A journey into spice

Anyone can toss a few noodles around in a wok. I wanted to go further and chuck out the lurid pastes and sauces lurking at the back of my fridge; to grind, pound and chop until I'd created something so fragrant it made my knees buckle. I thought a week at a new cooking school at the Four Seasons resort in Jimbaran Bay, Bali, might be the answer.

First signs were promising - an exotically gorgeous suite, a Balinese god in my private garden, a temple outside the front door and an artfully aged mossy stone fountain tinkling into my personal, clothes-optional, pool. The resort also has some of the world's most hedonistic and idiosyncratic spa treatments. But more of those later.

There are a choice of four one-day courses at the school, with titles like The Art of Balinese Entertaining, and I'd signed up for them all. The first morning we headed down to the local market with executive chef Marc Miron. We fingered chillies, sniffed armfuls of coriander and got giddily excited about piles of fresh turmeric, galangal and different coloured gingers. In the fish market we got a taste of Asia in the raw, with crones in coolie hats haggling, while squabbling urchins tugged dozens of primary-coloured wooden fishing boats onto the beach watched by their barechested dads, who demonstrated their prowess with filleting knifes.

Back in the stainless haven of the Jimbaran kitchen, Marc introduced us to knives sharp enough to skin the fuzz off a peach and a new vocabulary of lombok chillies, kemangi leaf, lemon basil and acar sayur ( vegetable pickles). As a course opener we were to cook Satay Lilit Ayam, made from minced chicken spiked with ginger chilli and spices.

Great ... but this recipe had 17 ingredients and they'd all been expertly weighed and chopped by some hidden kitchen god, then placed in a pearly-white ceramic bowl. Not even Delia gets this kind of service. It looked and smelled heavenly, but we weren't really cooking (why did we have those knives?), we were food combining.

Still, it was fun, and the perfect ice-breaker for the first afternoon. We moulded a blob of the greasy, sticky satay mixture around the end of a stick of lemon grass until it resembled something like a gear stick, all the time knowing what one another were thinking. Never had we prepared anything so penile for the grill. We were moved swiftly on to Pepes Ikan Kakap - grilled snapper in a banana leaf. First we had to prepare the "bumbu", a hot spicy paste made from a mere 13 ingredients this time, all pre-chopped, of course, then lay the marinated fish on the banana leaf, wrap it envelope-style and secure with wooden skewers - not as easy as it sounds.

By the end of the week we had managed to chop a few veg for a mega stir-fry, but I felt a bit let down. It was a laugh in a Generation Game sort of way, but everything seemed too complicated to try at home.

Marc and his team keep all the hotel guests happy at the Four Seasons' Taman Wantilan restaurant - soba noodles for Tokyo honeymooners, rib eye for US company presidents, but it had become clear that Jimbaran isn't actually about food. It's about sybaritic pleasure. And the spa's mandi lulur, or Balinese royal wedding treatment - massage with a paste of ginger, turmeric and sandalwood, a heavenly scented rosepetal-strewn bath to finish - is the number one recipe.

Way to go

Jill Hartley flew to Denpasar with Singapore Airlines (0870 608 8886), which flies daily via Singapore. Returns £667. She travelled with Abercrombie & Kent (0845 0700 615 www.abercrombiekent.co.uk). Six nights at the Four Seasons Jimbaran Bay costs from £1,830pp, room only, including flights. Cookery courses cost £60 a day, including lunch.