Page 80 of A Recipe for Love
‘When?’
Bella bit back her giggles. ‘Now! We’re live. You’re on!’
‘Oh! How exciting. Hello Facebook!’ shouted Nina with the intonation and volume of a rock superstar playing Wembley stadium. ‘I’m Nina Stone. And I’m here with the one and only Netty Wetherall, who is just seconds away from completing her sponsored silence in aid of the Lowbridge community appeal to raise funds for our new footbridge to link the village and the Lowbridge estate once again! Let’s all join in the countdown. Ten! Nine!’ Nina waved her arms to encourage the crowd she was clearly imagining to join in.
Flinty pursed her lips.
‘Eight, seven, six…’ muttered Anna.
Bella did her best to show willing. ‘Five. Four. Three.’
Nina, fortunately was generating enough enthusiasm for everyone. ‘Two! One!’ she bellowed. ‘So Netty, what do you want to say now you can finally talk again?’
Netty murmured something that Bella missed entirely, but, out of the corner of her eye, she could see Anna and Flinty nodding. Nina clapped her hands together. ‘Well I think we can all agree with that! Thank you everyone who has sponsored Netty, and don’t forget that you can still donate on our fundraising page.’ She waved happily at the camera as Bella ended the live stream.
‘OK. That went out live.’ Bella handed Nina’s phone back to its owner. ‘And then it’ll be there for everyone to watch in a few minutes.’
Everyone agreed that that was marvellous, and that Netty had done a great job. Any hope that this might distract the group from the main reason for their get-together swiftly evaporated though.
‘Do we need to be in the kitchen for your demo thing love?’ Anna asked.
‘No. Anywhere with a table should be fine.’
‘Well why don’t we do it out here then?’
The weather was warm and there was a large metal garden table on the centre of the lawn.
‘We might get a few shoppers wandering through,’ Anna added. ‘But we don’t mind that, do we?’
Bella shrugged. What was a few more passers-by to see how bad she was at this?
Anna and Flinty made tea while Bella laid out her demo on the table. There were only five of them including herself, so everyone got their own board with a sheet of pre-rolled pasta on it, carefully passed through the pasta machine at the castle and then floured so it wouldn’t stick. She also set out a Tupperware tub of mushroom filling with five spoons.
‘All right then. We’re going to do one simple thing so I can practise and make sure I’ve worked out how to plan everything through,’ she explained. ‘The task is shaping tortellini.’
Making and shaping pasta was one of those slightly repetitive kitchen tasks that Bella had a strange but deep affection for. Each member of the Ladies’ Group had enough pasta to make four tortellini – a task which, in Bella’s mind, took about fifteen seconds. She guesstimated the whole demo and practice would only be five minutes.
And that was the first thing Bella learned about teaching cookery. The five minutes she’d worried she’d be struggling to fill stretched to ten and then to fifteen, and that was with women who cooked regularly and who were more than competent following a recipe. In a group, though, they chatted and distracted one another. They looked over one another’s shoulders and questioned whether they were doing it right.
Bella had attempted to do one long demo from cutting the pasta into rounds, spooning in the right amount of filling, folding the proto-tortellini into half-moons, and then wrapping them around the tip of her little finger to create the final shape.
Halfway through adding the filling Anna had held her hand up. ‘I can’t remember all this. Let’s do one bit at a time.’
Breaking up the demo into stages meant it took longer but also meant that people didn’t have to remember step one while Bella was talking about step four. She might not be able to do that for longer recipes though. ‘I’m going to need to do instruction cards,’ Bella said.
Flinty nodded. ‘You could do little booklets for each session – something for people to take away.’
Nina agreed. ‘People feel like they’ve got more for their money if they’ve got something to take away.’
Netty added her thoughts to the conversation.
Anna laughed. ‘Well I don’t think that’ll be a problem for Bella.’
Bella could only hope she was right.
After twenty minutes – four times longer than Bella had planned – all her ‘students’ had a row of four passably shaped tortellini in front of them.
Anna frowned. ‘Four’s not really enough for a dinner is it?’
