Blackheath Cooks is a wonderful new cookware shop and cooking school in Blackheath, southeast London, run by my friend Joy Neal. They offer a wide range of cooking classes for children, young people and adults in their teaching kitchen behind the shop. Blackheath Cooks is the home of Munchkins, which offers super after-school cooking classes and cooking parties for children. I regularly teach (adult) classes at Blackheath Cooks, so do come and find me there too! See their schedule of upcoming classes on their website.
Riverford delivers delicious veg boxes from its network of sister organic farms across England. I have been a customer for some time and greatly admire their business ethics and the high quality of their produce. I wrote about them in my book Eat Slow Britain – see here for an excerpt.
Riverford Cooks is their initiative to get everyone cooking more vegetables. As one of their network of Cooks, I give classes for customers and their friends, in homes, at my teaching kitchen and at Riverford HQ in Devon. It’s all about getting excited about seasonal vegetables and learning new ways to cook them. Some of my Riverford classes are open to non-customers too (although we hope to persuade you of the joys of a veg box!) – so look out for dates. And check out the Riverford Cooks website for more events and my Cook’s profile.
I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Jennifer Altman when I started out in my culinary career in San Francisco. Jennifer, originally from Glasgow, is the pastry chef at Bay Wolf restaurant – one of the top restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a highly experienced professional pastry chef and class instructor, having trained at San Francisco’s famed California Culinary Academy, taught professional level courses at Tante Marie’s Cooking School, and often attracted high prize for her delicious desserts in restaurant reviews.
Jennifer entered her first and last baking competition as a child – her towering multi-layered meringue cake was deemed too good for an eight-year-old to make and was disqualified! Her cakes, cookies, confections and desserts continue to astound and delight diners and students. As Jennifer is also a food scientist by training her classes are the perfect opportunity to learn about the fascinating chemistry of baking, pastry and confectionery.
In January 2011 Jennifer is flying over to London to run a series of very special masterclasses with me:
It wasn’t until afterwards, when we persuaded Gülcan to translate some of the preceding fast and furious conversation, that we realised just how colourful it had been. An elderly neighbour had come round to lead us in our gözleme-cooking session over the tandır, and, it turned out, she’d spent the entire time hurling insults of the most explicit kind at anyone and everyone, for no apparent reason. Really, it was so rude I can’t write one word of it here. (And there was me thinking she’d been animatedly discussing the fine art of gözleme-making.) Gülcan’s husband Andus reassured us she’d loved it all really, and was even quite emotional at the end, since it was probably the last time she would ever cook over the traditional tandır oven.
We’d already heard about the tandır earlier in our Turkish travels – it’s a deep clay-lined hole in the ground in which you build the fire. (We suspect the similarity with the Indian tandoor is not a coincidence.) But it was not until we reached Cappadocia that we first saw one. In fact we saw lots – their remains are still clearly visible carved into the floors of the hundreds of cave dwellings dug into the cliffs. Many date back over a thousand years to Byzantine times.
We were intrigued – how long had people been living in caves here, how and what did they cook in them, and why would Hatice, our garrulous elderly neighbour, not be using a tandır any more?
How fortunate that we were staying with a cook and an anthropologist…
It wasn’t until afterwards, when we persuaded Gülcan to translate some of the preceding fast and furious conversation, that we realised just how colourful it had been. An elderly neighbour had come round to lead us in our gözleme-cooking session over the tandır, and, it turned out, she’d spent the entire time hurling insults of the most explicit kind at anyone and everyone, for no apparent reason. Really, it was so rude I can’t write one word of it here. (And there was me thinking she’d been animatedly discussing the fine art of gözleme-making.) Gülcan’s husband Andus reassured us she’d loved it all really, and was even quite emotional at the end, since it was probably the last time she would ever cook over the traditional tandır oven.
We’d already heard about the tandır earlier in our Turkish travels – it’s a deep clay-lined hole in the ground in which you build the fire. (We suspect the similarity with the Indian tandoor is not a coincidence.) But it was not until we reached Cappadocia that we first saw one. In fact we saw lots – their remains are still clearly visible carved into the floors of the hundreds of cave dwellings dug into the cliffs. Many date back over a thousand years to Byzantine times.
We were intrigued – how long had people been living in caves here, how and what did they cook in them, and why would Hatice, our garrulous elderly neighbour, not be using a tandır any more?
How fortunate that we were staying with a cook and an anthropologist…
After four days of eating our way round Istanbul’s restaurants, markets and street stalls we had intended to fast for a few days.
But that was before realising how talented, enthusiastic and generous a cook we were about to find in Zeliha İrez – a Turkish record-setting medium-distance runner turned cook and host extraordinaire…