The opportunity to cook with a Napa Valley chef can often be a big-ticket item. Visitors plans trips around a class, travel hundreds of miles and pay hundreds of dollars for a session.

Recently, however, one chef conducted a class that was — to borrow a term from Mastercard — priceless.

Chef Greg Cole, of Celadon and Cole’s Chop House, conducted a class in the art of making pasta with a group of extremely enthusiastic would-be chefs — second and third-graders at Napa Valley Language Academy.

Cole’s appearance was in an after-school class titled, “What’s Cooking in the Garden.” It’s one of 20 enrichment classes offered free of charge to students enrolled in the charter school, which has a Spanish immersion curriculum.

Cole’s own two children, Sophia, a fourth-grader, and Larsen, a first-grader, attend NVLA, which has an enrollment of 50 percent native English speakers and 50 percent native Spanish speakers.

The school is justifiably proud of its after school program, which offers classes in subjects that range from ballet to “super science,” violin and art. The classes are funded by a biennial auction and staffed by volunteers like parent Jill Klein, who teaches the cooking class.

Klein said she was delighted that Cole accepted her invitation to come to the class, and she hopes to line up more guest chefs.

“It is such a great school,” Cole said. “I wish I could have gone to a school like it. My Spanish is so poor.”

But Cole makes up for it with his cooking skills, which launched two of Napa’s best known restaurants in days when great restaurants in downtown Napa were a rarity.

For this cooking class, he came well-prepared with his Kitchen-aid mixer, ingredients for pasta, a portable stove top and a very nifty electric pasta machine.

“I used to use the hand-crank kind, but now I’m getting old, ” Cole, 44, noted.

He also brought a pan of pasta he’d already made.  “We only have an hour,” he said. During that time, the children would not only be mixing up pasta, but would be out in the garden, picking basil to make a pesto sauce with Klein to top the creation.

With his daughter Sophia and her friend Samantha Smith as assistants, Cole demonstrated to the youngsters how to measure and mix pasta dough, a simple mix of flour, eggs, salt, semolina and olive oil.  He explained to them that he adds semolina — a durum wheat that is more coarsely ground than regular wheat flour — “to give more ‘bite’” to the pasta.”

Cole used the mixer to get the dough to the right texture — “It should be silky,” he said — and then the students all got their own piece of dough to examine it.

Kai Mathiasson subjected his piece of dough to additional tests and determined that it was not only silky but also capable of being molded into two snowmen as well as a mustache, which he affixed to his face.

Next came the big adventure of rolling it out. “How big do you think we can get it?” Cole asked the children, as he held up a thick rectangle of dough about eight inches long and four inches wide. “Do you think we can get it to be as tall as Kai?”

Indeed, the final piece of dough, after six times through the pasta machine, was taller than Kai, a result that was extremely impressive to the students. 

Cole had the kids use scissors to cut the pasta into ribbons to cook. “I thought it would be a little safer than giving them all knives,” he said.

 Most satisfying of all was the end product: The pasta was cooked in boiling water on Cole’s portable burner, and served with the quick pesto sauce — fresh garden basil, olive oil and parmesan cheese —  that the kids whipped up in a food processor. To top it off, Sophia and Samantha added a garnish of freshly ground asiago cheese to each paper bowl of pasta with pesto.

“I like asiago because I think it has more flavor than parmesan,” Cole told the children. “And this is fine dining.”

Cole noted he often cooks at home with his own children, although at this point, Sophia is more interested in cooking and Larsen in eating.

What sauce is favored in the Cole household?

“My kids like it with butter and cheese,” Cole said. “I add a little whipping cream and nutmeg, although I don’t tell Larsen. He wouldn’t eat it if I did, but he does like it.”

The class was deemed a roaring success by its participants, and Cole, mindful of the bilingual mission of the school asked them, “What’s the Spanish word for pasta?

“Pasta,” one child replied politely.