Day 4 at cookery school and Lucy and I are suffering with expanding waistlines. Our chef for the day was Dave. He had is own restaurant in Budleigh Salterton for a while and was born locally but has moved around before coming back to Devon. It's been another busy day and a variety of new tasks to do and skills to learn. We made a variety of canapés for our lunch which was fun. The kitchen porters (there are always two) have been great and work very hard all d...

Day tree at cookery school and we had a new chef called Rob today. The pace was certainly stepped up today and we were being stretched a bit more. Rob has worked for Gary Rhodes among others. This has been the best day so far and Rob was very willing to pass on lots of useful tips. Brioche mixture was prepared and we are trying to make some that ate gluten free so it will be good to see how that goes tomorrow. After dealing with the crabs and scallops yesterday...

Well second day at cookery school and what a busy day it was. Alan was our chef again and he started by outlining what aspects we would be covering. Fresh crabs were first on the list. He explain the most humane way of killing them but there weren't too many volunteers for the job - 3 in fact. A swift knife to the head and straight to the stock pot. I was to scared that I would hesitate making things not so swift for the crab. Filleting the flat fish was good an...

Day 1 got off to a great start. Item one was killing live crabs. Thankfully it wasn't compulsory and the chef was happy to demonstrate - only three out of the eight students were happy to do it themselves. Most of the group are just enthusiastic home cooks. One girl has just landed herself a job in a professional kitchen and one man has had his own fish and chip shop! The chef Alan is very nice and has a wide range of experience before joining the cookery school...

Here we are in Ashburton gearing ourselves up for the start of the cookery course tomorrow. The apartment is lovely and they have kindly left us a booklet with all the different things that we can buy. Lucy has her eye on the knives! Ashburton is lovely and I hope that we get time to do the shops.