Cookery School

Since before we had even decided to come to China, I’ve been saying I’d like to learn how to cook proper Chinese food. I do my own approximation of some stir-fry dishes at home, and they taste nice, but they’re not really very authentic. I’d actually love to do a whole cooking holiday, doing nothing but learn how to cook but that will have to wait for another time – today we had three hours to learn 5 dishes and that would have to do me for now.

School started with a visit to the market to see what ingredients are available here. It was pretty much like a market at home really – interesting smells, noisy (though the traders weren’t shouting their wares the same way they do at home), just some ingredients we wouldn’t see normally. We saw lots of chillis, too many types of cabbage to name, various roots, then everything we’d already seen but dried. This market also sold fresh livestock so there were lots of people walking around with a chicken in their hands. Lots of people buy them live and butcher them at home themselves, to keep them really fresh. Other meat was available pre-butchered and yet more was available live for you to point at “that one” and it would be prepared for you then. Including dogs. We didn’t go to see that bit. I’ve eaten dog on a previous trip and don’t really have a problem with that, but I don’t need to see one skinned. There were also frogs, lots of different types of fish, and river snails, a local speciality.

Our teacher for the day was Leo. He told us what everything was and answered all our questions about how you cook this or slice that. Once at the school, we were each assigned a work bench, a fetching blue apron and a meat cleaver – the fun bit. We all gathered around Leo’s wok to watch him prepare each dish before we went back to our bench to have a go ourselves, with Leo shouting instructions from around the room. First off we cooked steamed chicken with mushrooms, which I won’t bother with at home cos it was pretty tasteless (I’ll blame it on the recipe, not on my culinary skills…)

Next up were pork dumplings a la Yangshuo. Normally dumplings come in a coat of dumpling dough. We, however, were using a beaten egg so you ended up with a little omelette style shape filled with yummy minced pork. These will definitely make it onto the menu at home. It’ll take some practice to make them into perfect little half-moon shapes like Leo did, but my misshapen ones tasted lovely all the same!

Also on the menu were stir fried pork with vegetables, fried greens with garlic and either duck with ginger or fried eggplant. I went for the eggplant, Gav went for the duck. We got to eat all the food we cooked and were absolutely stuffed by the end of it. Leo was an excellent teacher and we can’t quite fathom how they make any money – the whole three hours, including taxis to and from the school, ingredients, free water/tea and stuffing your face all morning and we only paid £12 each. We’d have happily paid double, I think. We also left with all the recipes of everything we’d cooked – a definite highlight of the holiday for me.

I’ll gloss over the fact that I was violently ill when we got back to the hostel… Gav had been ill the day before and a bug swept through the rest of the guests for the rest of the week, so I think we can safely say it wasn’t my cooking that poisoned me!