In which I go on a cookery course

So, for anyone who has tried any of the recipes on this blog I have a confession to make: the last cookery lesson I had was Home Economics at school, where as a twelve-year-old I turned out a thick, misshapen but edible pizza topped with tuna and cheese. Hey, I said edible, not delicious.

And I never cooked again, until the necessities of student penury forced me out of the kebab shop and into Kwik Save (for younger readers, Kwik Save was the Aldi of the 90’s). While packing boxes the other day I came upon a book where I wrote recipes in my student days. Even then I preferred making stuff up to following books. Of course, the first one I flipped to had both mashed potatoes and marmalade in the ingredients list… so I like to think my skills have developed over the years!

So I was intrigued to find myself at Leith’s Cookery School last weekend, wondering what on earth it was going to be like doing a half-day of “Malaysian Street Food with Norman Musa”. Props to my brother and sister for coming up with such a nifty idea for a birthday present!

Chef Musa is a great guy, self-taught like me, although of course he’s made a career of it whereas I tend to make a mess of it. With busy restaurants in Manchester and York, and a likely opening in London next year, he’s obviously hoping to get Malay cooking standing alongside Thai in the pantheon of imported UK cuisines.

Which it totally should be. I’ve been to Georgetown, Penang, the absolute Mecca of Malaysian food and we basically spent five days trying to eat everything. The Malay flavours are generally dirtier, richer and earthy than the super-clean spices of Thai cookery, but the range is amazing.

So, I suppose you think we spent an hour being lectured, watched some demonstrations, then pottered around making a laksa and took a leisurely hour’s lunch to eat it with a chill glass of wine? Not a bit. Within 20 minutes we were cooking up a genuinely excellent peanut sauce following Chef Musa’s demo, and then we just kept on cooking for four hours. Oh, with a five minute break for a drink of water, and chomping down a few satay along the way to keep us going.

I knocked out ten neat sticks of satay chicken for the peanut sauce, some deep-fried battered prawn and beanshoot snacks, a mean plate of Char Kuey Teow and ended up with a very satisfying Prawn Laksa. I say satisfying because sticking my nose over the pot I could smell exactly the same smell that came off the bowls of laksa we enjoyed at the hawker stalls on Penang.

To be fair, we did celebrate with a glass of wine at the end.

I’d recommend this particular course to anyone who wants to get some confidence with cooking South-east Asian style. I’ve picked up a very handy bag of tips and techniques from Norman that no amount of making-it-up or reading recipes off the internet would have taught me. And so, yeah, I’d probably recommend a course like this to anyone who wants to get some confidence with any unfamiliar area of cookery.