Learn to cook for fun

Aula Culinària del Vallès

Cre­ated in Gra­nollers 10 years ago by Lola Gar­cia Oliver, who al­ways dreamt of open­ing a cook­ing school. Lola and her team of eight offer free-time and other reg­u­lated courses, such as the cer­tifi­cate of pro­fes­sional kitchen as­sis­tants. They have been ap­proved as a school by the Gen­er­al­i­tat for their FOAP-SOC and SEPE courses for two years now. Gar­cia Oliver ex­plains that they get “a lot of peo­ple who don’t have a qual­i­fi­ca­tion, who want to learn to work in any kitchen in a restau­rant, hos­pi­tal, nurs­ing home, school can­teen... Above all, they get many women aged 50 to 55, who want to rein­vent them­selves”. And then there are the am­a­teurs, “those who like to cook and want to have a good time and dis­con­nect”. “Peo­ple come to us mainly from the Vallès Ori­en­tal, but also from the Maresme, and even from Castellde­fels, Berga, Tossa de Mar, Sabadell, Ter­rassa..., and Barcelona”, Gar­cia Oliver says. Her charisma and pas­sion for cook­ing are trans­mit­ted to the stu­dents and cre­ates a friendly at­mos­phere that makes learn­ing to cook eas­ier. Every week, es­pe­cially on Fri­days and week­ends, they plan fun cook­ing work­shops, such as Mex­i­can cui­sine, cro­quettes, Japan­ese cui­sine, rice..., or the trendi­est one now – street food. The groups have four­teen or six­teen peo­ple and when they fin­ish prepar­ing the dishes, they all sit at the table to share them over a drink, and “laugh a lot”.

Ada Per­al­lada

Ada Par­el­lada has cook­ing in her blood. She was born amid casseroles, pans, capipota, can­nel­loni, and the com­ing and going of wait­ers, din­ers, passers-by and cooks at Fonda Eu­ropa, an es­tab­lish­ment be­long­ing to the Par­el­lada fam­ily, deeply rooted in Gra­nollers and Vallès Ori­en­tal. “We were like a cir­cus fam­ily, all liv­ing life to­gether. We all ended up learn­ing how to make a sofre­git, (base sauce), how to eat and how to cook, how to dis­tin­guish foods”, she ex­plains. And out of this in­nate knowl­edge came the pas­sion for cook­ing, and the idea of set­ting up her own restau­rant in Barcelona, Sem­pro­ni­ana. As a good pro­fes­sional, she is aware that it is just as im­por­tant to be in the kitchen as in the din­ing room, doing pub­lic re­la­tions and serv­ing the cus­tomers.

In 2020, she spon­ta­neously started post­ing recipes on so­cial media under the name “cook­ing in a bathrobe”. “One morn­ing, at seven o’clock, my daugh­ter said to me: ’My brother and I have passed all our exams, we’ve fin­ished our de­gree. Why don’t you make us a yo­gurt cake as a re­ward?’” And I thought: “I’ll do it and I’ll do a live show on­line.” And I didn’t re­alise it then, but I was doing a so­ci­o­log­i­cal ex­per­i­ment. In the sum­mer, I cre­ated “cook­ing in flip-flops”, which I con­tinue to do every year, and it was a suc­cess.” The chef at Sem­pro­ni­ana is a staunch de­fender of local prod­ucts and Cata­lan recipes. “We are los­ing cook­ing at home and when we lose the cui­sine, we lose our own recipes. The food in­dus­try has no local sen­si­tiv­ity, it is all just global in­ter­ests, we’ll end up eat­ing all baos and co­chinita pibil, and lose di­ver­sity, be­com­ing slaves and vic­tims of the food in­dus­try.” Ada’s videos are no more than a minute and a half in length and some have no sound, only music, to make them eas­ily un­der­stand­able. “We have to find a way that means cook­ing doesn’t de­stroy pri­or­i­ties and doesn’t force us to stop lov­ing and tak­ing care of the things we like. That’s why we lower the de­mands and try to make cook­ing easy and doable, while pre­serv­ing recipes, gain­ing au­ton­omy and rais­ing self-es­teem.

Dos Quarts de Cinc

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“Cook­ing is like a hobby for me”, So­ri­ano says. “I like to make and dis­cover new prod­ucts and recipes, es­pe­cially sweets. When it comes to food, chil­dren didn’t know where the prod­ucts came from, about the dif­fer­ent sea­sons, the ben­e­fits of food...”

The pro­ject also or­gan­ises an­niver­sary par­ties, work­shops and dif­fer­ent ac­tiv­i­ties re­lated to food. For ages 16-18, they offer sum­mer courses at the Gra youth cen­tre in Gra­nollers, com­bin­ing leisure, cook­ing and arts and crafts.