A Sweet Rebellion- Part 1

I've always been a bit of a bad girl I'm not going to lie. Of mum and dad's seven children I'm probably the one that gave them the most grief growing up. The fact that I ended up working in the Hospitality Industry would have seemed completely unlikely some 30 years earlier given my dislike of school and in particular the cookery lessons or 'Housecraft' as it was known then.

It all came to a head one day when our cookery teacher, Miss Ballinger asked us to bring in ingredients to make something of our own choosing.
Up until then our repertoire had consisted mainly of dishes such as Vegetable Soup, Sausage Plait, Jacket Potato and a variety of Steamed Puddings, all terribly English and a little bland for my Mediterranean palate.

This was the 70s, mum was Spanish, so every other summer we would go over to visit our grandparents in Spain. We would return from the six weeks holiday with our suitcases laden with Chorizo, Jamon Serrano, Turron, Saffron and various other Spanish delicacies; it would take another three decades before some of these ingredients would be making regular appearances at British dinning tables.
The most important thing of all was of course the Olive Oil, at the time only available in the odd Soho delicatessen or in tiny bottles from some chemists. Mum always bought back a massive metal drum of the stuff, it was too precious to go in the plane's hold so she would always carry it on as hand luggage.

Anyway, mum suggested I make Empanadas de Atun, a type of pasty popular all over Spain. Like all pasties, fillings and methods of cooking vary depending on region; some people like to bake them in the oven, while others prefer to shallow fry them in the aforementioned olive oil.
My version would consist of tuna, red peppers, tomatoes, onions and a few peas. Mum prepared the filling for me the night before and put it all in a washed out Nescafé jar with a screw top lid. She gave me another jar with olive oil which when combined with flour would make a simple dough, with enough oil over to shallow fry the pasties.

Arriving at my cookery lesson, happy that I was going to make something that I would actually enjoy taking home afterwards I set about preparing the dough, 
just as mum had shown me.
Within minutes Miss Ballinger was standing next to me asking for an account of what I was planning to make. The method of making the dough, the shallow frying in olive oil, in fact the whole thing proved just a little too Avant Garde for her delicate sensibilities, she declared in her loudest voice, "that is not a proper recipe". 
Thoroughly offended I returned the insult by enquiring whether a salad consisting of "half a tomato balancing on half a hard boiled egg, masquerading as a toadstool" was?. This was something we had prepared in class a few weeks earlier, the tomato had been dotted with salad cream to resemble a toadstool which sat amongst a couple of lettuce leaves presumably like some kind of enchanted forest. By the time I got it home after an hour and a half's bus ride on the number 16 from Maida Vale to Victoria Bus Terminus  it looked anything but enchanting. Naturally we parted company, her happy never to see me again and convinced that I was "beyond help" and me happy that I would never again have to step foot inside a training kitchen... to be continued.