Now that my daughter is 14, she and I don’t agree on as much as we used to. It’s perfectly natural, I know, but it feels like just yesterday when I could trick her into wearing floral prints and watching Buster Keaton movies. Now her enthusiasms run to cutoffs, finstas, slime and the Avengers franchise — and though she’s too polite to say so, she surely pities me for being a boring nerd.

But there is one thing Sophia and I still bond over and that is food. We’ll debate the merits of Ghiradelli vs Scharrfen Berger chocolate chips. We don’t think twice about driving an extra 40 minutes for a better bahn mi. And the one celebrity we both agree we’d like to meet is Ina Garten. So when my husband and I planned a recent family trip to Barcelona, I knew one thing I wanted to do was take a cooking class with Sophia. Aside from the obvious fact that it’s one of Europe’s gastronomic capitals, a hotbed of jamon, tapas and modern gastronomy, I knew from experience that there were only so many museums and cathedrals to which we could reasonably expect to drag her and her 11-year-old brother, Leo, before they staged their own version of the Catalan rebellion.

So this is how Sophia and I found ourselves among about 15 other food obsessed tourists in front of a sizzling paella pan the size of a hula hoop, straining our ears to “listen” to the food talking to us. “Do you hear that sound?” said our instructor, Alex López. And yes, the golden-brown sofrito of minced onion, garlic, tomato, calamari and cuttlefish was angrily hissing at us. “The pan is telling us, ‘I need something!’ We need to add some moisture.” He thrust a warm cup of seafood broth into Sophia’s hands, and as soon as she poured it in, the pan erupted in a cloud of steam and turned silent, like a fussy baby given a bottle. Listening to the food was just one of the many little lessons she and I learned during our day with Chef Alex — by far our favorite experience in Barcelona.

The school, Born to Cook Barcelona, was founded just three years ago by López, a Catalan native and culinary school graduate who, with his bouncy stance, laser-sharp focus  and impeccable white leather sneakers comes across like an athlete of the kitchen. Like many of the other cooking classes aimed at tourists in Barcelona, his class is organized as a doubleheader, starting with a tour of the city’s famous food market, La Boqueria, and then moving into a kitchen for the hands-on preparation. But López has built a reputation for providing an experience beyond most of the others in the business. His classes are quite intimate (capped at 12 people) and include a tour of not just La Boqueria but also Santa Caterina market, a smaller, brighter, and more easily navigable marketplace in the city’s El Born neighborhood.  “La Boqueria has turned into a tourist destination,” he explained to our group when we first assembled. “The old timers that are still there have gotten a little bit cranky about people who come just to take pictures. So I like to show my students Santa Caterina to see the kind of place where cooks actually shop.”

The other students in our class included several American and Canadians, as well as a pair of New Zealanders, and a few solo travelers from Germany and Mexico. Most were in their 30s and 40s, but there was also another teenager, a 17-year-old from Dallas taking the class with his mother. “He’s recently gotten interested in cooking,” the mom told me. “And even though he’s not going to be making paella in the dorm, I thought we’d have fun.”

Sophia, for one, was clearly more enchanted by the Santa Caterina food stalls than the canvases of the Picasso museum where we’d dragged her and her brother the day before. Under Chef Alex’s guidance, we sampled ripe tomatoes (purchasing a dozen for making gazpacho) and a range of jamon iberico. We learned how to pick the freshest fish (tip: the gills should be as red as tomato pulp) and which Spanish olive oils to buy. Best of all, there were plenty of OMG moments begging to be Instagrammed: piles of pig ears, lambs heads, bulls’ balls and jiggly squares of a brown substance that Alex explained to us was sangueta, or fried blood.

By the time we concluded the market tours Sophia and I were practically ready for a siesta. But we perked up upon entering the Born to Cook kitchen, which is located in the basement of a 500-year-old building that’s said to be where Christopher Columbus’s family once lived. It felt like the set of Iron Chef, all high ceilings, dramatic lighting and high-tech kitchen equipment. “Awesome,” Sophia said with a grin.

After a snack of Pa amb tomàquet (the favorite Catalan snack of bread with tomato) , Chef Alex put us to work on the ambitious menu of gazpacho, patatas bravas, onion carpaccio with xato sauce, seafood paella and crema catalana. Though Sophia at first seemed nervous about cooking shoulder to shoulder with adult strangers, she became visibly relaxed as she proved she could chop and saute as proficiently as at least half the adults in the room. While I personally was most excited about making the seafood paella, the high point for her was undoubtedly the preparation of the crema catalana —  a custard similar to creme brulee. Chef Alex demonstrated how we were each going to use a red-hot kitchen iron (think: a cattle brander, but for dessert)  to caramelize the sugars on the top of each ramekin. The look on Sophia’s face as she wielded this gazillion-degree tool to ignite her dessert (something I probably would never allowed her to do at home, even if we owned such a device) was priceless.

“Kids have been some of my most enthusiastic students,” Chef Alex told me later, after our group sat down to enjoy the meal we had prepared together. Though he did not design his classes with teenagers in mind, he says he’s been pleasantly surprised at the steady stream of sophisticated teen cooks and eaters who’ve shown up ready to jump behind the stove. “For them, it’s fun — a form of playing while they are also learning.”

For me and my daughter, it was all that, as well as an unforgettable bonding experience for the two of us, a sort of mother-daughter off-site in the middle of our two-week family vacation. And though I may never be able to have a real conversation with Sophia about slime instagrams or Infinity War, now we both know how to listen when a sizzling pan is talking to us.