I launched Splat Cooking in 2001 as a cooking party company to encourage children to learn to cook and show them how much fun cooking is. The natural progression to the parties was after school cooking clubs and cooking workshops, then I was asked by their parents to teach them so they could help their children cook at home too. My cookery school was born.
Over the years I’ve built on the school, making the courses bigger, longer, more intense, more adventurous, offering lunch, wine, very nice cookery folders, etc, and of course, more expensive to cover the costs, lunch and an assistant to help with the food prep and washing up. However, it’s still located in the kitchen of my 17th Century mill house as I’ve always backed away from suggestions to ‘get a unit’ or ‘develop a purpose built cookery school’ as my passion is encouraging and inspiring normal people to learn different techniques or just learn the basics so that they can cook a basic or more flash meal for their family and friends. The fact that the cookery school is in a home kitchen has always gone down well, usually met with a sigh of relief from people expecting a fire breathing stove and stainless steel everywhere.
The point I’m getting to here is that I want to get back to basics, I want to teach real people how to cook real food and inspire them to be little more adventurous with their everyday routine meals. So I’m reinventing the courses we offer to be just that – REAL COOKING FOR REAL PEOPLE. In order to do this I’m paring down the courses and in doing so bringing the prices down.
I ran a taster short course a couple of weeks ago, Pasta with Three Sauces, it was 3 hours long and was half the price of our normal full day courses, there was no fresh homemade cake, freshly brewed coffee and tea on arrival and no lavish lunch with wine. Just 3 hours of learning how to make pasta and sauces to go with it with a cup of coffee and tea in the middle when we needed it, if my guests wanted lunch they were pointed in the direction of M&S on their way home. The feedback was incredible and the course sold out in 2 weeks flat.
Everyone on the course couldn’t believe the price was so low (my overheads were massively reduced and I didn’t need extra staff to help out, no fancy cookery folders either, everything on email afterwards), most of the guests had children and had time to drop them at school, come to the workshop and collect them afterwards, even though two of them had over an hours drive each way. They all said that they had been put off by the prices of workshops at other cookery schools and that they would only go on those courses if it was a special treat and as a special ‘day out’ rather than learn to cook, they loved the pasta course and said they’d like more courses like this that were short and affordable….
That’s when it hit me, I’ve always wanted to get people cooking and learning about food, so by offering more of these Real Cooking courses I can do that, so here we go. The first of these courses run in June with Breadmaking,on Friday 21 June, Healthy Summer Cooking on Friday 28 June and Summer Baking on Friday 5 July, all these courses run from 10am-1pm and are £40 per person, held by me, in my lovely farmhouse kitchen and if the weather is nice you get to have your cup of tea or coffee by the mill pond. You don’t get lunch, but there’s an M&S Simply Food in the village, but you will learn to cook amazing food and take a little home with you too, you’ll get the recipes but they will be on email or paper copies, if you’d like a nice folder then you can choose your own at another time, I’m going to teach you to cook. Real Cooking for Real People.
Tell all your friends and get booking to start cooking (yes, I know that was awful)
