Kitchen Vixen

Enough soul-baring along the dirt roads of my youth, say I. To hell with the timeline… And, dear reader in Australia, before I carry on, ‘koek’ is Afrikaans for… cake.

This blog actually started in May 2010 when I decided to do a fantastic cookery course – twenty classes covering The Basic Techniques and Methods of Cookery spread out over ten months – except it’s more like the cornerstones of fine dining. But alas, here I am in Feb 2011 trying to play catch-up and do this course justice… not to mention the man spinning the pots:

Chef Liam Tomlin. And you can google him. Or just visit www.chefswarehouse.co.za to get on board.

An Irishman who secured his position as one of the world’s best chefs with the award-winning restaurant Banc in Sydney, Liam and his wife Jan came to our shores about five years ago and opened Chefs Warehouse in 2010. Chefs Warehouse offers long and short courses, sometimes featuring celebrity guest chefs like Luke Dale Roberts (ex La Colombe, currently the must-eat-at Test Kitchen at the Biscuit Mill) and always providing everything of the highest quality: knowledge, food, equipment and ingredients – with most of the last two in stock to be purchased by you.

No, you don’t get to cook along with him. You couldn’t possibly keep up with the speed at which he demonstrates the higher truth of the humble potato (as only an Irishman could) or the step-by-step logic of a dish you would have thought beyond your capabilities.

So, we get great, thorough notes and we watch. Taster portions of most of the dishes are passed around, paired with wine. By noon and on our second or third little glass, the noise level increases and the table at the back are told to shut up by those in front. Liam soldiers on. Churning out dishes, explaining every step of the way, forever – hopefully – putting us on an accelerated culinary trajectory.

It’s a wonderful way to spend a Saturday morning. But a complete bitch to blog about in retrospect… I’ve decided to let the pictures do the talking. Because kitchen vixenage is all about short cuts, isn’t it? Kitchen cunning…. improvisation…. recipe schmecipy… although, I decided to do this course because I was improvising along the same tired old lines and I needed to flex some culinary muscle. Learn new tricks.

It’ll take years to do this motherload of inspiration culinary justice. I’ll be uploading highlights from the past eight months as I go along. Regretfully I can’t give you the recipes… for that you’ll have to take a seat in one of Liam’s classes.