Can’t quite get that filo pastry right? There is a cookery school in Limassol that could help you
MOST men I am acquainted with boast of their proficiency in the kitchen but only when it comes to the art of barbequing. Then, if you pose the question ‘What else can you cook?’ the answer will always include ‘Spag Bol’; as we all know, one of the traditional male tools of seduction.
Nowadays men (and women) have no real excuse for not having a modicum of basic culinary skills, due to the proliferation of ‘cookery schools’ that have recently opened their doors to the ‘Spag Bol’ brigade. Click on the web and you will find over 64,000 sites dedicated to classes for the amateur cook. There’s the choice of a week in Tuscany after which you are guaranteed to dazzle dinner guests with a fish consommé and partridge terrine. At the Texas Culinary Academy, graduates can toddle off home after a semester armed with the ability to de-bone a steer, and will, with aplomb and a certificate to prove it, be able to consistently cook mouth watering barbequed steaks the size of Wales.
Here in Cyprus we have a good number of culinary refugees, all of whom have, at some time, been brutalised by uninspiring and uninspired home-cooked food. It is these poor souls who have whipped up demand for Roddy’s cookery classes.
Roddy is the ebullient and always ‘on the ball’ owner/chef of the Little Plate restaurant (Ta Piatakia) in Limassol and was one of the first to open a properly-managed cookery workshop. Over the past two years he has successfully revealed the secrets of cooking with Filo pastry, his loyal students having managed to master marinades, curried lentil soup, courgette patties and the like. There are now, in kitchens all over the island, clutches of Roddy devotees who are supremely qualified to now stuff (almost) anything, from a marrow flower to a leg of lamb.
I caught up with Roddy at his cookery school, situated next door to his restaurant, and was treated to a lunch that had been lovingly prepared by two of his prize students: Veronica Georgiou and Hugh Jones.
Veronica hails from South Africa and had found the Limassol classes wonderful. She was going home armed with new ways to tantalise with turbot and tempt with a variety of Thai dishes. Hugh, on the other hand, was, previous to enrolling in the classes, a fully paid-up member of the classic school of cookery. When asked what he used to make before enrolling in Roddy’s classes, the answer was ‘only reservations darling’. The story goes that Hugh had invited Roddy and some chums over for dinner, they were then directed to the kitchen where their dinner – an uncooked chicken – languished in a basin. That’s when Hugh was finally persuaded that perhaps the time was right to partake of some basic culinary tips, like how to turn on his oven etc.
Lunch beckoned and we all fell on the students’ delectable starters of warm camembert with sweet chilli sauce, followed by roast pork with quince, seasoned with cloves and nutmeg, which in turn had been marinated in half a bottle of Commanderia.
The lamb fricassee with a salad of lettuce, dill, celery, spinach, topped with an avogolomeno sauce was so good it would have made a French chef cry into his sweetbreads. This was followed by a master’s degree example of how to create a Filo pastry pie filled with Feta. Roddy is a born teacher who, mercifully, did not graduate from the Genghis Kahn school of Cuisine; there’s no throwing of pots, no raised voices, just gentle explanations, a few glasses of wine, and, always, a generous measure of laughter.
l Little Plate Cookery Workshop, 7 Nickodimou, Mylona 3095, Agios Nikolaos, Limassol. Tel/Fax: 25 745017
