium class.
I was planning to do do it all volunteer. Time is of a limiting factor than money. Just would want to not spend a lot on supplies.
This may not be the right way or place to post this. This is a not so timely article but always fun to practice cookie perfection.
More importantly the science meets food website, (that I was not aware of) looks pretty good. Looks like young folks in Food science & related majors in grad School are some the the authors.
I see that they took on the “Food Babe” Blogger machine with a bit of fact checking.