Transcript

I signed up for an evening cooking course because I had moved into my own flat and was tired of eating the same three meals. The course was advertised as for people with little experience, but on the first night I still expected everyone else to know more than me. That fear disappeared when the tutor asked us to cook eggs and half the class admitted they had never done it before. The lessons were held in a school kitchen. It had plenty of equipment, although the cupboards were marked for children and some of the writing was too small for adults standing at the tables. Before the second lesson, the tutor made larger labels and put them at eye level. We stopped opening five cupboards just to find a pan. We worked in pairs, so everyone had a different partner each week. I liked that because one person might be confident with a knife while another was better at judging when something was cooked. If the same people had stayed together, we would probably have divided the jobs in the same way each time. The main surprise was the shopping list. We received it on Thursday, even though the lesson was not until Monday. I thought that was too early. Then I realised the tutor wanted us to notice which food we already had at home before buying more. For the first two weeks, she gave us printed steps. After that, the steps were shown on a large screen at the front. I preferred the screen because we could all see the next step without touching paper with wet hands. The tutor still kept one paper copy on a table in case the screen stopped working. The tutor also asked us to keep our work area clear. Anything we had finished with went straight to one side, which made the small shared tables feel much larger than they really were. We also learned to taste before adding salt. That sounds obvious, but several of us were following the steps like instructions for furniture. The tutor placed a small spoon beside every chopping board and told us to use it often. By the end, checking the food had become a habit rather than an extra step. Timing was harder. Different pans heated at different speeds, so the clock was not always helpful. The tutor asked us to watch for changes in colour and smell instead. She would say, 'the onions should look like this', then walk around the room so we could compare ours. One week we cooked too much food. Rather than throwing it away, we were given boxes to take the extra portions home. After that, everyone brought a box to each lesson. It also meant we could compare the food again the next day, when some dishes actually tasted better. At the final class, we did not have an exam. We each chose one recipe from the course and changed one thing about it. I used less chilli and added beans. The point was to show that we understood what we were doing, not that we could copy the tutor perfectly.