Combining Spanish cooking skills honed during a four-year stint living in Barcelona with teaching skills from her job as a maths teacher at a West London secondary school, Leytonstone resident Helen Crabtree has recently started giving group tapas cooking classes from home.
Under the name Pica Pica (which means picking food, so sharing dishes) Helen offers classes on Saturday mornings for up to six people. The first to book gets to pick the menu from a choice of five, including one vegetarian menu, with substitutions possible.
Arriving at Helen’s welcoming family home in Forest Drive East on a sunny-but-chilly Saturday morning, I was invited into her spacious kitchen and immediately handed a warming mug of a hot chocolate. Myself and my two classmates for the day gathered around a kitchen island that was piled high with fresh ingredients, three types of oil and Spanish specialities such as Pimenton dulce.
Helen talked us through the menu (chorizo al vino, espinacas a la Catalana, gambas al ajillo, patatas bravas, padron peppers and pan con tomate), introduced us to some key ingredients and handed us aprons and recipe sheets. With some Spanish music playing in the background to set the scene, we were sent us off to our cooking stations complete with colour-coded chopping boards, measuring paraphernalia and various utensils to get started.
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In true TV-show-here’s-one-I-made-earlier style Helen had already prepped the dough for a loaf, which she proceeded to pop in the oven. Cue homely bready cooking smells. One of our first tasks was to combine the ingredients for our own loaf. Gulp. Baking terrifies me. All that weighing, measuring and possibility of disaster – soggy bottoms, sinking tops and everything else that could possibly go wrong in between.
However, with Helen’s calm and clear instructions things started well, until my dough took a turn towards the way-too-wet side. Luckily Helen came to the rescue – with a sprinkling of flour everything was fixed and soon my dough was sitting in a bowl next to the radiator, waiting to be kneaded.
The rest of the morning passed in a whirlwind of tasks, including making the red sauce for the patatas bravas, grating tomatoes to top the pan con tomate, prepping the spinach and pine nuts for the espinacas a la Catalana, kneading the bread at regular intervals and more.
When Helen demoed made-from-scratch alioli I watched in awe as the raw ingredients magically turned into mayo. It looked easy enough but somehow, when it came to my turn, I managed to knock over my mixing jug sending water, egg, oil and lemon juice all over the work surface and on to the floor. Once again Helen calmly came to my rescue and got me going on my alioli 2.0.
Just as we were starting to feel hungry, Helen took her previously prepped loaf out of the oven and sliced it up, ready for us to rub with garlic, drizzle with oil and top with tomato and, finally, eat. Somewhere along the line a bottle of red wine – Spanish of course – was opened.
After a final knead of our dough, we shaped it, sliced a line in the top and popped our soon-to-be-loaves in the oven, then shared out the rest of the cooking duties, with me taking control of the chorizo and the padron peppers and my classmates taking on the tasks of the prawns, spinach and patatas bravas.
As each course was ready we stopped and dug in. Every dish tasted restaurant quality, which had more to do with Helen’s clear instructions, patient help and top notch ingredients than any skill on my part. I enjoyed every dish but the fresh-out-of-the-oven bread topped with tomatoes and garlic prawns were my absolute favourites.
All too soon, after a little over three hours, it was over. Helen sent us on our way with heads full of cooking techniques, tummies full of tapas, clutching pots of leftovers, easy to follow recipe sheets, a list of the best Spanish suppliers in east London and beyond and those made-by-us loaves which tasted delicious toasted up the next day.
I can’t recommend Helen’s classes highly enough: they’d made a brilliant Christmas present for a foodie friend and, if you’re looking for a fun team building idea or a hen-do-with-a-difference, Helen can come to you.
