Cordon Bleu cuisine in the capital

You could say I am the archetypal French girl. I wear Breton stripes, eat baguettes, punctuate my speech with "Oopla" - and smoke a packet of cigarettes daily. However, there is still one stereotypical Gallic attribute that I have yet to acquire, the art of cooking. My prowess in the kitchen extends as far as the microwave. I am simply 'opeless, a terrible cook.

So Loic Malfait, chef at the Cordon Bleu school's new flagship institute on Bloomsbury Square, is facing a challenge. The organisation, founded in 1894, now trains more than 20,000 students a year in 20 countries. But can Malfait teach me to cook without burning down his new £15 million building and café, or cutting one of my fingers off? He was adamant that he could prove my preconceptions about cooking - beyond reheating - wrong.

My first complaint, that cooking takes too long, was quickly rebuffed. "How long do you take to make an omelette?" he asks, "I can show you how to make one in 40 seconds."

To prove his point, Malfait then breaks two eggs into a pot, whisks them and adds chives, before pouring the mixture into a red-hot pan. Twenty seconds of furious, circular shaking keeps the omelette separate from the pan - et voilà, my meal is almost ready.

He then adds tomatoes and vegetables to the plate "because presentation is key" before handing me the pan. It is my turn. "First, relax," says Malfait. "I can see that you are very tense and that's how accidents happen. You need to use the entire handle of the pan. It will make it easier ..." and indeed it did. Within seconds I had also prepared a beautiful omelette, without throwing eggs everywhere.

My second complaint was that cooking is too complicated. Chef Malfait starts preparing a grilled salmon with beurre blanc, a butter-based sauce with shallots and a white wine or vinegar reduction. "It might sound scary, but it is not as hard as you think," he says reassuringly. I don't mention that I can't even recognise a shallot. But after pointing me in the right direction, he shows me how to chop it correctly. He explains the slicing security positions: the thumb should be hidden behind the vegetable and used to push it forward, and the fingers should be folded while the knife follows.

Next, we bring the wine to the boil before leaving it to reduce, while preventing the butter from burning. We grill the salmon, just two to three minutes on each side.

The addition of cherry tomatoes and the sauce completes the dish, and I am quite stunned. The recipe seemed much more difficult in theory than it was in practice. However, we still had to answer the crucial question: was it any good? I am pleased to say it was.

In fact, my confidence in the kitchen has improved so much that I have offered to cook for my Parisian friends this weekend, to their surprise. While I might not make a Cordon Bleu chef, Malfait proved I am not so terrible a cook, after all.

The grand opening of the Cordon Bleu school is next Tuesday