On the first day of the 12 week certificate course at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Cork, Darina Allen (founder of the school, and a very big cheese on the Irish food scene) welcomed us to 'gastro boot camp', and I think she was only half joking. One week and two days in, the teachers are still being fairly easy on us, but you can already feel the ante slowly-but-surely being upped.
We cook four mornings a week, and there is one teacher to every 6 students, so we get lots of one-to-one attention - and we're graded on everything we produce, which is a bit scary but a good incentive to try your hardest. In the afternoons there are cooking demonstrations by Darina and her brother Rory, who used to be head chef at Ballymaloe House, a posh hotel and restaurant a few kilometres away, and has worked with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in California. On the other day we have lectures all day on things like cheese and wine, as well as boring-but-useful stuff like how to put out fires and avoid poisoning people. As well as practical classes, lectures and homework (and later on, exams) we have all sorts of duties to carry out – feeding scraps to the chickens, picking vegetables and herbs to use in our classes, making salad for lunch, and helping to serve, clean, hoover and polish.
Every lunchtime we sit down together to eat a three course meal made up of the food we've cooked in the morning (ok, so it’s not quite a boot camp). So far my jeans still fit – I am going to have to exercise some serious portion control for that to continue to be the case, it's all about the butter and the cream over here.
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