Intro to Cookery
We were still newlyweds when my husband’s company offered him the chance to work in their London office for a year and of course we took it! (See Valentine’s Day in Foggytown, Kinky Boots, and Laundry Day in London)
I took a leave of absence from my job, we sublet our apartment, and since taking our cat would have meant a 6 month quarantine, we boarded him instead with my mother-in-law.
We rented a lovely little flat off London’s Kings Road, and to keep me busy while my husband was at the office I decided to take some courses. A friend suggested City Lit on fabled Drury Lane.
City Lit offered wonderful adult ed courses and I registered for Survey of British Lit; another class called History Tours of London with weekly field trips around the city; and a course I badly needed called Intro to Cookery.
To be honest my lack of culinary skills had already become a sensitive issue at home, and so I hoped that at each class session I’d master a new dish. (See Bone of Contention)
But truthfully the only cooking tip I remember learning was that lemon juice improves almost everything. And the only dish I remember learning to cook was roast chicken – in fact I made it for the first time one night when a friend was coming to dinner.
That evening when the chicken was done I took it out of the oven and put it on a large platter planning to carry it out to the table to carve. But our kitchen was narrow with a few steps leading up to the hall, and going up those steps with the platter in my hands I tripped and watched helplessly as my lovely roast chicken summersaulted onto the floor.
Meanwhile I heard the two guys chatting away in the next room oblivious to my kitchen catastrophe. So I lifted the miscreant fowl off the floor and put it back on the platter, rearranged the garnish around it, and carried it out to the table.
And despite that one little mishap, I’m happy to say our dinner was delish!
– Dana Susan Lehrman
