Sam's Cookalong Diary Reflections on the big night - Sam's final diary entry

Date Published:

21/01/2008

So it's over. My kitchen is tidy and quiet again. I've just finished digesting that huge steak, my scallop shells and offcuts are out in the wheelie bin, pungently tormenting the neighbourhood cats and a tomato stain on my t-shirt is the only physical remnant I have of two weeks of work and one hour of borderline madness

Fun though wasn't it?

If the comments left on the Channel4 forum and Facebook event page, not to mention the hundreds of photos on the Cookalong Flickr group are any indication, plenty of other people found it as enjoyable as my guests and I did.

Typical postings contained the words 'excellent', 'fantastic', 'pandemonium' and 'oh my god', 'loads of fun', 'brilliant', 'we had a blast' and 'enjoyed immensely' and 'please do again'. A few people objected to the 'wobbly' camera motions (Personally I barely had time to register them. I thought it was just me that was wobbly). One or two green-inkish posters also objected to the real life naked chef whose lady parts made an occasional appearance on the programme. 'How shocking', they said. 'Shame on you Gordon!'

Spare a thought too for Trev and Lyn from West Sussex. Someone with a JCB managed to knockdown a power line outside their house just before the programme began, leaving them to cook along in the dark with the recipes they'd downloaded from the internet.

But most people loved it. The thing that strikes me now is how strange it is to know that many other people were sharing not just the same exhilarating emotions, but also the same smells, flavours, and by the end, feeling of gloriously contented satiation. It was a communal experience like no other.

It's also heartening to know that plenty of people went wrong in the same way that I did. The big mistake that I and others seem to have made was to forget to have a kettle boiling before the programme began in order to parboil the potatoes for chips. The result was that our spuds sat in lukewarm water for ten minutes, and were only just beginning to cook when the programme finished.

Still, most other things went smoothly. Although smoothly probably isn't the best word. Gordon Ramsay might have claimed that there wasn't going to be a 'fucking chicken' in sight at the start of the programme but for most of the hour I was doing my damnedest to imitate the headless fowl.

I was sweating even before I'd finished working on the first course, which as a number of people remarked on the message boards, goes a long way to explaining how chefs manage to stay trim even though they're constantly surrounded by so much tempting grub. All of my guests were roped in from the start too and soon the pile of discarded plates and pans rising up from the sink was looking more and more like an accident that had already happened.

But I was pleased with the results. The simple tomato salsa that accompanied the scallops was delicious. The scallops themselves were so good I thought they were going to have to be the highlight of the meal. Then I got to the steak, which was as perfect as it was simple to cook. I even enjoyed the salad.

My two weeks of training had paid off. All chopping, herb rolling, steak basting and whisking was accomplished with ease and something approaching efficiency. I cooked an excellent first and second course and I'm pretty pleased with myself.

So am I a better chef now?

I've certainly got a few essential principles down and can cook a mean bit of meat, but the final proof is in the pudding. And my pudding looked a bit like vomit. I forgot to freeze the honeycomb, I added the chocolate to the cream when it was too hot and everything curdled. The end result was flecked with strange white lumps, slightly sour and wholly inedible.

Still, I know where I went wrong and I'm confident that I'll do a better job next time. So long as there is a next time. We'll just have to hope that Gordon Ramsay gives into the most often posted comment on the message boards and runs another Cookalong. We were all stuffed to the gills - but remain hungry for more.