Cookery school: vegetarian dinner party recipes

Cooking novice Elisabeth Egan packs up her wooden spoon and goes back to cookery school. Here, she shares some delectable dinner party dishes from the course. The pudding, however, is all her own.

I hardly knew how to cook three months ago. I knew a great deal about food — most importantly, how to order it in restaurants and where to buy delicious prepared meals — but when it came to slicing and dicing at home, my hands were tied. Every edible meal that appeared on my table was prepared by my husband, whose first love was Delia Smith.

I can’t put my finger on exactly what inspired me to enrol in The Versatile Vegetarian, an eight-week cooking course at Le Cordon Bleu cookery school, in London. Since I like to tuck into a juicy steak as much as the next meat-eater, vegetarian food certainly wasn’t the draw. But maybe ‘versatile’ was. I craved the most rudimentary skills of cooking. After two-and-a-half decades of depending on my mother, my husband, restaurant chefs or the freezer section of the supermarket for my next meal, the idea of navigating my kitchen with any sense of ease was almost too much to hope for.

The class didn’t put me on the fast track to becoming a gourmet chef. In fact, I’m still up to some of my old tricks, like thickening a pot of fresh tomato sauce with a dollop of Dolmio or passing off shop-bought brownies as homemade. The most valuable lessons I took away from Le Cordon Bleu were the basics I’d never had the patience to practice: how to peel a potato, how to separate an egg from its yolk, how to chop ingredients without losing a finger. I realised that constructing a meal without mastering these keystones of cooking is as futile as trying to read without learning the alphabet. Once I had the know-how to interpret a recipe and organise my ‘mise en place’ or preparation area, cooking became a pleasure, rather than someone else’s chore. These days my greatest challenge in the kitchen is convincing my husband that he’s not completely off the hook at mealtimes. After all, I’m still no Delia Smith.

These are some of my favourite recipes from the Le Cordon Bleu course. The preparation tips should take the most nervous novice one step closer to haute cuisine. Add these to your next dinner party menu and your guests might just stroll casually into the kitchen, looking for the person in the white hat. That’s you!

Next page: Elisabeth’s dinner party recipes