Culinary doyenne Norma Shirley is thankfully once again conducting gourmet classes. Our SunDay lifestyle member Roland Henry attended the first session and left suitably flustered but more than eager to return … Move over, Gordon Ramsay, here comes Roland.

My first attempt at gourmet cooking is, to say the least, disastrous.

Arriving late for Norma Shirley’s Tuesday evening 5:00 – 8:00pm gourmet cooking class – conducted inside an ultra-stylish kitchen adjacent to Furniture Land along Constant Spring Road – I swiftly glide to the shelf and help myself to an apron; my first impediment, since I am now wasting precious minutes figuring just how to fasten the shoulder strap. But a quick peek at Shirley’s apron gives me an idea.

I’ve missed the lesson on how to prepare Cornish hens, but nevertheless, slip into the work area assigned to me. “My name is Roland,” I mutter to myself, “and I’m student#9 and the only male”. My eyes pan the calming blue room to see eight ladies standing around the counter, watching the culinary doyenne as she reaches for a bowl of chicken breasts marinating ever so stylishly – it’s next on the menu.

“Chicken is the easiest meat to cook,” suggests Shirley. “I don’t know why Jamaicans love to overcook it, five minutes and that’s it,” she reiterates, shooting me a glance that seems to both acknowledge my presence and disapprove of my tardiness.

“Hi, I’m Dorrie Wynter,” the student next to me declares. She is as the French would say “une femme d’un certain age” – a woman with soft, greying hair and smiling eyes. I smile too and introduce myself. “Have you cooked before?” she asks. My mind darts back to my forest-green Portmore kitchen, where cooking is, for me, defined by a waffle-iron or adding herbs and spices to pre-bottled pasta sauce, and I absent-mindedly say, “Yes.”

Intense eyes hold their focus on Shirley, who’s now turning the meat with her bare fingers. “Cooking is something deeply personal, use your hands, that’s why God gave you them,” she states in that matter-of-fact Shirley tone, pouring white wine from a bottle labelled Bogle.

“For God’s sake, don’t use cheap wine when you cook, that’s just going to be vinegar. this is a $2,000 bottle of wine, use wine that you drink,” she shares, and the class concurs.

Pots clang and chime as students search for those oh so perfect skillets, in which the chicken breast will be sautéed. I stare at the cornucopia of herbs, spices and other ingredients before me, not sure what exactly goes where.hmmm.

I peer into the other work spaces to see the women chopping chives, parsley and rosemary and follow suit.

“No, no, you’re doing it all wrong,” Shirley says, prying the borrowed William Sonoma knife (students carry their own utensils) from my hands, “When you’re using thyme, you must cut against the way it grows. the sticks aren’t a part of the dish.” She shudders, says something under her breath and moves on to the next student, attorney-at-law Velma Brown-Hamilton who is making herself out be the class know-it-all. Shirley passes her a compliment before moving on.

The chicken breast sizzles inside the mixture of margarine and parsley and I drown it with wine.

“Roland, you want to drunk off yourself,” SunDay photog Bryan Cummings asserts and I feel the instinctive need to say “Shut up,” but instead channel my more polite side, letting out a hollow laugh. The flame is way too high and my chicken is far browner than the others’. I hastily grab the skillet’s iron handle before releasing it even faster, swearing under my breath.

“Aarrrrhhh,” I whimper, staring at my pulsating fingertips, pink and hurting. Shirley’s bit about cooking being “deeply personal” flashes across my mind and I think, “Her statement would have been more accurate had she said, deeply dangerous”.

“Your flame is too high,” Brown-Hamilton instructs, as she adjusts the knob at my burner from her station opposite mine. I use a nearby spatula to lift the chicken, but it falls back into the pot, oil splashing everywhere, and I scream like a kid afraid of spiders as I burn myself again.

The breasts are now done and students busy themselves with styling their plates, using avocado, tomatoes, rice and potatoes to complement the protein.

“Oh God, what’s going on here?” Shirley asks, looking down at my plate of chicken, peas and tomatoes. I shrug my shoulders, with a boyish facial expression, before softly saying, “A not sure, Aunty Norma.” She takes a piece of thyme and places it atop the dish.

“Food must never be the same height, there must always be a relationship with every element of the dish,” Shirley admonishes.

I fare better on my attempt at the next dish – baked chicken drumettes – and Shirley shoots me a compliment of sorts. “That’s not looking bad, Roland,” she says, as the ladies turn in my direction. Patrice Pusey-Martin, an exec at Nestlé Jamaica hands me a bowl of unseasoned drumettes and asks if I can complete the dish. Eager to prove myself, I oblige, and Wynter and I brown the chicken in her skillet before having it placed in the oven.

“I want to take the horror out of cooking,” shares a now relaxed Shirley, as I sip choice wine after class, “nobody coming to this class is going to be a saucier.”

Asked why the eight executive women would be attracted to a class like this, Shirley explains that today’s executive woman wants to be all-rounded.

“More and more of these women want families, careers and the chance to do other things at the same time.” Our conversation meanders until we begin to discuss the man who cooks.

“I think men who cook are sexy, we have to realise that men were the cooks. it’s fabulous for a young guy to say to his girlfriend, ‘Let me cook you something’,” Shirley adds. Her comment strokes my ego and my confidence swells instantly.

And if she’s right, I’ll soon be one spatula-swinging-sexy-son-of-a.

The kitchen again

That is, of course, until I encounter game. not the variety that flutter across Jamaica’s backcountry, but exotic quail (small birds that belong to the pheasant family). It’s now Thursday afternoon – back for my second class – and I struggle to grasp the two birds sizzling inside my skillet.

Shirley slaps me across my fingers and I suddenly feel like I’m five again (when my grandma would do the same thing to punish me for stealing sweets). “No, no, give it here,” she says, prying the tongs from my hands. It’s a scenario familiar to me since it seems only yesterday (or at least the day before) that she had been yelling the same thing. She grabs the frail-looking poultry, expertly flipping them before turning up the heat.

“You want to get them to a crisp brown,” Shirley quips, “and yours are coming on nicely.” I smile and gain more confidence in my abilities, even as I watch my birds transform into plum. Brown delicacies. As I lift the quails from the pot, the remaining base is paired with grapes and Brazilian pomegranates and reduced to a caramelised sauce.

The next dish, stuffed chicken breast, proves a little easier. Ironically, the tune to that Lasco commercial goes off in my head and I hum under my breath… Shirley’s kitchen, however, is far from the cornbeef capital the commercial heralds. For her domain is the stuff of choice cuisine, food that’s fun and fabulous sans complexity.

“These are light, fun foods that you can really get creative with,” shares the culinary doyenne, as she prepares a chicken breast for stuffing. Shirley warns against overstuffing and further outlines that, when dealing with food, presentation is most important.

Carole Fullerton, executive director at Devon House, stops in on her old friend’s class and, before long, becomes my sous-chef.

“You’ve cut the chicken too thin and that’s why it’s tearing,” she says, as I desperately employ wooden skewers to keep the mushroom-sun-dried-tomatoes-and-mozerella stuffing inside the breast pocket.

The chicken now complete, I attempt to style the plate and receive what can be considered my highest compliment over the two days.

“You’ve done much better with styling today,” says Shirley. However, I’m not that lucky when I present the fillet platter.

“That’s horrible, take off that rubbish (the julienne carrots and zucchini) and start over,” she chides. I quickly scrape off the “rubbish” and restyle the plate. She smiles up at me after we in unison create the new dish.

“That’s what I mean when I talk about fluidity… it must never be ad hoc, but always feature clean, natural lines,” she says. And it becomes obvious why she’s so good at her job… she cooks food with everything she’s got!

For more information on Norma Shirley’s culinary escapes you can call her at 968-5488 or 8817710.