Do you cook? Do you like to cook? Are you any good?
Watching a lot of Masterchef recently, I'm always amazed when they come up with something really interesting from the pile of random ingredients they're given for the initial invention test. Sometimes of course it's a disaaster, other times it's truly amazing. I just know that as good a cook as I am, I couldn't do this.
If someone stuck me in front of chicken liver, marjoram, oizo pasta, cherry tomatoes, maple syrup and Blu-tack and asked me to come up with something I'd be stumped. Given time, I'm sure I could whip up something amazing, but not just like that. I think I'd go into freefall. Liver in a Blu-tack sauce. Mmmm!
About 15 years ago, Mrs F-C, me, and my then sister-in-law who ran off to become a lesbian (long story), did a cordon bleu cookery course.
It was all hugely competitive. Mrs F-C missed some sessions due to travelling, my sister-in-law got bored and fizzled out after a few weeks, but I stayed the course. It didn't take long to settle into it. Once you can follow a recipe and get your timings right, it's really no problem at all.
The teacher loved me, and week after week held up my veloute sauce or my chicken a la king as a shining example of how it should be done. Mrs F-C was furious. The guy who arrived on his moped with everything beautifully packed up, cooked really quickly then packed it all away again perfectly, blanked me the entire course. We were still there draining the cooking wine and haphazardly washing up long after the lesson had ended.
Anyhoo, I didn't go back for part two because it involved finding muslin and buying fresh fish, etc., and there was no way that could be sourced on the isle of Dogs on a weekday back then. Canary Wharf was but a pile of bricks.
Now, I enjoy cooking and I'm confident enough about it. It's a question of being bothered, but if you can, it's all rather satisfying. That said, there's no way I'm going on Masterchef like my pal GKW. He's good. He eats goat and squirrel. I draw the line.
So what's your signature dish?
