Man in the Kitchen - by Kit Villiers

Phew! Give me teaching any day! Cooking? I never realised what hard work it is. Following a day's cookery course at Denman College last week, I crawled back to Oxford determined never to enter the kitchen again except perhaps to select 2 slices of Mother's Pride and casually flick down the lever of our old trusted toaster, spreading the result with thick butter and having no greater decision to make except whether to slap on Marmite or jam.

I had been enrolled on the course as a birthday present some months ago, and as the day got nearer I got more and more apprehensive.  Surely I wouldn't need all these freezer blocks, food bags and plastic boxes to take home the result of my efforts. It was more likely that anything I produced would immediately be binned or possibly put down as a new kind of rat-poison.

I was somewhat reassured by the olde world appearance of the college, and by the low-key coffee reception where I took the precaution of eating an extra cake in advance of my now imminent failures in the kitchen, and finally by the fairly unforbidding appearance of my 5 fellow "students"  - all of whom seem to have been dragooned into attending by their wives. Soon the cook/trainer/coach arrived and I marched off after the others through the lovely grounds to a large block, part of which was an enormous kitchen.

I thought I was fairly fit, but I found being on my feet all day, cutting, slicing, trying to figure out how to turn the gas on, not to mention endlessly washing up, totally exhausting. We all had our own cooking range, but I was constantly sneaking a look at my rivals trying to ensure I wasn't last or to see I was doing it right (mostly not). There was quite an incentive to get the stir-fry chicken right as we were going to eat our own concoctions for lunch. Actually despite everything even mine was pretty tasty. We must have been a pretty poor class though - the instructions said we were going for a nice walk around the grounds after lunch, but instead we found oursevelves slaving away over our respective hot stoves again almost immediately.

The day ended with cake in the lounge - fortunately not made by us - and a chance to get our breaths back.

For the record I took home: sausage and fennel seed ragu
coq au vin (with apologies to Delia Smith)
keralan prawn curry
one minor flesh wound