Stumped in the kitchen? Judy Kavanagh will come to your home and teach you how to cook. Conor Pope pulls on an apron.
Creating a delicious meal out of a turnip, a block of mouldy cheese and some unidentifiable fish found at the back of the freezer is a piece of cake for some people. For the rest of us, making anything edible, even from a fridge filled with the finest ingredients, always seems to end in a haze of black smoke, bitter recriminations and endless washing-up.
This inability to cook is a great embarrassment. But how are you expected to learn once you've hit adulthood and grown used to ready meals and toast and the occasional foray into Italian or Mexican cuisine with the help of some jar of processed gunk? As the celebrity-chef recipe books gather dust on your shelves, you might consider a weekend cookery course in a remote country house. This will undoubtedly render your souffles lighter. Sadly, the lightening effect on your wallet will be even more pronounced. Night courses, although cheaper, involve leaving home on winter evenings to work under fluorescent lights with a bunch of similarly culinary-challenged strangers.
A more appealing alternative might be to contact Judy Kavanagh, a Galway-based chef who will come to your house with all the food and utensils needed to teach you and your friends how to rustle up a feast. Her Cook Club courses cost €25 per person per night for groups of up to 10, and it doesn't matter what size your kitchen is; as long as it has a sink, a hob, an oven and a bin, she'll make it work.
The three-hour classes extend over eight weeks, after which even the most clueless should be able to wow (or not poison, anyway) family and friends with at least four complete menus. "The atmosphere is somewhere between a party and a dinner party," she says. "Some nights it's all about the food, other times it's more about life and all that goes with it. There is always a lot of laughing."
Kavanagh came up with the idea for the club almost by accident. She returned to Ireland from London in the late 1990s, and although she'd been working with food for 10 years, she felt she couldn't progress as a chef without formal training. She packed herself off to Ballymaloe and did a three-month intensive course.
When she returned home she was dismayed to find no jobs matching her new skills, so she took the best of what was on offer: a job running Dana's constituency office. A year later she took maternity leave, during which Dana lost her Connacht-Ulster seat in the European Parliament and Kavanagh her job. At a loose end, she was asked by a friend to do a cookery demonstration to show what she'd learned at Ballymaloe. "I agreed, thinking it was a one-off. When I arrived I realised they wanted eight classes." The eight classes became 16, then 32, and slowly it grew into a full-time enterprise.
She focuses on meals that can be partially cooked or prepared ahead of time. But despite the advance planning, she still gets "the odd panicked call" from pupils on a Saturday evening, desperate for advice after some mishap.
Cook Club isn't all about food preparation. "My other aim is to get people thinking a little about their food, encouraging people to buy their meat from their local butcher and visit the local veg shop," Kavanagh says. "We have a great Saturday market in Galway. I know it might seem obvious, but your dish is going to be better if you use fresh local produce, as it won't have travelled halfway around the world to get to you. I'm not talking about shopping organically, as that's not always feasible, but I try where possible to source and support local producers."
She has reached an agreement with Colleran's, a well-known Galway butchers, and Ernie's, a city-centre vegetable shop, to be her regular suppliers. She gives both shops copies of her recipes ahead of classes, so when her pupils come in looking for specific cuts of meat or certain vegetables, the shopkeepers know what they are talking about, even if the shoppers don't.
At the end of each class she asks her students what they would like to learn next time, takes their ideas and comes up with a menu. "During the time between classes, I test three or four different recipes, and I come up with the easiest method for whatever it is they want to learn."
Cook Club has been running for more than a year in Galway, and Kavanagh has recently hired a chef to take classes in Westport, in Co Mayo. She is also in the process of employing a chef to run similar nights in Dublin.
The majority of her students are women, but last month she had her first men-only class - a group of thirtysomethings and their fathers. "It was hysterical," she says. "There was lots of messing, but they were actually way more attentive than the women." Women tend to be more relaxed in the kitchen. More relaxed and more interested in desserts, by all accounts. "I did have one group who were only really interested in making cakes, buns and desserts. Every week I'd say, What about making risotto or Thai fish cakes next time? And they'd all say: 'Mmm, maybe. Or what about strawberry meringue or chocolate fudge cake?' And so that's what we did." It's one of the dangers of putting the pupils in control. u
Contact Judy Kavanagh on 087-6273570,