I’M sitting in a kitchen in Glasgow talking to three people I’ve never met before about my struggles with daal and my woeful and ongoing attempts to tame the aubergine. From the nods of recognition around the table I can tell I’m not the only one who has faced these challenges and lost.

Take Sarah Burgess, who admits she needs to up her curry game (her phrase) and who’s left scratching her head at the gulf in class between the daal she produces – “stewed lentils” is how describes it – and the delicious dish her father’s Pakistani neighbours bring him. How come they can do it and she can’t? What’s the magic ingredient?

Or how about Siobhan Lawson, who admits she has needed to do something like this for a long time. “It’s not that I can’t cook,” she’s saying, “but I don’t find it calming. I find it very stressful. I’d like to eat better and I’d like to cook more, but because I don’t have that knowledge I guess it’s not very easy. If I haven’t got a lot of time I’d have to use a lot of brain power to cook something from scratch.”

The final member of our quartet is Colin Mackay, a sort-of vegetarian who eats fish and likes cooking, and whose approach to that wholesome art closely resembles my own. “I just chuck things in,” he says. Put another way, he’s more interested in learning the process behind cooking a meal than in being taught how to slavishly follow a recipe, ingredient by carefully measured ingredient.

And learning is primarily what we four are here to do. The “here”, by the way, is a kitchen in an old stable block in Glasgow’s Pollok Park and our teacher for the day is Herald On Sunday cookery writer Sumayya Usmani, a Karachi-born former lawyer who moved to London in 2006 and relocated to Glasgow three years ago.

As well as also being a blogger, food columnist and the author of two acclaimed cookery books – Summers Under the Tamarind Tree and Mountain Berries And Desert Spice – Usmani has now launched Kaleyard, a cookery school founded on social enterprise and communitarian principles which aims to put cookery skills and food knowledge into as wide a variety of hands as possible, from the disadvantaged to the socially isolated and those suffering from mental health conditions. She’s already working with two special needs schools in Glasgow on a project which is introducing children to cuisines from (among other places) France, India, Pakistan and Syria.

But she also runs straight cookery classes like this one, billed as an Indian vegan masterclass and promising to instruct us in the fine art of chapati-making and give us the low down on such delights as almond, cardamom and banana kolfi. And yes, daal and aubergines will feature prominently. We’re planning on making four dishes plus the chapatis, and once the cooking is done we’ll all sit down together and share what we’ve made. That, says Usmani, is as important a part of the process as the cooking itself.

“People have lost the ability to sit together and eat a meal and it’s that simple thing of sitting together and eating a meal that’s such an incredibly enlightening moment – when you take time away from your phones, from everyday life, from stresses, and you just talk about things,” she says as we take a breather from slicing cabbage and examining the intriguing array of spices laid out in front of us. “In Pakistan, our food is very communal. So in lots of places you sit round a big platter and everyone at mealtime shares that same platter. One of the main things is that we would never plate up food. We would always make it and share it together.”

Regarding Kaleyard, she says she thinks it important “to connect people in a non-confrontational space … a place where people come together to cook and eat and share irrespective of background, belief, faith, whatever. They come and they meet each other and they socialise. There’s a barrier-breaking energy when you cook together.”

Kaleyard also aims to heal what Usmani sees as a “disconnect” affecting Scotland generally but Glasgow in particular.

“There is this absolutely incredible produce but people don’t know where to get it and most importantly they don’t eat it primarily because they don’t know what to do with it. I think there’s a general fear of the produce because people think good produce means expensive produce which doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.”

And by produce she doesn’t necessarily mean just spuds, neeps or, yes, kale.

“Over the last 50 or 60 years Scotland has got a very rich culinary landscape because of immigration and, more recently, refugees, so I think there’s a time that we can celebrate what these people have brought into the country and actually teach people what to do with things. So I thought it’s nice to have a cookery school where people celebrate ethnicity, locality, and the seasonality of Scotland and learn to how to make really cost-effective food for their families.”

So Kaleyard is about connecting with others, de-mystifying cooking and de-mystifying and promoting this healthy local produce.

“There’s loads of spaces in Glasgow where there’s community cookery going on and that’s absolutely fantastic,” Usmani adds. “And I think there are some massive changes happening – in Glasgow generally there are loads of people working in the social community sector that are trying to change people’s eating habits. But there’s no specific cookery school that actually helps people learn and understand the relationship with food at grass roots levels.”

Now there is. To date, Kaleyard has been the recipient of two financial awards. Usmani has used the money to buy equipment and fund some of the community projects. The next stage is to apply for another, larger slice of funding which would provide her with a salary for a year and allow her to develop a business plan. She’s also looking to attract those investors who only put money into social enterprises. And she’s casting around for land and potential premises for a permanent home, while talking to kitchen companies who would be prepared to fit them out. Locavore, the Glasgow-based social enterprise organisation which now operates a shop, a market garden and a vegetable box scheme, took a similar route to funding and is now running successfully, she notes.

Usmani’s other model for Kaleyard is Square Food Foundation, a cookery school and community garden based in Bristol and run by local restaurateur Barny Haughton. Ahead of launching her new venture she spent time working there.

“Because I know Barny I just called and said to him ‘I want to come over’ and he said: ‘Come and spend three or four days and learn what we do’. They started small but now they have a lovely space in a community centre. They do loads of corporate dinners and stuff like that and then they do all their community work – they work with everyone from sex workers to young kids who want to be chefs, which is what I want to do.”

On now with the cooking. Today’s menu consists of Savoy cabbage sabzi with coconut, mustard seeds and curry leaves; a Moong tarka daal with tamarind chutney; a chickpea and aubergine curry; and the almond, cardamom and banana kulfi. Oh and we’ll be rolling out chapatis and cooking them on an extraordinary contraption Usmani bought in Karachi, a sort of upturned wok that sits over a naked flame. When I ask about weights and measures, how much of this and how much of that, she just says: “Eyeball it.” I like her style.

We spend an hour or two chopping, slicing and frying as well as listening and watching. We each have our own mini stove to cook on and the aromas wafting up from my pans as I tackle the ingredients – some mundane, some exotic – smell pleasingly authentic. I even manage to roll out a chapati and cook it without singing my beard, and at the end of it all we sit down to talk and eat and share.

Colin, it turns out, is involved with Tenement Veg, a market garden and workers’ co-operative based in the south of Glasgow. Sarah works for an inter-generational gardening project in South Lanarkshire that brings together children and older sufferers of dementia. For Usmani, who harbours ambitions to create a market garden and source her own produce, and who is reaching out to mental health charities, this information proves her point about what happens when people eat together: out come the stories and the personal histories, and with them comes mutual inspiration and (perhaps) some useful personal connections. “Can we stay in touch?” Usmani asks Sarah. Then, to me: “It’s great how you meet people”.

So what have been the culinary hits of the day? The ghee is a winner all round, it seems. Traditionally it’s made from re-clarified butter flavoured with spices but we’ve made a vegan version that uses coconut oil to which we’ve added turmeric, salt and curry leaves (fresh ones, not the dried sort you might find in a supermarket).

Elsewhere Colin has been quite taken by the asafoetida, a ground root which Usmani says reduces flatulence and Wikipedia tells me is sometimes referred to as Devil’s Dung. Sarah, meanwhile, liked the cabbage sabzi. “I use quite a lot of kale but sometimes I look at cabbage and go ‘Hmmm …’. But I wouldn’t have thought to fry it up with tomatoes,” she says between mouthfuls. For Siobhan, it’s the tamarind chutney which was really found favour, a dark, sticky condiment packed with heat, sweetness and a touch of lemony sourness. I’m quite taken by it too – so much so that there’s now a half-empty bottle sitting in my fridge.

“The only way to do business now, I think, is socially,” says Usmani after the empty plates have been cleared and we reflect on the day. “The way Glasgow should be is there should be no companies that are capitalist, all companies should be social. You can still get money, you can still earn a living – but you can help people.”

Cynics would sneer but Usmani, about as go-getting and energetic an individual as you could hope to meet, has no truck with that sort of negativity. “Do you know what the amazing thing is?” she adds. “I’ve noticed that if you think big, you get people who think like you coming to you”. And with Kaleyard there’s certainly no doubt that she is thinking big.

For me, the challenges are smaller but some victories have been won. There’s no question my daal has improved and, though I’m still not convinced I can bend the aubergine to my culinary will, I do at least have the tools now to try.

The next Kaleyard classes are on April 6 (Middle Eastern Vegetarian Masterclass) and April 12 (Modern Pakistani Pop-up Kitchen). Details of further classes are available on the website, www.kaleyard.org

Recipe for moong tarka daal with tamarind chutney

Serves: 3-4 people as an accompaniment

Preparation and cooking time: 25-30 minutes (plus soaking lentils)

1 red onion, thinly sliced, fried until brown then rested on kitchen paper

250g moong daal (without husk)

1 garlic clove

1 tsp red chilli powder

½ tsp ground turmeric

1 cinnamon stick

Salt, to taste

1 - 2 tbsp vegan ghee

2 garlic cloves, sliced

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp mustard seeds

2 long dried red chillies

Salt to taste

5–6 curry leaves (fresh if possible)

½ bunch of coriander

1-inch piece ginger, peeled and cut into julienne

Handful of coriander and dill, chopped, for garnish

1 tsp chaat masala

2 tbsp tamarind chutney (can be bought in most Asian shops)

Begin by frying the onions and setting them aside for garnish. Then soak daal in a bowl of water overnight or for a couple of hours before cooking. When ready to cook the lentils, drain and put into a large saucepan with the garlic, red chilli powder, turmeric and cinnamon stick. Pour in 350ml of water, or enough to cover the daal and bring it to the boil. Cook for 15–20 minutes until the daal is soft. You may need to top up the water every now and then. Once the daal is cooked, add salt. If the daal is a little watery, using a wooden spoon, crush some of the daal around the sides of the saucepan and this will thicken the sauce. Put the daal in a serving bowl.

For the tarka: In a small frying or tarka pan, heat the vegan ghee over a medium heat until melted then add the sliced garlic; when it starts to brown lightly, add the cumin and mustard seeds – when they splutter quickly add dried red chillies and curry leaves and cook for about 5 seconds then immediately pour the tarka over. Garnish with chopped herbs, fried onions, ginger, tamarind and chaat masala.