How to Make Friends and Cook for People

Day 82 - B-Levels

2010-07-10T13:50:00.002+01:00

Last year I took my final exams at school. I left the exam room on the last day feeling relieved that it would be a very long time before I would have to go through the whole ordeal again: little did I expect to be back in the exam room so soon, wracking my brains and scribbling absolute rubbish in the hope that I might get a point for originality.

Contrary to what you might be thinking, the exams were not at all easy. We were not given much in the way of instructions for the exam because we were required to learn and revise everything, which is quite a lot. At Ballymaloe speeds one can fit a year's work into twelve weeks and it is not that much fun to re-read all of that.

The first was by far the hardest - food costing, food law, the business of restaurants and so-on. The stuff that makes you want to self-harm whilst you revise it. No-one found it easy. The second and third included everything else that we had done on the course - meat and fish recognition; spices and herbs; preserving and jams; even tea and coffee. We also had questions on the various food lectures that we had had on Wednesdays - coeliac cooking, sushi, canapes and all of the rest. The canape questions were difficult because we had to come up with loads of different examples of them - I assume that I was supposed to have remembered all of the ones that we were shown, but I couldn't and instead just made a whole load up.

In any case, it's all over now, and I was given a pleasant piece of news when I found out that I had got 92% on my wine exam. My certificate from the school will be coming throught the post soon, and I can hardly wait.

The only thing left to do was have supper - kindly cooked for us by Rory O'Connell. We had cold beetroot soup followed by a slow-roast leg of lamb which was beyond delicious. Peach melba for pudding and then speeches and the pub. Not a bad end to the course, I think.

Day 81 - Revision

2010-07-10T13:46:00.002+01:00

As the course hurtles towards its close and the exams come ever closer, I decided that today would be the day that I looked over all of my notes, did all of my revision and generally prepared myself for the coming cataclysm.

I will be honest and say that I did practically nothing of the sort - I delayed, procrastinated, obfusticated and generally avoided my notes like the plaugue. Consequently, I am not very well prepared for the theory exams tomorrow; I will not apologise however - you try revising the finer details of food costing.

Day 80 - Deflation

2010-07-07T19:38:00.001+01:00

I tried to take today easily: I woke up and got out of bed at about 8:00 and unhurriedly got dressed, looked at my order of work and left - calmly - for my exam which was due to start at 9:00.

I had very carefully chosen my menu on the sophisticated grounds of what I would like to have for lunch, and so I was to be cooking a chilled beetroot soup, steak and a tarte aux pommes. Last night as I wrote my order of work, I realised that this was a silly menu because it is not possible to complete in three hours. To make the tart you have to refrigerate the pastry and then blind-bake it which takes hours. To make a chilled soup, you have to let it chill which takes time. Even more importantly, you have to cook the beetroot, which takes an absolute age.

I started the morning off in high spirits, looking forward to getting the whole thing over and done with and thinking that if I couldn't do it all on time, then I was at least going to enjoy myself. I put the beetroots on to cook, I made the pastry and then put the bread in the oven. All was going well. I lined the tart tin, filled it with baking beans and put it in to blind bake. I was still on time. I then moved to make the soup: I gathered my ingredients and checked the beetroots. Which were still practically raw.

I did other things whilst I waited - prepared vegetables and chopped apples, but it was no use. I was now behind schedule and it was downhill from thereon in. Eventually I just gathered up my order of work and put it away so that I could concentrate on getting the food to taste good.

Hopefully I succeeded...

Day 79 - Build-up

2010-07-07T14:28:00.001+01:00

This morning we were given the final lecture of the course by Rory. He showed us how to make a red wine sauce - possibly the most indulgent sauce ever. Half a bottle of wine is reduced to just under a cup before anything else happens, so as you can imagine it is not a sauce that you serve very much of - a dessertspoon per person is more than enough. He also cooked quail, prepared carpaccio of beef and showed us how to make Oeufs a la Neige.

Oeufs a la neige are particularly important to me - they are about the first thing that I can remember cooking on my own from a cook book without anyone asking me to. I don't recall my efforts being a success, but for my parents it was the thought that counted. For those who don't know, oeufs a la neige are very light, poached meringues which are served on custard, giving them their english name - Floating Islands. They are delicious and light when cooked properly (which is fiendishly difficult to do) and they are something that really marks a chef out as someone who is making an effort.

This afternoon was taken up by 'cook-aheads', which is to say those things which require doing the night before so that they can be ready to serve for the exam. I went in to cook my vanilla ice-cream which I will be serving with my apple tart tomorrow. I was slightly apprehensive about this as I realised that I had not made this type of ice-cream before and that it used a very different technique to the one that I had used previously - you use a base of stiffly whipped egg-yolks and sugar syrup to which is added flavouring and whipped cream. This is essentially the italian style of ice-cream and it is by far the tastiest; it also has the advantage of not requiring an ice-cream maker - you can just freeze it. Happily, despite my lack of practice it all went swimmingly (if slowly) and I am now ready for my exam tomorrow. God help me.

Day 78 - The End is Nigh

2010-07-05T19:47:00.004+01:00

The day dawned bright and early and I awoke with a smile upon my face as I walked over to the school for the final morning's cooking session. Yes - the very last one. The institution that has kept this blog going and has given me something to write about, laugh about and weep about at the end of every day has come at last to its end. In a very real sense, the course has now finished and we are ticking down towards to time when we may leave. Only an exam stands in our way now and we are rolling towards it with a disconcerting and frankly indecent speed - I'm sure that only yesterday there were a good four weeks until this exam and now I find that I have only a day. I am appalled.

The cooking this morning was some of the most relaxed that I have yet experienced on the course. It is always a rare treat at Ballymaloe to be able to stand still and look around in an 'I have nothing to do and I am smug about it' fashion, but today half of the room seemed to be doing just that as we were given practically nothing to do. A little gift perhaps, from our headmistress to keep us going before the exams start.

My list for the morning was Pork en Croute, rosettes of smoked salmon and a bread. That, honestly was it. The bread was a rye and caraway loaf, but I can't report back on it because it took hours to cook and I didn't get a chance to taste it before I went into the afternoon lecture. I haven't high hopes for it though: the amount of caraway that went into it was quite obscene and I'm not sure that I would have wanted to try it.

Pork en croute is a very simple dish to prepare: you take a pork tenderloin and stuff it with a mushroom stuffing called Duxelle, then you wrap it in puff pastry and bake it so that the pastry puffs up and looks pretty. It really is that simple. This was the second time that the puff pastry that I made on Thursday has had a starring role in my cooking and it survived the weekend quite well, rising in perfectly good layers. After I had wrapped up the pork in the pastry, I realised that I had an awful lot of scraps left and my teacher told me that I was supposed to do decorations on the top of it. I looked around the kitchen: I saw artful twists, beautifully crafted leaves and fine bows of pastry sitting atop the others' work. I knew suddenly what I had to do - I went and got a small circular cutter and used it to construct four little pig's heads on the top of my pork. It was a moment of divine inspiration which was rewarded with one of the most bizarre reactions imaginable: I was soon surrounded by admirers and on-lookers who came to gaze at the beauty and cuteness of my pig's faces, adorning the pastry like little...faces (but not in an off-putting way), and I had to pose for a photo. My teacher especially was extremely excited by the sight of little pigs faces decorating food, and she made an enormous fuss over it.

Unfortunately it is fairly common for the pastry to split open in the oven and sadly this happened in such a way that it detached the pig's ears from their heads in a highly distressing fashion. I therefore decreed that it was not to be served to children who might be upset by the sight of poor, ear-less pigs and the day moved on.

The only other thing on my list was rosettes of smoked salmon, where you take the smoked salmon, cut it and arrange it so that it looks like a rosette. I have nothing else that I feel I can add to that.

In the spirit of Ballymaloe, hard work and tying up loose ends, we had a demonstration this afternoon despite the fact that we won't be cooking any of it. We were shown how to prepare skate and how to bone chickens and I saw none of it because I am the official ambulance for the school and I spent the afternoon ferrying people to the doctor. Still - it was a nice afternoon, so I didn't really mind.

Day 77 - Laziness

2010-07-04T20:20:00.003+01:00

At the end of today, it has come to my attention that most of my fellows have spent the weekend sensibly practising for their exams, revising for the written tests and generally doing useful things. I have not. Whoops.

Instead, I went to Tesco's this morning for something to do. I shall have to sneak some practising into tomorrow morning's cooking and hopefully my teacher won't notice. SHHH - don't tell anyone!

Day 76 - Counting Down

2010-07-04T19:58:00.003+01:00

In one week I will be departing Ballymaloe for the last time. In one week my course will end and I will return to the outside world a qualified chef with a certificate to prove it. In one week I will be free.

My mind knows all of these things and yet the larger part of my brain still assumes that it will be business as usual from this time hence. I have become used to the routine of recipes in the afternoon and cooking in the morning; of greeting Sue, Gillian, Annette, Mike and all of the rest of the teachers when I pass them; of writing my blog in the evening and copying out my order of work for the next day; of chatting to Eleanor, David, Craig, Jassy and all of the rest of the students during the day when I should be concentrating on my food; and of being able simply to decide to cook something and be able to do it and have all of the help that I need to do it well. To be leaving having got used to all of these things is practically unthinkable, and yet my ferry ticket is booked. My exam menu has been finalised and the orders for food have been placed. I have only one day left of cooking before the exams start and it really isn't registering in my mind which is fully prepared for a week of the same old, same old.

This also marks the beginning of the countdown for this blog as well. There will be seven more posts after this and then it will be closed: left to posterity and any future Ballymaloe students who want to know what the exam has in store for them.

It's hard to comprehend that it is nearly all over: that it really is coming to an end.

I will try to make my final posts the best of the lot.

Day 75 - Miners Strike!

2010-07-03T12:33:00.001+01:00

You may remember that yesterday I mentioned in passing that I had made puff pastry which I would be using during my morning's cooking today. Many many wonderful things can be made with puff pastry - beef wellington, millefeuille, strudel and gateau pathivier, for example - but today I made a journey back to the days of Ted Heath, industrial action, silly hair, industrial action, oil crises and industrial action - the 1970s - in order to make some of those great culinary treats, vol-au-vents. Yes: I made vol-au-vents.

For the audience under 40 reading this blog, a vol-au-vent is a round puff pastry which is baked so that it puffs up and then filled with whatever you feel like. They haven't been seen since the 70's, having gone the same way as Nixon, community spirit and Keynesian economics. Like Keynes however, I am convinced that they are making a comeback because they are really very good; I filled mine with a creme patisserie and some apple compote: they were delicious and looked so sweetly retro that you couldn't help but like them. I'll admit that their taste would have been better if they had slightly less in the way of colour, it's not that they were burnt - more tanned. In any case, they were very nice and honestly not all that fiddly, certainly when compared to the vast majority of canapes.

In order to make the vol-au-vents, you first roll out and cut your pastry in rather a similar manner to making scones, but it then gets slightly more complicated: to fill the vol-au-vents later on, you will need to have a lid and you achieve this by scoring the pastry in a circle quite deeply. When the pastry rises, the little lid will be quite easy and importantly quite neat to remove so that you can fill the little cases with whatever you want. The easiest way to score them is to take a smaller pastry cutter to the one that you were using and simply press it most of the way down into the pastry but this was not an option for me as I was already using the smallest cutter, so I very carefully scored the tops of them with my knife (having checked to make sure that Darina wasn't watching). It was during this engrossing process that I became aware of a large television camera positioned six inches away from my hands and watching my every move very closely.

At first I thought that Darina might have simply taken a step too far in the surveillance of her students, but it turned out that an American TV chef was doing a programme on Ireland and one of the episodes was to be from Ballymaloe. Apparently one of the cameramen thought that the careful preparation of vol-au-vents would make for riveting viewing during the opening sequence: I wonder if it will make it to the final cut? The one person who I did feel for was another of the students who had the appalling luck to be turning out a Tarte Tatin at the moment that the whole of the crew entered the kitchen: she was surrounded by three cameras, a boom-mike, Darina and the presenter as she turned out the tart with a look of terror. Happily it turned out fine and I am sure that a fine future awaits her as a TV chef.

In other news, I also found the time to cook one of my very favourite foods in the whole wide world - chowder. So much more than a fish soup, a good chowder is a whole, filling meal which can contain just about anything that you have to hand (providing it is fish); on that reasoning, mine contained monkfish, salmon, prawns and mussels (which I left in their shells for aesthetic effect) along with the obligatory potatoes and cream to make a lovely and filling soup. Chowder also manages to endear itself to me because it is so easy to present - with a mussel in its shell and a prawn that I had left whole swimming in the creamy soup with great big chunks of fish in between and a few slices of bread on the side, it looked really quite lovely. And that's an achievement for me.

The only other thing that I was cooking this morning was candied peel (stage two): having soaked the peel overnight in salted water I had to simmer them for three hours in order to soften them before finally candying them. This was in at least one respect wonderful - my section smelt divine all morning because of the peel. It was however also intensely irritating because the pan was always in the way and I had to borrow pans from other people once or twice to make up for the fact that I was using mine. I intend to complete the process on Monday, so I shall report back on my progress then.

I was partnerless today once again because he has a shellfish allergy and the cooking lobsters around the kitchen were making it difficult for him to breathe, but he very kindly saved me the trouble of filleting the salmon before he went. It was a bit quiet without someone to talk to, but I had so much to do that I didn't think too much of it.

The demonstration this afternoon was done by Rory and it is the very last which we will actually be cooking - we have two more on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, but they are purely there in order to tie up loose ends. This was the last of the recipes that we would be cooking. And they were all worryingly easy. It was as if we're being given a break for the last morning - nothing too challenging which seems odd given the difficulty of the cooking today. Still, I am sure that they know what they are doing.

Day 74 - Crackling and Cake

2010-07-03T00:01:00.001+01:00

How best to describe today? Efficient? successful? pleasant? or perhaps just plain boring? I shall do my level best to turn the events of the day into thrilling (or at least moderately interesting) reading, but I make no promises as to my success.

The recipes that I clutched in my hand as I entered the kitchen were for a roast loin of pork, a boring brown soda bread, a chocolate cake and puff pastry (to be made today for use tomorrow). I also carried with me the recipe for something that I have decided that it is high time that I learn how to do - candied peel. This is however a three day process and so I will not be mentioning it again until tomorrow: the first stage is, after all, to soak the peel overnight. A real challenge.

The roast loin of pork was the first thing on my list and was not - if I am honest - the world's greatest challenge: you take a loin of pork and roast it. What it has done however is help me in a very important way: for the last few weeks a knife described only as a 'chopping knife' on its box when I bought it, has been sitting in my knife case. So far its only regular outings have been to chop mushrooms because the chef's knife is far more use for general cutting; now however, I have re-designated it my boning knife, given that I don't have a real one. A boning knife is a medium sized, very sharp knife designed to be used to cut up raw meat and remove the bones from it and my chopping knife does this very well: it is exactly the right size and weight to be able to easily cut into meant and to be used precisely for the removal of bones. Perfect. I reached this conclusion because I was presented with my loin of pork with the bone still attached and was told that I should 'loosen' the meat before cooking in order to facilitate the job of carving it later on; my knife performed well and is now on permanent meat duty. Lucky it.

The only other job as far as the pork went was to make the crackling. This is harder than it looks because old-breed pigs have very thick skin and you have to really push to get the knife to score it deeply enough - and my knifes are sharper than most. Once you have scored the rind you rub large quantities of maldon sea salt into it and stick it in the oven for the best part of two hours - when using older breeds of pork it is always best to cook them fully because they will be slightly tough if pink, but the extra juiciness of the meat means that they won't dry out nearly as fast as modern breeds and the flavour will be far superior.

The biggest job of the day was by far the chocolate cake - a real labour of love is all that it can be described as. In return for your efforts you are presented with a cake that unlike so many chocolate cakes is not disappointing, not dry and not tasteless: it is definitely worth it. Part of the reason for the extra goodness is down to the addition of extra, secret ingredients like ground almonds (which I promise, really do make the cake moister) and whipped egg-whites. And chocolate: there was absolutely NO cocoa powder in this recipe - only proper chocolate and it was all the better for it.

I iced the cake and decorated it with redcurrants before finishing for the morning. And that was it - nothing to it. Sorry about that.

Day 73 - The Finer Points of Salad Dressing

2010-07-01T21:56:00.002+01:00

I awoke this morning knowing my fate but not willing to meet it. I had told myself when I went to bed last night that I would get up slightly earlier than usual so that I could do some last minute cramming before the wine exam and thus scrape the 60% required to pass. Accordingly, I woke at 6:30, looked at the clock and then went back to sleep. My body however was determined and woke me again at 7:00 so that I could have a quick flick through the wine book before the exam started at 8:00. I looked at my watch, turned over and went back to sleep. Eventually (having been determined) I got out of bed at 7:47: I can wake up on time, but getting up is a different matter, particularly when there is only an exam to look forward to.

I think that it is unlikely that I will be receiving first prize for my efforts (a first prize which is, I might add, sponsored by Bollinger), but hopefully I won't fail miserably either. I managed to correctly guess the difference between Pouilly Fume and Pouilly Fuisee and identify a good wine to serve with goat's cheese (Sancerre); hopefully some of my guesses will turn out to be right, otherwise I may be in big trouble, though. As is fairly usual with exams, when I handed in my paper and left the room I came across a large gathering of people anxiously discussing what answer they put for certain questions. I went over and joined in (because what else are exams for if not for working one's self up into a frenzy over a single mark?), occasionally making a comment, occasionally worrying people by declaring confidently that I had put a different answer to theirs. Ha ha ha.

We were given a short break after the exam before trooping back into the demonstration room for the last theory day of the course (...sniff...). So what would this last hurrah of a lecture be on? A difficult, obscure and impressive branch of cooking? How to decorate a wedding cake, perhaps; or possibly how to scream violently without damaging one's vocal cords unnecessarily in the process? No. Salads.

We had a guest speaker who's name was Barny and who spent a very long time showing us different salads, and it was universally fascinating. None of the salads were green - I don't believe that he used a leaf of lettuce anywhere - and none of them were designed as accompaniments to the 'main' dish: they were the dish. Salads of chickpeas, of chicken, of duck and of fruits abounded and in between he explained why they tasted good and why they were better than other foods. You would have been amazed, astonished and veritably astounded by the simple varieties of flavour, colour and texture that were achieved by putting cold ingredients together on a plate.

And then came lunch - salad.

Happily, Darina brought out a roast haunch of venison (from God knows where) which improved my lunch ever so slightly.

About a week ago, a piece of paper came around during the afternoon demo inviting us to list recipes that we would like to see demonstrated before we go. Students suggested things as far apart as rice pudding and vegetable soup. On the back row, we were feeling bored and slightly subversive, so when the paper got to us, we put down Roast Grouse as a suggestion. A friend sitting next to me put down toast. After lunch today Darina intended to show us how to make some of these requests and on the list of recipes I was somewhat astounded to see grouse: she had only included the recipe and wasn't going to cook it, but I still found it immensely amusing that we had been taken seriously. The recipe (if you are at all interested) runs to several lines, but the basic gist of it is: take one grouse and place it in the oven. Serves one. Toast was unfortunately not included - a pity I felt, as I had been having difficulty with toasting bread recently: it's something to do with the way that you turn the dial on the toaster.

After our request session we trooped off to Ballymaloe house for a tour of the hotel and tea. We were given a talk by Myrtle Allen who told us how she got started and what had gone into the restaurant over the years - it was fascinating, even though I am terrified of the idea of cooking in a restaurant. I can see how she has become a role-model for so many chefs over the years. The whole occasion reached new heights when the gooseberry tartlets and tea were brought out and we all left feeling thoroughly full (and inspired).

The final (and optional) lecture of the day was a visit by a local gamekeeper who had brought with him examples of the different types of game that could be found in Ireland. He also showed us how to skin rabbits - a surprisingly simple if ever so slightly gory procedure.

Thus ended the venerable institution of the theory day. I mourn its passing with much solemnity and gravity. May its memory be blessed and may it, in due course, be inflicted upon the next lot of hapless students who come through these doors naively expecting this course to be easy...

Day 72 - Finally...

2010-06-30T23:05:00.003+01:00

Today was the day that we finally got to cook what we all (by which I mean 'I') really came here to cook - steaks. Since the beginning of the course many moons ago, I have eagerly been awaiting the day when I would be permitted the opportunity to completely ruin a lump of meat. Or turn it into something delicious.

I cook steak a lot at home: if I'm honest, too much. But then again, steak is tasty and reasonably healthy, so why wouldn't you eat it? In any case, my previous experience in the rarified world of steak led me to the kitchens today anxious to impress with my ability to perfectly cook one; in the end, I cooked three. The first was by far and away the most difficult - a T-bone steak: essentially the fillet and the sirloin still attached to the bone that separates them. They are large, reasonably thin in order to compensate for this fact and also composed of two slightly different meats which cook at separate rates. I would never usually touch one with a barge pole, but it was there and my partner wanted it so I felt it my duty to cook it - which I did, medium-rare to perfection.

The other two steaks were a sirloin which I cooked rare-medium-rare and a fillet. Fillets should only be served blue: no other steaks can be, but a fillet is best this way. The only problem is that it is quite difficult: the pan has to be ridiculously hot in order to only sear the outside without cooking the meat in the centre and you cannot leave the meat for even a second - it is briefly the most important thing in the world. Rather like doing creme brulee with a blow-torch, cooking a steak blue is nerve-racking, but it is good practice, so I duly did it. I left it until the very end, when the grill-pan had been on the heat for a good fifteen minutes and was properly hot: when I slapped the steak on, the whole thing briefly caught fire. Then it is merely a case of letting it sear on one side after another, putting it on a plate and getting it out as soon as is physically possible. The reward for my labours was the accolade from my teacher of 'best steak-cooker' (but worst presenter), and a delicious steak for lunch which on the whole constitutes quite a good morning.

The only other thing that I made today was a cauliflower cheese which was a bit of a disaster. The problem is that it is very easy to forget about the cauliflower whilst you're making the mornay sauce and as a result they were somewhat overcooked. I decided that the best thing to do would be to try and hide this fact by drowning them in sauce - doing things again is for wimps. Unfortunately, my teacher noticed and told me that a) I had badly overdone the cauliflower and, b) it was supposed to coated in sauce, not swimming in it. Not a great result, if I'm honest, but one can't always get things right. Especially if one is sabotaging one's self through the sort of bone-idleness and apathy that those who know me are aware is my trade-mark. No one could ever accuse me of keen-ness.

After the demo, we had a lecture from Darina on olive oil, which is apparently not just stuff that comes in a bottle and is used to grease pans.

We have our final wine-exam tomorrow which is no doubt going to be incredibly difficult, so now I shall go to revise.

Day 71 - Muddling Through

2010-06-29T19:34:00.003+01:00

My posts for the next two weeks may be somewhat shorter than they have been up until this point because I find that I am getting less and less time in which to write them. I apologise, but you'll just have to lump it.

Because I was in London this weekend, I didn't get the chance to have a look at my recipes for today and came into the kitchen this morning not having a clue what I was going to be cooking. When I got there, my partner told me that he too had not been at the lecture on Friday and thus was in a similar position. We quickly apportioned the morning's work and began with only a slight telling off from the teacher. I was to roast a rack of lamb and make a meringue sandwich thing for pudding.

Rack of lamb is delicious, and it is even more so when using the tenderest of tender spring lamb which we were given to work with. It takes a bit of preparing though, and whilst any normal person would simply ask their butcher to do it for them, this is Ballymaloe and that is unfortunately not an option: out came the boning knife and the meat-saw. It isn't exactly difficult to prepare, but it does take some time to get it to look good and professional - you have to carefully remove all scraps of meat from the top of the bones, otherwise you end up with an almighty mess.

Having prepared my meat, I and another of the students decided to do a guard of honour - which in retrospect was probably not a great idea: our racks were from rather differently sized animals and as a result the guards appeared for all the world to be sleeping, such was their position. This ridiculous enterprise also considerably lengthened the cooking time and made me late for lunch which annoyed me greatly.

Whilst the lamb was sitting around waiting to be cooked, I also produced a coffee flavoured meringue with whisky cream. You shape the meringues into rounds and then sandwich them together with the cream in the middle. This sounds like a simple operation and indeed it was, but somehow whilst the other students came up with delicate and lovely confections on plates, I managed to produce a dog's dinner. A mess. An utter disgrace. It probably didn't help that I dropped the cocoa shaker as I was dusting the thing, resulting in a slightly more chocolatey topping than I had anticipated; it may also have been something to do with the fact that I did nearly the same thing when I tried to dust the top with a little coffee powder too; or that the cream warmed up and tried to split. Who knows?

I also made another white yeast bread today. I am delighted to be able to announce that it looks exactly like a white yeast bread. I shall therefore account it a success.

I went out to Ballymalloe House for dinner this evening with my parents. I've been trying to persuade them to come over and buy me dinner there for nine weeks, so I'm glad to have finally got the chance to eat there. I had a consomme julienne followed by roast guinea fowl, both of which were delicious and I returned to the school feeling well fed and prepared for the rigours of tomorrow's cooking - steaks.

Day 67 - Aqueous Scribes

2010-06-28T19:21:00.002+01:00

Squid are horrible. They really are. Preparing them, that is - they're delicious to eat. In any normal fish, one simply cuts it open and pulls out the guts in what is a twenty second operation; in squid, you pull it's head off. Not cut: pull. In theory, all of the guts come out attached to the head, so the next job is inevitably to try and extract those parts of the squids anatomy that hadn't heard about the theory; they're all squishy and horrid, and completely unrecognisable as internal organs. My squid also had roe, which interestingly was transparent and provoked a brief discussion on whether squid roe could be eaten: I thought that it probably could and suggested that my partner try some and see what it tasted like. Unfortunately, I am partnered with a boring kill-joy who for some reason didn't want to eat raw squid eggs. Wimp.

It was explained to us at great length during the demonstration on Tuesday that one must be very careful when handling squid guts in case the ink-sack ruptures an spills ink everywhere. Happily this was not an issue for me as the stupid thing had ruptured inside the fish and dyed my hands black when I picked the squid up. Instead, I chose to rupture something infinitely worse. Squid have very large, squashy eyes and I managed to nick one of them with my knife, sending eye-liquid everywhere; it was disgusting.

As may be apparent, I am no longer enamoured of squid, although if someone else is going to be cooking then I'm very happy to eat them. I served mine chargrilled with a chilli and parsley oil which was actually quite nice, so if anyone wants to make that for me then they are very welcome.

I had another go at brioche today and I am pleased to say that they turned out well enough that one was stolen to be put into Darina's lunch-box. I am going home this weekend for my brother's wedding and I thought that it would be nice to bake him some brioche for breakfast. They really aren't a huge bother to make and the look of wonder and pathetic gratefulness that one receives when presenting someone with warm brioche for breakfast is very pleasing. An also I'd like to make my brother's day special - not that it wouldn't be anyway, but as Tesco insists on reminding us, 'every little helps'.

Most impressively of all, today I made my own chocolates. I made some little chocolate cups by spreading melted chocolate on the inside of muffin cups and then filled them with a strawberry each and some chocolate mousse. It was fiddly work, but I assure you that they were good - something to do on a rainy day, I think.

At home, no blog, etc. etc...

Day 66 - Small Food

2010-06-28T18:23:00.002+01:00

The penultimate theory day of the course was perhaps slightly outstanding from its fellows in that it featured little in the way of actual theory - instead we had two ordinary cooking demonstrations, both of which featured food which could be eaten in small helpings: canapes in the morning and sushi in the afternoon.

I have never made canapes before in my life, but they always look far too hard to even contemplate attempting: I'm sure that one would need to train for a million billion years before one could turn out such fiddly work on time for a party. Apparently however I am wrong in this assumption: canapes aren't all that difficult, particularly if you have Top Gear on in the background to entertain you whilst you carefully construct tiny little pieces of food. I still don't think that I would be very good at it though.

Sushi likewise, I thought is something that needs at least ten year's training in before one is even allowed to touch a fish. Apparently, provided that you aren't bothered that not all of the grains of rice are aligned, then sushi is actually quite simple. It certainly looked simple from where I was sitting at the back. I think that I shall have to try making some when I get home - sushi is just the sort of food for Scotland.

Day 65 - Help Yourselves

2010-06-22T23:25:00.001+01:00

I had braced myself for a long morning when I awoke, bleary-eyed in order to get ready for salad duty. Salad duty involves turning up an hour earlier than normal to help make the salad to be served at lunch that day. It is a horrible thing to find out that you have to do right at the beginning of a day which you have been dreading (see yesterday's blog).

I have to say now that I don't actually like buffets. Darina was at pains to point out all of the ways in which the Ballymaloe buffet was superior - better ingredients, freshly made and not refrigerated, but the fact remains that buffets are essentially collections of not very appetising food. I am sure that it all tastes lovely, but I can just never work up the eagerness to actually desire anything that is on show: for me, buffets are generally about picking out some boring, plain food because I am too boring to go for the lovely salads and chutneys. A day spent devoted to the art of buffet food was not therefore something that I was necessarily looking forward to, but I was pleasantly surprised by the success of my morning.

Perhaps it was because I wound up cooking one of those things that I do like to eat from a buffet - glazed loin of bacon - or perhaps it was because I was doing less work than I had dreaded that I might, but it turned out that in the end I had a relaxing morning. I even had enough time to make a second brioche dough which will be finished tomorrow. It really wasn't too bad.

Apart from the bacon, I had to produce a cumberland sauce, which is a spiced redcurrant jelly with port and orange peel in it, and an apple and carrot salad. This was produced by grating some apples and then grating some carrots. Difficult. The bacon was not initially hard - it is cooked by being boiled for about an hour. You have to remember to blanch it first though - the first time that you bring it up to the boil, scum consisting of salt and preservatives rises to the top of the water: you then discard and replace the water and leave it to cook happily by itself.

When the bacon is cooked you score the fat on top with your knife and stud the thing with cloves; then you cover it with demerara sugar and put it in the oven until the top caramelises and turns crispy. Not at all difficult.

The demonstration today involved squid - an entirely new life-form for us to eviscerate in the name of cuisine. Squid is quite difficult to get right - if you cook it for too long it goes to the texture of rubber bands - and so I am looking forward to having a go at char-grilling it myself: it is just half a minute of cooking to get it to the right stage. I'll let you know how that went tomorrow.

Day 64 - Health Foods

2010-06-21T22:00:00.002+01:00

I actually quite like prunes. Prunes are good. The problem that they have is that healthy eating obsessives hijacked them long ago and turned them into something to be 'enjoyed as part of a healthy, balanced diet', which made them instantly unappealing. That, and prune juice: more unappetising concepts there are few.

Happily, today I was able to strike back against the forces of health and blandness by taking their sacred prune and stewing it in wine. Lots of wine - especially to make it winey and not at all healthy tasting. I stuffed them with bits of walnut too which I have to say I wasn't so keen on, but the recipe demanded it and the recipe must be obeyed or terrible things happen: terrible, terrible things.

The prunes were served with whipped cream sweetened and flavoured with rose-water, scattered with rose petals and arranged beautifully on a plate. The cream caused more problems than it really should have: I decided that I would whip it by hand on the grounds that it would be faster than getting the machine out and setting it up to do it for me. Indeed it was quicker, and I whipped it to quite a stiff stage before I realised what I had done and stopped. This caused an issue with the next stage of the recipe that I had not foreseen - when I added the rose-water the whole mass promptly split and I was left with a rose-flavoured butter which needless to say I was not brave enough to taste. It was at this point that it was brought to my attention that one person would be mixing the cream for the whole kitchen and that I had just wasted a not inconsiderable amount of time producing something inedible. I confess that I found this mildly distressing, but I have recently been perfecting my attitude of 'keep calm and carry on' in the face of terrible adversities such as producing butter rather than cream or burning loaves of lovingly produced bread.

To go with my stewed prunes, I made a focaccia, which is not too difficult at all; and an elderflower sorbet. I don't actually like elderflower sorbet all that much, I have decided: freezing anything reduces the level of sweetness and that means that the sorbet can all too easily take on that nasty musty, cat-pee smell and taste of raw elderflowers. My sorbet tasted fine, I am pleased to say but I still am not convinced.

There were several people cooking curries for lunch today and so I decided to make chapatis to go with them. For those who don't know: a chapati is an indian flat bread that is floppy so that it can be used to pick up pieces of meat and rice and so on. They are quite easy to make, so I made lots and I think that mine were the best. But then, I would think that, wouldn't I?

The demonstration this afternoon was all to do with buffets which was quite interesting: doing a buffet that isn't ghastly is a fine art. God help me when I try it for myself tomorrow, then.

Day 63 - Beach Party

2010-06-20T21:41:00.002+01:00

Another day of peaceful uneventfulness - a lie in and lazing around all day. I had to go into Cork to collect one of the other students from the train station but that was about all that I did.

A coalition of the willing organised a beach party and barbecue for this evening, so I went down and stood around looking like I was having fun. When I had eaten I decided to come back - it was windy and quite cold on the beach. Still: it was a nice way to spend an evening and the food was marvelous.

Day 62 - Rest and Be Thankful

2010-06-20T16:44:00.002+01:00

Having had a reasonably tiring week, I decided to make today an uneventful one. I went to the market in the morning where I bought some smoked salmon to compare to my own and I can confirm that it was far better than mine. What an unpredictable surprise that was: I was stunned.

Not much else happened today, so here I shall leave it.

Day 61 - Pasta

2010-06-20T09:24:00.002+01:00

Today I made pasta, which is not as hard as people might think. Pasta is essentially dough which is rolled out thinly and then pressed, cut and manipulated into various shapes - some of these are simple and can be done at home with no experience at all, some are not. Happily, I ended up making some of the former - cannelloni, which are essentially rolls of pasta with a filling which are baked in the oven.

Making the basic dough is not at all difficult - it is just flour and egg yolks, with a little salt as an optional extra. The dough has to be very dry, though because it needs to be able to stand up to being rolled out very thinly: according to Rachel, when Marcella Hazan visited the school many years ago, she was not impressed with Rachel's dough because her finger did not come out clean when she touched it. This dryness does cause some difficulty - the dough must be kneaded, which is not easy when it has about as much suppleness as plasticine and it needs to be kneaded for a long time. You come out of it wanting to sit down for a minute.

After kneading, you leave it to sit for about an hour and then roll it out. This is a job made infinitely easier by the use of a pasta rolling machine which does the whole thing in a matter of minutes. You could in theory roll it out by hand, but you wouldn't get the same result and it would be more effort. Eventually you end up with a few strips of pasta which you can do what you like with. I cut them into squares and put a chicken and pork stuffing on top of them before rolling them up, covering them with a cheese sauce and baking them in the oven for about half an hour. Cannelloni: what could be easier.

Pasta takes quite a while to make so I kept the rest of the morning light. I made a soda bread that unfortunately turned out to be a bit of a disaster and cooked some french beans. Cooking the beans was fun because I had about five minutes only right at the end of the morning to do them in: I prepared about 1.5lbs of beans by cutting them into three one at a time in less than the time it took for the water to boil which was an achievement that I was quite proud of.

The demonstration this afternoon was quite Indian - we did a few curries and I helped to make chapatis which are not as easy as they look. I'm looking forward to trying them out again on Monday.

Day 60 - French Cuisine

2010-06-18T23:32:00.002+01:00

I'm told that the french don't just do poncey restaurant food - good hearty meals like Boeuf Bourgignon are very much at the centre of their cuisine too. But whereas we in these islands regard stew as something to feed the family on a weekday evening or fill the belly of a hungry but not too discerning fisherman, the french view stew very much in the mainstream of their cooking knowledge: in France, a stew is not offered to guests with a wan smile and a quiet 'it's only stew, but...', but instead with just as much ceremony as would be attached to a roast joint of meat on Sunday. I find that I have mixed feelings about this - whilst I certainly would regard a stew as a great treat during the winter and would be offended if someone thought that I was short-changing them with an inferior meal, I cannot quite allow for the idea that it should be put on the same level as roast venison, for example. After all, the relative attractiveness of a stew is directly correlated to the quality of the ingredients and has a great deal less to do with finesse or style as might be the case with a more complex dish - even the classics like boeuf bourgignon whilst labour-intensive, are hardly difficult to make if one has the time.

The point of this rather peculiar dissertation on the subject of stews and their fitness for the high table when compared with other dishes may not be immediately obvious. The reason for it is that this morning I found myself making another of the famous french stews - a Daube de Boeuf Provencale. Leaving aside the repetition of the observation on the peculiarity of stewing meat in June, I was surprised by how obvious it was that this was not simply a stew - one has to take time and care over it: there is marinating over-night, there is much chopping of ingredients and there is something to make it a bit different - vinegar added before the end of cooking to cut through the richness and give it a different dimension. One can see why the cook might want to make it clear that this is a special dish, given the amount of work that goes into it.

My daube went very well except for one slight issue which was unfortunately unavoidable - its nature. Stews use tough, otherwise unappetising meat which must be cooked for a long time in order for it to become edible; this is not a cooking technique compatible with a fast morning's cooking and when I took it out it became pretty obvious that it wasn't cooked sufficiently. I wasn't happy about serving it and Rachel agreed, so she tried some of the liquid to test the flavour and seasoning and then it went back into the oven.

The other recipes that I worked my way through this morning were a champ - a mashed potato dish with vegetables, in this case peas and parsley mixed through it - and granary bread. Granary bread is actually quite tricky: it uses a very heavy, strong flour and so it needs to rise a huge amount before it is put into the oven or you end up with a dense, nasty, malty brick. The problem with letting it rise a lot is that you very quickly become paranoid that you might be letting it over-rise, which is a disaster of monumental proportions; I am happy to say though that mine was a bread baked to perfection - a veritable triumph amongst bread, particularly when I pointedly placed it next to another granary loaf at lunch that looked distinctly inferior (at least to me).

My teacher this morning was Rachel Allen - a nice change from the usual. I think I am now qualified to say when I see her on TV: 'she taught me how to cook' - an infinitely more impressive statement than 'I've met her'. Not that I would ever wish to exploit someone else's celebrity in that way though, of course.

The morning ended well, if a little behind schedule and I wandered off to lunch feeling that I had had a good morning cooking. After lunch I sat down for the demonstration and waited for my name as the roll was called out. When Rachel got to me, she looked up and enquired as to how my daube was going - a question to which I replied 'very well', before running off to check. Happily it is quite difficult to over-cook stew and in all honesty I would have been happy to leave it in the oven for another twenty minutes or so; I hauled it out, however and left it to cook feeling ever so slightly relieved.

The demonstration this afternoon was largely to do with home-made pasta and I was very much looking forward to it. I'm going to be making my own tomorrow, so I shall report back on how that went in my next post.

Day 59 - Profits and Losses

2010-06-17T21:10:00.002+01:00

Lectures again - today we were presented with the second part of Blathnaid Bergin's lecture on not failing miserably in the food industry. Once again I found it ever so slightly depressing to be reminded that the food business is just that - a business. To survive you have to be as much entrepreneur as anything else and I really believe now that the industry isn't the place for someone who simply enjoys or is good at cooking: a pity as I don't think that that's what the lecture was supposed to achieve, but there you are. We were given instructions on menu-planning and food-costing, market research and advertising and how to stop people stealing from you. What a shame that I really am only here to become a better cook.

Day 58 - Competence

2010-06-16T17:54:00.002+01:00

You may remember that a couple of weeks ago I posted a blog raving about how I had managed to finish my work early and get to lunch before everyone else (assuming of course that you have all actually been paying attention to the blog and putting in the effort required to read it - it's quite hard work for me, you know). Today I managed to re-kindle some of the spirit of that glorious day and once again became the first person to actually finish. Hurrah for me.

Part of the reason for this must be attributed to the fact that I have been moved to a different are to cook in; it is the same area that is used for the afternoon demonstrations and is thus called, imaginatively, 'demo'. There are only a few of us there and the whole atmosphere is remarkably calm, orderly and quiet - there is no shouting, very little in the way of running and less in the way of waiting for the teacher to come over to ask a question. In other words it is far more conducive to successful cookery and it is concomitantly far easier to stay (within a reasonable margin of error and taking all things including unforeseen delays, shortages and fire-alarums into account) on time, by which I mean to finish when you have planned to finish.

I had quite a lot to do today, none of which was a truly dreadfully long and draining recipe: my work for the day was rather a large selection of things that would each take not very long to cook. This presented its own problem which will become clear soon. I had to make a dish of monkfish with a vinaigrette, buttered courgettes, steamed potatoes, a bread, marinaded beef and hot-smoked salmon. This deceptively long list presented me with a busy but not rushed morning - an enjoyable pace - and then a hugely rushed final half-hour. The problem was that the monkfish, the courgettes and the potatoes all had to be done right before they were served: I had to watch about four different pans whilst clearing up and rushing off to get warmed plates to serve on. I was actually nearly running at one point which shows just how much I cared. Surprisingly despite the fact that I was a little rushed, I managed to get it all done - yes, I really could have done better presenting the monkfish and yes, the zucchini may have been partly overdone because I had chopped it slightly unevenly in my rush, but I got it all done and it all tasted fine. What a result.

The most interesting thing of the morning by far was the salmon. You may remember that I recently went fishing, and if you don't then I suggest that you stop reading this and look for an earlier post entitled 'Lough Corrib' where the full story resides. I asked politely if I might be allowed to use the school's smoker to smoke it, rather than just cutting it into steaks which is boring and my teacher said yes, although it really would have been better if I had got it done earlier. She told me that we would hot-smoke it (smoke it in a hot environment) rather than cold-smoke it which is what one normally thinks of as 'smoked salmon', because cold-smoking is an almighty faff if one is only doing one fish. It's an almighty faff if one is doing lots of fish as well, but at least you get lots of salmon at the end of it. Hot-smoking also has the advantage in terms of ease and convenience - it is a simple, compact operation that can be done on top of the hob.

A hot smoker is essentially a box into which is placed a little sawdust, a rack to keep the fish above the sawdust and the fish to be smoked. The fish must be lightly salted the night before smoking in order to help the process - it chemically changes the flesh which makes the smoke adhere better to it. You put a tight fitting lid on the top of the box and then put it on the hob for long enough for the sawdust to begin to smoke but not long enough for it to catch fire: fire is distinctly undesirable, unless you like chargrilled fish more than smoked fish - a predilection that raises the question of why you bothered to use a smoker in the first place.

The whole process once started takes about twenty minutes to complete and you are left at the end with orange, cooked bits of fish. It doesn't look all that appetising but it tastes really quite good and is proving very popular with my house-mates which means that it will soon be gone - a noble end for a fish, I feel.

Day 57 - China

2010-06-14T22:45:00.002+01:00

I'm in a different kitchen this week and I don't quite know where everything is yet, which is my excuse for the fact that despite the fact that I had a quite leisurely morning I over-ran by a little bit.

My brief for the day was quite uncomplicated and not at all time consuming, if done efficiently: spring rolls, raspberry ice-cream and a 'rustic' fruit tart. The ice-cream was not strictly required of me, but I hadn't done it yet so I felt that I might as well have a go at it. It's not at all difficult to make an ice-cream, even if you don't have an ice-cream maker to use - you puree the raspberries and add them to a little sugar syrup (as if they weren't sweet enough already), fold in some whipped cream to add body and flavour to the mixture and then freeze it. The advantage of the ice-cream maker is that it churns the ice-cream as it freezes so it all stays together: if you were to simply freeze it then there would be a danger of the raspberries sinking to the bottom - a problem that can be somewhat mitigated by adding a little gelatine to the mixture to stiffen it.

The rustic fruit tart is essentially a tart made without a flan-ring. You simply lay out the pastry on a pyrex (heat-proof) plate, put the fruit on top and then bring the sides up around it. It's not as if you save yourself a huge amount of work this way, but it does look quite nice and it makes for a change. The one problem is that you can't really take it off of the plate so serving it nicely is something of an issue. The fruits that I used were apricots (sliced), blueberries and raspberries and at the end of cooking I was left with something that tasted really rather nice. It certainly looked rustic, anyway.

The spring rolls I thought would be easy - a simple matter of mixing ingredients and then wrapping them up in little rolls. I hadn't counted on one of the ingredients being crab, that most off-puttingly unappetising of all of God's creatures. I can stomach the taste of crab but the smell is something that I find really off-putting, especially during cooking: I nearly retched whenever I had to take them out to see if they were ready. Needless to say, picking the crabs took quite some time and by the time I had got the spring rolls together I was a bit on the late side. They tasted quite nice, though so it wasn't too bad. At least I got them done eventually.

The demonstration this afternoon featured puff pastry - the most difficult and refined of all pastries, apparently. You may remember a fortnight of so ago when I reported having spent some considerable time making flaky pastry, the poor cousin of puff pastry - it took an absolute age, you have to be extremely careful to get it all aligned and the end result is a little worse than puff. Here is news for you all - puff pastry is easier to make. Why anyone would bother with flaky is a mystery and Rory said that we would probably make it only once in our lives - when we learn to make it here. I'm going to have a go at puff pastry tomorrow, so I will report back then.

We're also going to get the fish smoker out tomorrow to deal with my grilse - it's getting a bit old but I'm sure that it will taste fine once it's been hot smoked. I'm looking forward to seeing how it works.

Until then...

Day 56 - Trout and Salmon

2010-06-13T20:52:00.003+01:00

To start the day with a pan fried brown trout for breakfast is a special thing indeed. I suppose that many people think that they don't like trout all that much - it tastes muddy and boring, they say. No it doesn't: especially not if it has just come off of Lough Corrib and is properly wild. The nasty things that you get in supermarkets are rainbow trout, not brown trout and they are fed mainly on pellets rather than wild food so they never taste as good as they should. Properly wild brown trout is a delicacy that far exceeds even salmon in terms of taste: the flesh is sweet and firm and wonderfully orangey-pink in colour. It really is just an extraordinary delight to eat and at 3/4 lb just the right size for a meal. What more could one want?

I slept about as soundly as it is possible to last night and woke up at 9:00 feeling quite refreshed and ready for another day's fishing. Unfortunately it was not to be as I had to get back to Ballymaloe for the evening, but we managed to get in an hour or two of fishing in the morning and Geoffrey managed to catch another fine grilse. We had salmon for lunch and I left at about 2:30. What a great way to spend a weekend.

Day 55 - Lough Corrib

2010-06-13T20:31:00.003+01:00

I awoke, raring to go at about 6:00 this morning - looking forward to the big day. Geoffrey told me last night at supper that the river was very low because there hasn't been any rain for ages and so we planned to go fishing for brown trout on Lough Corrib instead, aiming to catch the tail end of the mayfly hatch.

Today was the first time that I got to use the fly rod that I was given for my birthday and I'm happy to say that it served me very well today. The lough was very quiet because although there were still mayfly hatching, the trout were more interested in chasing the perch fry and weren't really taking anything on the surface; I managed to catch three small brownies over the course of the day though and rose several more. Geoffrey got two and we left at about 4:00 with just the one decently sized (3/4 lb) trout which I caught and have claimed for breakfast tomorrow.

We were pretty knackered after the day out on the boat (and not a little pink as well - the sun came out in the afternoon) but after supper we felt strengthened and Geoffrey mentioned that he thought that he had seen some movement in one of the pools on the river and suggested that even though it was so low it might be worth having a cast or two before bed - you never know. On the first cast I made, I rose a salmon. Not such a bad idea at all.

In about 45 minutes we raised about 10 fish, I caught one (4 1/4 lbs) and Geoffrey caught two. They were all small grilse (young salmon) that had just moved into the river, presumably anticipating some rain to allow them to move further up.

Thus was brought to an end an extremely good day's fishing.

Day 54 - Jellied Brioche

2010-06-12T23:26:00.002+01:00

Today was an exciting day. I had several different things that I needed to do, but I didn't really care because I was going to be making brioche and I was full of anticipation for the buttery buns that I would soon be turning out of the oven and impressing all of my friends with. I spent most of yesterday promising brioches to various people in exchange for favours (I wasn't going to put them out to be eaten with the rest of lunch) and so I had something to live up to.

I started the morning, however with two slightly more urgent if not more important tasks. The first was to bake another of the brown breads that I had made the day before in order to prove to myself that I could get the recipe right like everyone else on the course. I was very careful not to make the dough too wet and I was therefore not at all pleased when I opened the oven to discover once again a rather flat loaf. I think that the problem this time was that I didn't let the dough rise enough before I put it into the oven, or possibly that I knocked it when putting it into the oven, thereby relieving it of the air inside it: I shall probably have another go in a few weeks when I've recovered form the trauma of this whole episode.

The next thing on the list was the supposed 'main' recipe of the day - a set cream rather similar to a panna cotta except for the fact that it was flavoured with cardamom. It was the first time on the course that I had got around to using gelatine, and it all came out quite well - set firm but not rubbery. I was supposed to be doing a rhubarb compote to serve with it but unfortunately I overcooked the rhubarb whilst I was washing up a bowl so instead I made it into a rhubarb fool which was quite nice too.

It was only at this point that I got around to doing the brioche and I immediately ran into a problem - someone else was also making the things and had started before me, nabbing the only set of brioche moulds. I had to make do with a muffin tin which caused a slight problem when the brioches stuck to it a bit.

The most difficult part of making a brioche is shaping it - they are supposed to have little bobbles on top which would be extremely easy to do with a normal dough. Unfortunately the amount of butter in the brioche dough means that you have to work quickly in order to stop it softening too much and becoming unworkable. Needless to say, mine ended up looking like ordinary buns rather than perfectly formed confectionaries but they tasted quite excellent. I'm looking forward to having a go at them at home - the worshipful thanks that I will receive form my family when I hand them warm brioche for breakfast will be wonderful indeed - and I am now looking out for brioche tins.

The lecture today was primarily about spring rolls and related dishes. It was very interesting - I love spring rolls - but I had to leave early. I was getting into the car and taking a long drive up to County Galway where I'm going to spend the weekend fishing for trout and salmon. Hopefully I will be catching plenty of both and by the end of the weekend I will have a photo of myself to replace the dreadful one currently representing me on my profile. I arrived at about 8:30, bearing gifts of brioche (by now getting a little bit stale but still delicious) and homemade rhubarb jam to eat with them. The combination is extremely good and we feasted upon the brioche for pudding.

Look tomorrow for posts on the day's fishing.

Day 53 - Alone

2010-06-11T07:23:00.002+01:00

My partner was away in Dublin today for an interview, so I had the work space all to myself. This has its advantages - productivity goes up because there is more space to work with and also because one doesn't have to share measuring jugs and saucepans. There are disadvantages - you don't have anyone to chat to during the morning, but the main one is that a feeling of obligation comes upon you to get as much done as is physically possible: it seems important that you get all of your absent partner's recipes done as well as your own. This was a problem for me because my morning was not exactly light anyway and I came in having prepared an order of work with about eight different recipe on it. Happily, my teacher said that I didn't have to do everything so I got on with my original plans.

The first thing on the order for the day was a basic brown yeast bread: about as simple as one could possibly get. There is no kneading and only one rising - you just mix all of the ingredients together, leave it to rise to the top of the tin and then put it in the oven. This straightforward operation turned out to be beyond me, however as I managed to turn out a rather dense, doughy bread from the oven after a very long time. Apparently I had made the dough to wet, so it hadn't been able to dry out enough in the oven before it was cooked. Quite annoying. The problem is that the dough is supposed to be sloppy - enough that you can't really pick it up, so it's actually quite difficult to gauge when it is okay. No matter - as has been noted before on this blog I am a determined individual: I will not be cowed by some bread and tomorrow I shall make it again.

Today really was something of a baking morning - I began a two day process to produce that queen amongst breads - Brioche. It really isn't as difficult as the french would like you to believe - it's nothing more than a bit of a hassle. You start by making a dough with yeast, flour, sugar and several eggs in place of water - it is simply put into a Kenwood mixer and then kneaded with the dough hook - and then, with the mixer kneading the dough slowly, you add in the butter over the course of about half an hour (you use about half butter to flour). This stage has to take a long time because the butter must be fully mixed through the dough before the next bit is added: if too much is added at once then it won't get kneaded in properly. The mixture is then left in the fridge overnight to rise. That's it. I don't know what the french think is so tricky about the whole thing. Check back tomorrow for stage two...

I had a slight disaster this morning with the supposed 'main' thing that I was to be cooking - a date tart. It is a tart with dates arranged neatly in it and then a sort of custard poured on top that sets in the oven. So far so straightforward. Unfortunately however, I was to make only half the recipe of pastry but forgot to halve the egg, so I had to make a second batch in a hurry. This time around I overcompensated for my mistake by adding barely any egg and instead increasing slightly the amount of butter: the pastry came together just fine but when it came to roll it out it was so short that it took me five tries to get it into the tin. My tart came out of the oven so late that I nearly missed lunch, but the pastry was delicious so it wasn't all bad.

Tomorrow I'm going to be making an Indian version of a panna cotta which will be good fun. I wanted to do the panna cotta, but unfortunately wasn't allocated it. Happily, it is so easy to do that I hardly need to try it now that it's been demonstrated.

Day 52 - Vegetables

2010-06-09T22:53:00.001+01:00

It is a strange fact, but apparently there are those amongst us who do not eat meat. I find this to be a strange attitude to take - meat is there in shops, packaged and ready to be eaten, so why not eat it? Sadly however, the cult of vegetablism is now very powerful and the lecture this morning was designed to arm us against the forces of social disapproval and ostracism by providing us with an arsenal of recipes that did not use meat but were quite good as well. Nearly as good as dishes that do use meat, in fact.

Please do not take me seriously - I don't really care what people eat, as long as they care: it's quite galling when people say that they aren't interested in food, given the amount of time that someone will have spent trying to make it taste good. The vegetarian dishes that we were shown how to make today had a distinctly indian flavour - probably because India has a long tradition of it and thus has come up with the good combinations of taste that western people have traditionally ignored in favour of meat. Mostly they were delicious, although I really wasn't all that keen on 'textured vegetable protein' - stuff made from soya that was used in chilli con carne - it does a passable imitation of mince, but one does notice the difference. The best vegetarian dishes were those which were supposed to be so, and hadn't been adapted in any way - we did a few bean stews, quinoa and lots of different salads which all tasted good. I would be happy to eat any of it in a restaurant, and they all have the advantage of being vegetarian (or vegan) and yet being attractive to those of us who like meat as well - a bean curry is easy to make and tasty, so it's a surefire hit.

The wine lecture this afternoon featured a man who talked about the currently small and not very good but rapidly improving Indian wine industry; he told us about it's history and we tried two wines, neither of which I liked.

We were also treated to a woman who came to talk about biodynamic and organic wines, but I ma afraid that I zoned out somewhat during his part of the lecture so I am unable to give much of a report. Apparently, biodynamics has a lot to do with the phases of the moon, the movements of the planets and homoeopathy. I'm not sure if I really believe that the reasons that were cited as explanations were actually correct, but the biodynamic wines did taste nice (to my unsophisticated palate) - there may be something in it, but I can't quite bring myself to be open-minded enough to assume that the planets have an effect on wine. No.

Day 51 - In The Deep Midwinter...

2010-06-08T20:56:00.001+01:00

It was beautifully summery today - warm, calm and bright: the sun shone down through the leaves of trees and onto the backs of hens calmly pecking their way through the grass. In the trees birds chirruped away and the Allen family dogs lounged around lazily, taking in the warmth and occasionally begging for food.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen I was making stew. It was a really rather good recipe, entitled Italian Stew and it contained beef, onions, wine and various other stewy ingredients. Unsurprisingly, it is a very straightforward recipe - little more complicated than preparing and sealing the meat, sweating the vegetables and then bunging it all in a pot with some wine and stock to simmer for a few hours.

To go with the stew I cooked a big bowl of polenta to which I added some parmesan cheese and butter - good, wholesome, filling, warming food. I was feeling quite confused at this point and decided that it would be better for my sanity if I tried not to look out of the window too much.

In a rather light day as far as work was concerned, that was it for me. Feeling rather bored, therefore, I decided to increase my general knowledge of cooking: I waylaid my teacher and smiled at her politely until she agreed to show me how to segment an orange - a job that is not at all difficult once one has got the hang of it. I was rather at a loss as to what to do with the orange segments afterwards though, so my partner and I ate them as a mid-morning snack.

I also decided to embark on a project this week of getting some practice in with bread - I am concerned that I might be falling behind. I started with a nice, easy soda bread that nothing could go wrong with, but predictably it did. Not that it was my fault: someone stole the oven that I had selected to use for my bread and so I had to heat up another. Soda breads have to go into the oven as quickly as possible in order to rise, and mine spent a good ten minutes sitting around waiting, so it was a little on the heavy side when it came out. What a pity.

My final act of the morning was to start a sourdough starter. I'm terribly excited about it, but I won't have sourdough for quite some time, so don't hold your breath.

Day 47 - Lots To Do

2010-06-07T22:10:00.002+01:00

My cooking today proves one thing above all else - the advantage of forward planning. I'm not talking about one's order of work, detailing at what time one will do x, but rather about the simple application of a moment's thought: it has been demonstrated today that the advantages concomitant to this simple act are, if not incalculable then certainly very useful. What I should have done is spend some time talking to my partner about who was going to do what dish this morning; what I actually did was spend about one minute talking to my partner about this morning. The selection of recipes that we decided that I should do were not particularly time-consuming and not especially tricky - nothing seemed to be wrong. It was only upon closer inspection of the recipes yesterday evening that I noticed a (minor) issue.

They all were going to take a long time. Not from my point of view, you understand: the preparation of them would take no longer than anything else. It was more what came after that I worried about - all of them (with the exception of the buttered zucchini) needed a long time cooking. In other words, due to the shortness of the morning, they all had to be put on to cook quite early in order to be finished on time: this presents problems given that there is really only so much that one can do in the period of time designated 'early'.

My recipes this morning included beetroot soup, apple jelly and flaky pastry. None (except for the soup) require an enormous amount of work, but by god they need an awful lot of time. I started by getting the beetroots on to cook - a simple matter of putting them on to boil, being careful to keep the skin as intact as possible to prevent them bleeding all of their colour into the water. Easy.

I followed this (working at a speed not appreciably less than the speed of sound) by starting the flaky pastry. This at least was easy, given that it is in essence an ordinary shortcrust made in a special way. Shortcrust made, I placed it and quite a large lump of butter into the fridge to cool down before its transformation and hurried off.

I then chopped up the apples for my jelly and put them into a pan to cook until they had broken down. Apple jelly is made by taking the cooked apples and putting them into a jelly bag to drip and release all of the juice. This is then turned into a jelly in a very similar manner to jam - possible because of the astronomically high levels of pectin in cooking apples. My apples (unsurprisingly) chose to take a very long time to cook and I was therefore quite behind when I finally hung them up to drip into a large bowl. They had just under an hour (the recipe says that overnight is best) to hang before they were taken down and the sugar was added to the juice; after that you're really just making jam, except that you have to remember two things - a) the amount of pectin means that it will set in minutes and will go from unset to completely set in a very short time and; b) it's supposed to be jelly - you have to let it set more than jam (it's surprising how easy it is to forget that - not that I did, of course).

The beetroot took an absolute age to cook: you know it's ready when the skin comes of in your hand when you rub it. The colour of beetroot means that as you skin and chop them your hands gradually begin to resemble those of Jack the Ripper, but I persevered despite the suspicious looks from my fellow students and made an astonishingly simple soup: you boil the beetroot and some sweated onion for 1 minute in stock and then puree the lot. It's supposed to be eaten cold so, mindful of the lack of time, I poured it out onto a baking tray and put it next to an open window in order to cool faster.

Whilst I was doing all of this, I was also (in my spare moments) turning my pastry into flaky pastry which is a huge amount of bother. Essentially you roll out the pastry (keeping it as a very accurate rectangle) and then press butter into it; you then fold and roll it so that the butter becomes incorporated into the pastry, creating layers. The process is repeated several times with refrigeration in between. Unfortunately, it is now June and it is therefore hot. Warm. Ish. And this kept melting the butter and making the whole exercise difficult. I shouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be a complete disaster when it comes to be cooked.

Despite all of this, I managed to finish just about on time, and I spent some time congratulating myself for this before I remembered that I really hadn't had anything difficult to do. Which will change with next week when I start to catch up on my bread-baking: apparently I'm getting behind.

There will be no posts for the weekend because once again it is a bank-holiday and I will be in London. The next post will be that for Tuesday. I can hardly wait.

Day 46 - Road Trip

2010-06-06T10:06:00.002+01:00

There was no cooking today. Instead we all got up early in the morning and trooped onto a bus: it was the day of the school field trip, and we were all terribly excited. Except me, because I hate coaches.

The whole idea of the day was to show us lots of different food related operations in and around Co. Cork - Darina wants us to know more about food than just how to cook it and to that end is very convenient that we actually get to meet the people producing our ingredients. We are after all, in the words of Frank Hederman (the fish smoker), just the people who put it all on a plate.

The first port of call was in fact Frank, who owns a traditional smokehouse near to Cork and produces everything from smoked salmon to smoked eggs and smoked porridge. He showed us around and told us how he smokes things and what he does to make it all taste nice - in order to smoke salmon, you hang it up in a room and then fill it with smoke. We also got to taste some of his smoked salmon (for research purposes) - it was quite mild, much milder than the stuff that you get from Loch Fyne, and it just melted in the mouth. Apparently, the mildness is due to the fact that he uses beech wood to smoke with becauseit has a much thinner smoke than oak or anything similar: in fact it was so gentle that when he opened the door to the smoker in order to show us what goes on in there, no-one coughed or even blinked.

After visiting Frank, we moved on to have a look at a farmers market just to the south of Cork. It was much bigger than the one in Middleton and it had a slightly different selection of stalls - there were many more food stalls, catering to people who didn't actually want to buy a loaf of bread but who did want something nice for their lunch outside in the Sun. The whole thing seemed like a very good operation and there were lots of people so it was doing quite well.

After this we visited a cheese maker, a baker and a hotel before returning to the school at 5:00.

Day 45 - Pass the Razor Blade

2010-06-03T22:58:00.002+01:00

Today was the day that I made a very important decision. It has become apparent to me that one of the very stupidest of things that one can do with one's time on earth is to go into the restaurant business, and I have therefore decided not to. Ever.

The theory day was devoted to the practical application of our skills in the real world, be it in a shop, a restaurant or a catering outfit. Essentially, we were given the business talk - a particularly depressing milestone. The amount of regulation, costs and general issues means that a restaurant is something best left to businessmen rather than cooks - I have to say that I could never stand to stay in the business now that I know exactly what goes into it that isn't cooking related, and by the end of the day I was feeling nearly suicidally depressed about the whole affair.

Part two of the lecture is coming in a fortnight's time... whoopee!

Day 44 - Pancakes

2010-06-02T23:10:00.002+01:00

Happily, today passed off without much to comment upon - it was actually quite boring and there were no disasters or funny stories which I could report on. Sorry. What follows is unfortunately but necessarily going to be a simple recording of events, given that I can find very little to make light of in the goings on of the day.

The first recipe of the day was to be a pork, spinach and herb terrine - a quite nice coarse meat pate which was easy to make. The only slight problem with it was the spinach; actually, there were two problems with it, and they were both spinach-related. I should explain that until very recently I was a great fan of spinach, but I learnt to hate the stuff in just under a month by being fed spinach soup or spinach pate (yes - it does exist) every night for supper: it was lovely, once. My dislike for spinach was not improved by the fact that we were not to be using annual spinach - the ordinary baby spinach that is bought in shops everywhere - but instead perpetual spinach, which is a quite different beast. It has very large leaves with thick stalks which have to be removed - a time consuming activity - and this put me somewhat behind schedule. This wasn't a problem as I have now learnt to leave large amounts of time in my daily plans to accommodate the occasional lapse in timing, but it was annoying. The second irritation was that the spinach, for reasons unknown, had to be dry when added to the terrine. Properly dry - I had to spend about ten minutes squeezing the water out of the stuff until I was satisfied that it was dry enough (read: until I gave up).

These two minor issues aside, I did eventually get the terrine into the oven where it happily sat and (perhaps unsurprisingly) took twice as long to cook as it should have.

The other main excitement of the day was pancakes - specifically a non-inflammable version of crepes suzettes. I have to say that I couldn't see the point of not having them on fire myself, but I was firmly instructed not to add any brandy to the sauce. Spoilsports. To make this supremely easy recipe, you make your pancakes, making sure to show off by flipping them, and then you leave them aside until they are needed. At the last minute, you take some orange butter (butter creamed with orange zest and icing sugar) and melt it in the pan with some orange juice. Quickly add the pancakes until they are warm and coated, fold them into quarters and then serve one or two to a plate. And then set them on fire when no one is watching.

I got my exam results back today and I am pleased to say that I passed. Hurrah for me.

Day 43 - America

2010-05-31T20:31:00.004+01:00

Today was another of my peculiar 'pleasantly disastrous' mornings: I managed to destroy quite a lot of my work (though arguably the central cause of the problems wasn't my fault) and yet managed to stay perfectly calm in the face of adversity. Except briefly, when I was confronted with a pan of blackened onions that I had been nurturing carefully for the best part of an hour.

Most of my cooking this morning was actually quite competent - I made a nice pear cake and also some hamburgers. The problems arose mainly from one incident which I shall describe in greater detail slightly further on.

I started the morning off cooking a spiced pear cake - an in theory simple endeavor. You melt butter in a big pan and then add soft brown sugar to it, giving you a thick paste; into this paste is placed slices of pear, carefully arranged in order to look pretty because the whole thing will eventually be turned out and the pears will be uppermost. The whole thing is covered with a cake batter and then baked in the oven for about an hour when it is turned out onto a plate and you have a beautiful pudding which will make absolutely everyone in attendance go 'wow', and then put on half a pound. I enjoy making cakes and I was looking forward to trying my hand at this particular one, but it took me rather longer to put together than I originally anticipated; this was in no small part due to the fact that I failed to read the recipe closely enough and therefore did not notice the sentence describing how the pears were to be arranged. In my enthusiasm, I had skipped ahead and assumed that they would be arranged in pretty, thin slices like one might find in an apple tart, or indeed atop an apple upside-down cake: it was not so. Actually, they were supposed to be cut into sixths - great big chunks which would compensate for the tendency of the pears to disintegrate when cooking. Needless to say, this oversight cost me quite some time - about 50 minutes in total. Delays aside, however, I did get it into the oven and from thence out again an hour later.

The problems arose when the cake was cooked and ready to be turned out: because I had had to use rather a large saucepan in which to cook the cake in order to get the whole thing in, I had to use a large plate. To turn out a cake you place the plate over the pan and using your tea-towel you take a firm grip of the pan underneath and the plate on top, whisper a prayer and then flip the whole thing. If done properly the plate will be on the bottom, the pan will be upside-down on top of the plate and it will be perfectly centered, allowing you to remove the pan and leave behind a beautiful cake. If, by contrast, you have a pan and a plate that are too big to be held comfortably then it is more than likely that either the plate or the pan will not make it and you will be left with a god-awful mess. I dropped the pan. What I was left with having flipped the plate was just over half a cake - the pan had migrated from dead-centre to hanging over the edge. The part of the cake which was not on the plate was on the work-top in several pieces; we did briefly consider trying to re-construct the cake and making it look pretty again, but eventually decided on an alternate, sneakier strategy. We carefully arranged it on the plate in such a way as to make it look as though people had been taking slices from it - we left a few crumbs here and there, and so-on. Here is the result:

Whilst the cake was in the oven, I had been preparing for the other main event of the day - burgers. I mixed the mince and other ingredients for the patties, and then thought to make some caramelised onions which I could put on top of the burgers to make them look prettier and taste nicer. To caramelise onions, you slice the required quantity of onion (keeping in mind that the volume reduces somewhat) and then cook them over a very low heat for about 45 minutes, at which point they will be browned and sweet. It is important to stir them regularly to avoid burning them and it is equally important not to accidentally destroy a cake and spend ten minutes faffing around trying to salvage the mess when you should be looking after your onions. 45 minutes of cooking wasted: that had me just a little bit upset.

Happily, after breaking the cake and burning the onions I managed to avoid buggering-up the burgers and was left with a relatively edible lunch - it wasn't all bad.

I hope that you are all taking note of my errors and remembering them so that you don't make the same mistakes. It isn't just for your entertainment that I'm putting all of these disasters up, thereby damaging my reputation as a competent chef: these posts are intended to be illuminating. It's a public service that I'm providing.

Day 42 - Half Way

2010-05-30T22:51:00.002+01:00

Today marks the exact half-way point of the course. This presumably makes be exactly half of a cook - a peculiarly worrying concept.

In the spirit of fun and celebration, I marked this momentous milestone by reading a book. I had a cup of tea, too.

Day 41 - Cleaning

2010-05-30T14:23:00.005+01:00

When making jam, it is usual to place the jars in a hot oven beforehand in order to sterilise them - this helps to preserve the jam which, given the amount of time spent cooking the stuff, is quite important. At the beginning of my jam making last night, therefore, I turned the oven on and put the jars into it: I thought to return to them when I was ready with the jam standing by. I made the jam. Having cooked it sufficiently I went to retrieve the jars from the oven and was, immediately I opened the oven door, engulfed in a cloud of smoke that made Eyjafjallajokull look like a big fuss about nothing. Planes over Cork were diverted for three hours until the fallout cleared. I would like to emphasise that this was the first time that I had got around to using our oven, so this whole episode was not exactly my fault. However, I nobly volunteered to clean out the whole thing this morning, vaguely thinking that it would be an hour long job which I could use to get out of doing other, less attractive forms of work like loading the dishwasher.

I'll be blunt: it took me just over three and a half hours in total to get the thing done. I had to go into town to get brillo-pads. The grime on the bottom of the oven was so bad that even with metal scourers it took me several hours to get it all off; and that was before I got onto the job of the racks. One of them was so badly caked in grease that it had nearly welded itself to the inside of the oven - I had to pull quite hard to get it out and I actually thought that it might be attached or have some release mechanism that I had to press. I am pleased to report that I stuck with it, however, and by the end of the day I managed (with some help) to return the kitchen to it's previous immaculate glory. What an achievement to be proud of.

Having done this, all there was time was have a cup of tea (or eight) and then go to bed.

Day 40 - Pizza Test

2010-05-29T22:11:00.003+01:00

Today marked the half way point of the course and therefore the day of the dreaded herb and technique exams - designed to test our progress and to provide a goal to aim for from the start. God help us.

There were two tests which had to be taken over the course of the afternoon. The first was a herb and salad exam - we had to identify various herbs and salad leaves as well as giving examples of recipes in which the herbs could be used. This sounds easy, but it is remarkable how similar different types of lettuce can look when you've only got ten minutes and you also have to come up with twenty different recipes to use for all of the herbs that I had to look at. Does anyone know a good recipe which uses savoury? No? Thought not.

The second part of the test was slightly harder - the technique exam. In this, I had to demonstrate my competence in four tasks - chopping and sweating an onion, making a paper piping bag (for cake decorating) and two which were specific to me. Those were picking a crab clean and making an omelette. Happily, this was by no means a difficult selection of tasks and the only thing that took any time at all was the crab, which I was very careful with and spent a good 20 minutes over (whilst trying not to be sick - nothing puts you off your lunch quite like picking a crab). My omelette was extremely good and I was very conscientious about getting the pan hot so the whole thing took about 9 seconds to cook: I ended up with a lovely and not-at-all leathery snack.

The morning was taken up not with cooking but with a demonstration on pizza - how to make them and what to put on them. It was all very interesting and I am pleased to say that along with the cows, chickens, pigs, wooden chopping boards and jam-making pans that we will be getting when I return home, we will also be putting in a wood-burning oven for whenever I feel like a pizza, or alternatively whenever I feel like showing off.

I spent the evening turning my souvenir-ed rhubarb into jam. This required me to borrow quite a lot of things from the cookery school, and I had spent the latter part of the afternoon quietly fetching muslin, wooden spoons and a jam funnel that no-one seemed to need very much. I did get caught by Darina whilst doing all of this, but she did not seem to mind (possibly because she had no idea of the provenance of my ingredients). I am pleased to say that the result of my enterprising use of resources was somewhat more successful than my last effort. A good thing too - I've now got pots of the stuff lying around, and if they were no good then I wouldn't know what to do with them all.

Day 39 - Rhubarb

2010-05-28T21:30:00.002+01:00

I entered the kitchens this morning with a good feeling - I'm not sure why. Maybe it was that I was relived to be doing something other than sitting down at demonstrations or maybe it was just that I was looking forward to cooking rhubarb jam - a special treat for me. My good mood lasted throughout the morning, which was in itself slightly unusual; in fact, I managed to stay in a good mood as I cheerily burned things and forgot about various recipes until the last minute - today was unfortunately not a good day for cooking.

My partner was away for the day so I had the entire workstation to myself and I was able to pick and choose the recipes that I wanted to do without using any diplomacy: I therefore planned to do a white bread, a chicken and garlic soup, a rhubarb upside-down cake/tart and rhubarb jam. Not a heavy workload at all. With time in mind I started with the one thing that was going to take the longest - the bread. Yeast breads need to be kneaded for a good length of time and then left to rise for ages in order to make them light and bread-like. This means that they have to be made and left to rise right at the beginning of the morning if you have any ambitions of completing them: even I managed this and soon my bread was happily expanding in a bowl whilst I got on with more important things.

The pudding that I made today was a rhubarb upside-down cake, made in a saute pan and it was one of the few genuinely not bad things that I managed to produce in a morning's cooking. Essentially you caramelise some sugar and then dump a whole load of chopped up rhubarb into the pan when it's ready to stop the caramel burning; you then cover the rhubarb with a sweet cake-like base and stick it in the oven for about an hour. The result is wonderful - the caramel provides sweetness, but because it is so thick it doesn't soak the rhubarb which stays quite tart and you get the contrast between the different flavours. Sweetness with tartness is a great combination (for the record - sweet and sour is, by contrast, a horrible mixture. Or maybe that's just me).

Whilst the cake was in the oven I got started on the next job of the morning - rhubarb jam. Jam is a simple thing to make - you take equal quantities of fruit and sugar and then boil it; when this is done, the pectin in the fruit reacts with the sugar and forms a jelly when cooled, preserving the fruit in a sweet, unhealthy and easily spreadable form. You have to be careful when cooking jam in order to get just the right amount of set - if it is undercooked then you end up with a liquidy glop. In fact, the only thing that you can do to jam that is more silly than undercooking it is forgetting about it because you're searching for an oven to cook your bread in, a lesson that was rather embarrassingly made obvious to me when I did just that. I turned around and looked at my jam: it wasn't actually burnt, but the sugars had started to caramelise and it had gone slightly darker; when I tested it (put a little on a plate and then put it in the fridge to cool), I ended up with a consistency approaching that of glue. My teacher said that it wasn't that bad, really, and that I could take it home and it would be perfectly nice on toast. I chucked it in the bin. I then proceeded to borrow 4lbs of rhubarb from the stores that no-one seemed to need all that much and quietly chopped it into chunks which I shall make into jam tomorrow. I'm buggered if I'm going to be defeated by a bunch of chopped up stalks and some sugar.

The final recipe on the list was a chicken and garlic soup. It was disgusting, although I would like to point out that this was in no way my fault - I just thought that it was too garlicy.

As I finished my soup, I heard a plaintive bleeping sound that had been going on for a few minutes but which had only just registered with my brain. It was the oven that I had put my bread into reminding me (in an irritatingly unobtrusive manner) that it was time to take the bread out. My teacher helpfully said that the dough had been very good and that the loaf would have been perfect if it wasn't quite so sunburnt on top - what a balm to my pride that was. I brought it back the to the cottage because apart form a slight excess of colour, it was still very good.

And that brought to an end a reasonably disastrous but inexplicably good-tempered morning. How about that.

Day 38 - Sherry

2010-05-27T18:12:00.002+01:00

This week's theory day was one of the more interesting so far: it followed the usual pattern of a talk about cheese followed by a longer lecture, then lunch and then another lecture, but we were introduced (during the morning lecture) to a subject which I had never before come across - sherry.

Of course, I did know what sherry was - a sweet liquid that comes from a bottle and goes on top of christmas pudding. It never really clicked that sherry is just wine, that mostly it isn't sweet and that it isn't much more alcoholic than any normal reds that one can buy these days. Essentially it is a fortified wine made in southern Spain around a town called Jerez (thus 'sherry) - it ranges from bone dry and relatively light (as in a Manzanilla sherry); to sweet beyond all reason, with the colour of treacle and the texture of velvet (Pedro Ximenez). The problem with it is that people don't think of it as a wine - they think of it as a spirit (God only knows why) and treat it accordingly: they leave it on the drinks tray in the cupboard for years on end and have a glass at christmas, if ever. One of the things that was pushed very hard today was the idea of sherry as a wine (a fine wine) like any other that could be drunk at a meal or with friends, not as a dreadful sweet substance which is ten years gone - and I have to say that I agree. Sherry is nice and goes well with food.

We were given a few different ones to try over the course of the morning, starting with one most likely to dispel any previous notions that we may have had about sherry - a manzanilla. This is a style of sherry which is dry, only 15% and most importantly, light - both in colour and weight. Not here the brown gloop that many think of as sherry. I have to say that I didn't really like it all that much - it has a slight yeasty, salty flavour that, as Colm put it, is like tasting olive when you were expecting grape - but what is extraordinary is that when I had it with food it made an awful lot more sense; the bone-dry character of the drink complements a light meal or tapas perfectly - fish or chicken would have been nice too.

The second wine was an Olorosso - a sherry produced in a slightly different fashion to the Manzanilla due to it's higher (17%) alcohol content. It was darker in colour and richer in flavour than the manzanilla but still dry; none of the yeast or salt, though. This one, being a bit heavier than the manzanilla could be served with a more substantial meal - think venison.

The third was a Pedro Ximenez. This is the sherry that people think of as sherry, but about 20 times. It is alcoholic (20%) and SWEET - a dessert wine than makes sauternes look wimpy and weak. It would be perfect (I think) to serve in small quantities with blue cheese, or alternatively could simply be drizzled over some vanilla ice cream as a sauce.

The final wine was an Amontillado, aged for 30 years and quite different to the others. Amontillado is a cross between a Fino (similar to manzanilla) and an olorosso, so it contains elements of both wines - it was bone dry and yet had a curious flavour and colour, similar to that of the olorosso.

And that was the end of sherry. Actually, there is one other thing that is worth mentioning - for what it is, sherry is cheap. And when I say cheap, I mean that 'ludicrously underpriced' is not sufficient to describe how cheap it is. The amontillado which we tried was a 30-year-old wine, and would be considered by those in the know as on a par with a Chateau Margaux - peculiar, given it's £19/half price tag. Seriously - that is how cheap sherry is. If sherry were popular (so we were told), that half-bottle would be considerably more, which brings me onto a top-tip of the day: buy sherry, the world's only affordable fine wine - forget about cheap plonk when you could get an incredible wine for a pittance.

The afternoon was dominated by a tapas demonstration, bringing to a conclusion our Spanish themed day.

Day 37 - Misery

2010-05-26T21:44:00.004+01:00

I have now realised that of the many stupid things that I can do on this course, volunteering to do a roast of any sort ranks quite high up on the list - they take, without exception, aeons to cook.

I started the morning off in high spirits, fully expecting my cookery to be a triumph and that I would be able to erase the bad memories of yesterday by finishing on time. I would write about 'what a fool I was', but I fear that that sentence is becoming ever so slightly cliched (a new approach is required) - I shall therefore simply state that once again my ambitions fell somewhat short of my eventual achievements.

The basic problem with doing roast anything at Ballymaloe is that for some reason they want you to do stuffing as well. Speaking as a person who fails to see the point of stuffing - just because there is a hole doesn't mean that it has to be filled - and who eats it only once in a blue moon I find this both surprising and also quite annoying. I have no idea how long stuffing takes to cook and it therefore inevitably takes longer than I timetable for, putting me behind. Today, we were cooking roast duck, a dish that I love, filled with a sort of potato stuffing which I don't: it just doesn't taste nice. The stuffing took about half an hour longer to cook than I had anticipated and thus the duck wasn't ready to go into the oven until 10:00; I placed it (once again with ceremony) inside and left to go and do the rest of the morning's jobs.

I was on lemonade duty this morning, so the next thing that I did was make the syrup - a five minute job. To this syrup (made by boiling 1lb of sugar with 1pt of water) is added the juice of lemons and oranges (normally 4 and 2 respectively) and then 4pts of water. The lemonade is actually very good and I recommend that people try it at home.

I then had two small jobs to do - preparing some rhubarb to make into jam on Thursday and weighing out some broad beans that I would cook just before serving. Then it was on to the big job of the day - dealing with a crab. I don't actually like crab very much, but we have an exam on Friday and crabs might come up, so I have to have some idea of what it is that I am doing. This took an awfully long time, and by the end I was getting worried that my duck might be overcooking: I rushed back and opened the oven. What confronted me then was not a happy sight, dear readers: a duck that was not even remotely close to being cooked at 11:30, having been in the oven for 1.5 hours. PANIC!

12:00 - I cooked the broad beans as if nothing was wrong. CALM - DON'T PANIC.

12:30 - I checked the duck again. I WILL GET TO LUNCH. DON'T PANIC, DON'T GET ANGRY.

1:00 - The duck was finally cooked. My teacher told me that I had to make gravy. RAGE BUILDING.

1:30 - I couldn't be bothered to have lunch. The broad beans were cold. ANGRY.

Day 36 - Butchery

2010-05-24T22:30:00.002+01:00

Having worked so hard to unlock the secrets of timing and urgency towards the end of last week, I was disappointed to discover this morning that I had not managed to hold onto my newfound knowledge over the weekend. Today shouldn't have been difficult: it shouldn't have taken a long time - all I had to do was make a lamb pie and a gingerbread. Once again my expectations and hopes were dashed upon the iniquitous rocks of reality: such an extraordinary surprise, that.

The morning started off well - I made the gingerbread quickly and got it into the oven. The recipe that we were given for it is possibly the best recipe that anyone has ever invented for gingerbread: light, yet moist and of course wonderfully tasty. Certainly, it is easy to make and great to eat which means that it must by definition be good, but it also tastes exactly like gingerbread should, which is to say, of ginger - a taste that surprisingly few gingerbreads manage to convey. I would recommend that you all try it, but I suspect that it would amount to violation of copyright for me to put it up on the blog. Sorry.

It was after I finished my gingerbread and placed it in the oven that the trouble began. I was (along with quite a few others) down to make a lamb pie: it was going to be lovely, and extremely simple as well. Unfortunately (and as is becoming increasingly the case at Ballymaloe), it wasn't: the lamb that we get here doesn't come in neat packets from the supermarket, nor does it come in neat packets from the butcher. Instead it comes in great big lumps - if we are to be cooking shoulder of lamb, into the larder in the morning will be placed two or three shoulders of lamb, and if any cooking is to take place then someone has to take the initiative and start to prepare them. This preparation is not of the 'cut it up into chunks variety': no - it is butchery (in a word). I was unfortunately (by which I mean, 'to my great delight') volunteered for lamb duty and therefore spent a good 40 minutes of the morning (which I freely admit that I had not timetabled for) trying to work out how the hell to extricate a shoulder-blade from a 10lb piece of meat. I am pleased to report that I did eventually manage it, but not until I was so far behind schedule that my continuing was not only pointless but quite probably stupid - I would certainly end up missing out on lunch, which is not a happy thought when you've spent the entire morning running about the place desperately searching for carrots. In the spirit of enterprise and in submission to my desperate desire for high marks, however, I persevered and by the end of the morning I had managed to finish the filling of the pie and even done the pastry. I left the whole lot in the cool room and it will be going into the oven first thing tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I will be doing a roast duck with a potato (surprise, surprise) stuffing. I and my partner will also be doing 'how to de-construct a crab' in order to prepare for the technique test on Friday. For the first time, I will also be making a seasonal jam - rhubarb and ginger. How exciting - I can hardly wait.

Day 35 - Sunday; being the Sabbath, or Day of Rest

2010-05-23T15:57:00.001+01:00

Some of the others went out to the pub last night - I had to lock the door to my room when they got back.

Still sunny...

Day 34 - Sun

2010-05-23T15:48:00.002+01:00

Today has been warm and sunny - I mean properly warm and sunny, in an 'oh-no! Global Warming!' sort of way. I personally don't see what all the fuss is about - all it seems to be meaning is a few more sunny days a year: what an extraordinarily terrible state of affairs.

All that I have done today is go briefly to the market, where I bought some apples.

This having been noted, I will now leave you.

Day 33 - Timing

2010-05-21T22:36:00.003+01:00

Today I managed, for the first time ever, to finish on time. Okay - I actually finished 20 minutes after I said that I would, but crucially I also started 20 minutes late. In other words I have discovered timing. What a triumph.

Part of the reason that I managed to pull off such a miraculous turn-around in my fortunes was because I spent most of my time desperately attempting to make up the minutes that I had lost at the beginning because I had to spend 45 minutes making chicken stock. In other words, I spent the entire morning running around in a hopeless but ultimately beneficial game of catch-up. And what a full-on morning it was: scones (for pudding); a couple of lovely cheesy gratins in coffee cups, topped with a tomato paste and put under the grill just before serving; and (most time-consumingly) a fish curry which involved dealing with an entirely new variety of fish - the monkfish (also known as a freak-of-nature-fish).

Scones (as most people know) are wonderfully easy things to make - the very epitome of last-minute cooking which can be put together in an instant in the event of an unexpected guest. Happily they proved not too difficult to do in a hurry, and I rather liked the Ballymaloe innovation of brushing the tops of them with egg-wash and then dipping them in sugar - you get a lovely sort of sugary crust on them which was fantastic. The other advantage of scones of course is that they spend so little time in the oven - mine took 12 minutes - which means that you're less likely to forget about them than you otherwise would be; 12 minutes was also the perfect length of time for clearing/washing up and then preparing the ingredients for the next dish I made, which was...

Goat's cheese gratins with tomato paste. These are just lovely - goat's cheese mixed with some chopped-up chives and seasoning, put into ramekins or coffee cups or similar and then covered with a paste made by putting sun-dried tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and seasoning into a food processor and zapping it. They have to be served blisteringly hot from under the grill, preferably with little bits of toast on the side, but their great selling point is that you can make them all ahead of time and then put them under the grill before serving, which is what I did. This aspect of them apparently makes them very popular for the end-of-course exams, and I can see why - you can just get them out of the way good and early and then get on with other recipes in the knowledge that they will be there for you when you need them.

The last and most time consuming job of the morning was a fish curry with pilaf rice. Unfortunately this was to be made with monkfish (please refer to my earlier observations on the matter of this particular creature) which was a complete mystery to me - all of it's meat is contained in the tail which must be separated from the head before anything can be done with it. You also have to remove the meat from it's cheeks and then you have to remove not only it's skin but also the tough membrane that lies between it and the flesh - it's an absolute nightmare if you haven't done it before, but looking back on it I can now see that actually it is one of the easiest fish of all to fillet - there is only one central bone in the tail - no pin-bones of ribs and no irritating bit that can trip you up. Just meat. Even so, learning how to eviscerate the thing took me a good half-hour which took up most of the time that I had managed to re-coup by being speedy with the other two dishes. Eventually, it looked like this:

Horrifying, isn't it? No matter - I pressed on and started to turn it into something edible by preparing the spices and then adding coconut milk to them which I used to poach the fish. The whole thing ended up as a quite agreeable curry. The head was saved for stock - we're very environmentally/taste-conscious here and we would never pass up the opportunity to avoid waste/make a nice stock.

After that, it was onto the pilaf and then the home-straight: grilling the gratins, buttering a scone and plating the curry. All was done by 12:00 on the dot and it was tasted by 12:07. Result.

The lecture this afternoon was based around a basic seafood theme - shellfish, carrageen moss and so-on. I look forward to cooking it all on Monday.

Day 32 - Friendship

2010-05-20T23:06:00.002+01:00

I have a feeling that if I were to return home now I would be inundated by requests from distant cousins (removed to the nth degree) and long lost school friends. The reason? I am now able to make chocolate eclairs - those wonderful bastions of unhealthy, artery-clogging goodness. There are many people who say that they don't like eclairs - they are lying: if they were to be offered one they might refuse, but five minutes later they would take it anyway. And then another because one really isn't enough, and in any case you won't really notice that you're eating them at all until you've had four or five. Mine were not at all what you would find in a shop - I like small eclairs rather than hot-dog sized monstrosities and so I tried not to make them too large: I ended up with a tray of knobbly, misshapen dwarf puff-thingys. They were also in the oven for perhaps 30 seconds too long. But the Chantilly cream went inside them and the soft chocolate icing went on top of them and they were transformed into veritable bite-sized delights. They were fresh and so not at all soggy, they were ugly and so verifiably hand-made, they were small and so disarmingly inviting in a way that the giant sausage things sold in Greggs can never be: they were above all delicious examples of all that makes bakery so great and worthy an art. Admittedly they're fiddly to make; and admittedly they have a shelf life measured in hours; and admittedly they are horrifically 'bad' for one; but overall we cannot ignore the fundamental fact of the matter which is that I made chocolate eclairs and that -though rubbish by Ballymaloe standards they may have been - had you been offered one you would have eaten three. At least.

The other momentous event of the day was the filleting of a flat fish - a job that is a great deal easier than filleting s round fish. I feel rather sorry for flat fish in that nature has dealt them what can only be described as a poor hand - they are specifically designed (as far as I can make out) for humans to eat. 'How do I know this?' you ask: they have a line running down their flank from head to tail that marks the exact divide between the fillets and hence the exact place to cut. In fact not only is it a clear line, it is also a dotted line - to fillet a flat fish you simply cut along the dotted line. It's like one of those craft books that I had when I was about seven (albeit ever so slightly more slimy and - well - dead).

Having filleted successfully my first flat fish I proceeded to skin the fillets and then cut them into goujons which I deep-fried and served with some home-made aioli and salsa. Apart from a slight hiccough with the aioli (it may have split slightly) the dish was a success - which is to say that I declared it to be so. I then ambled off to lunch. Late, again. I shall definitely finish on time tomorrow.

I shall be cooking a fish curry tomorrow, which is exciting in itself because I will be working with monkfish - a fish that is neither round nor flat. A fish in fact best described as a freak: if you don't know what I am talking about, google monkfish and you'll see what I mean.

Until tomorrow.

Day 31 - Sitting

2010-05-19T21:57:00.003+01:00

Today marks the passing of one month at the cooking school, a third (roughly) of the course. I suppose that that makes me a third (roughly) of a chef, although I have to say that I'm not so sure on that score.

Today was also yet another of the delightful and engaging theory days which once again entailed a desperate race for the last of the comfy chairs - a race which I am pleased to say was not unsuccessful and which left me with a functioning back at the end of the day. Whoever said that getting up ten minutes earlier wasn't good for you?

The lectures that we watched today were multitudinous and varied in their composition and started off with the now traditional demonstration of biscuit recipes and the introduction of some cheeses. Today saw us being shown how to make chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter cookies - both of which are very easy. The cheeses where all Fermoy cheeses: three small-production irish farmhouse cheeses.

The next lecture was rather more substantial - menu planning. The art of menu planning is just that - an art: it requires careful thought and the taking into account of so many different factors that your head practically explodes just at the thought of it all. For a start, you have to be aware of simple things like repetition of ingredients or cooking styles - you don't want to be serving grilled smoked mackerel followed by steak followed by apple fritters: everything is fried or grilled. Equally you don't want to be serving a quiche followed by creme brulee - too many eggs; nor do you want there to be repetition of vegetables like broccoli or peas. On top af that are more complex considerations such as the likely tastes of your customers (not everyone likes offal); the seasonality of various ingredients (it is fairly obvious that wild garlic soup is just not going to work in the winter); the appearance of the food on the plate (chicken with cream and rice is awfully white); the balance of the meal; and whether the weather will affect the meal (people eat less during the summer). The whole thing is a minefield of pitfalls, banana skins and concealed garden-rakes that would make Tom and Jerry proud. The whole thing is then complicated further by the fairly obvious necessity of food costing: that charming process whereby you ensure that you stay in business; as Darina succinctly put it: 'profit is not a dirty word'. The basic formula for working out the cost of a dish is to take the cost of the basic ingredients and multiply it by 3 (or 4 if it is quite a fancy dish) - this is quite important because if your food-costs creep above 30% of the profit then you will be out of business fairly rapidly. This is obviously only a guide because with something like a green soup your costs might be as low as 20p, but you wouldn't want to sell a bowl for less than £1 - intelligence (or at least thought) is required. That said, I think that with practice it is a process that would become extremely easy and Darina did mention that Myrtle Allen never spent time costing out the menus at Ballymaloe House - they just worked and that was enough.

The afternoon also featured a veritable glut of lectures - the first one being on organic parmesan cheese and how best to source food if you are running a shop.

The main lecture of the afternoon was on spices - the different varieties, their tastes, smells and uses. The man who spoke to us was very keen to emphasise the fact that spices should be seen not as some exotic ingredient to be used only when cooking a curry, but rather as seasoning - used alongside salt and pepper to round out the flavours of a dish and to complete the whole experience. I have to admit that I had never really thought of them in this way before - previously they have just been ingredients to be put into a recipe, but I have to say that the idea of having them as flavour enhancers next to salt is actually quite obvious once it is pointed out to one. We were taken through all of the different spices: the way they were produced, what they are used for and so-on. Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world, followed by vanilla and then cardamom pods: all three of these have long, drawn-out production methods and they are all labour intensive to harvest which contributes to the sky-high prices. You should also always buy whole rather than ground spices as they last at least twice as long; obviously this requires an investment into a pestle and mortar, but it's worth it in terms of flavour and keeping quality. Also, with the more expensive spices like cardamom, if you buy them ground there is a chance that they will be adulterated with something else in order to take advantage of the high prices.

The last item on the agenda was a short (understandably) lecture on freezing things. It was very interesting.

Day 30 - Breakfast

2010-05-18T22:12:00.003+01:00

I am pleased to announce that I can now make marmalade and that hopefully I will never have to again, at least with kumquats. Kumquats surely rank among nature's stupidest of inventions, along with rabbits (also known as 'lunch'), and Piers Morgan: what they are is irritatingly small fruits which are mostly full of seeds rather than flesh, flesh which I should point out is bitter and quite nasty. To make marmalade from them, you have to slice them thinly and no seeds are to be allowed into the pot: great. For every miniscule fruit that you have to individually slice, there are about six pips which have to be carefully extracted with the tip of a knife - the 18oz of fruit that I sliced today took me just over an hour. After the excruciating boredom of preparing the damned things, they have to be simmered for about 30-45 minutes until they are soft and the water has reduced by a half; only then are you allowed to add the sugar which has to be boiled for at least 15 minutes for the whole thing to set. Basically it is a complete nightmare that takes an age and really doesn't fit into a hectic morning's cooking, especially when you are trying to prepare a cooked breakfast (which I was). At least I have a jar of marmalade now which is downstairs in the kitchen and will hopefully get eaten.

The other main thing that I had to do today was muffins, specifically a rather nasty version of bran muffins. Actually, I say nasty but everyone else seemed to think that they were delicious: I never liked muffins anyway. My choice of muffins as a recipe to cook sits extremely comfortably with my already noted and commented upon habit of choosing recipes which take an awful lot of preparation before they can go near an oven: these (obviously) had to be put in the little paper muffin cups - a job which takes an absolute age, particularly as half of the time the muffin cups rolled over in the tin when I tried to fill them which meant that I had to take them out, clean the tin and put a new cup in its place. I persevered however, and I managed to force myself to make four dozen mini-muffins which I cooked and put in a basket where they looked quite nice, even if they didn't (I thought) taste all that great. I kept the rest of the mixture and brought it back to the cottage where I shall make the rest of it into muffins just as soon as I can be bothered.

The final thing on the menu today was the cooked Irish Breakfast - eggs (fried, sunny side up), bacon (back and streaky), sausages, black pudding, white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, kidneys and potato bread (also known as fadge). My partner and I worked together on the breakfast because we were a little behind time, what with the ridiculous hour and a half spent on marmalade, and had the whole thing together in double quick time. I am pleased to say that unlike the rest of my fiascos, this breakfast a) tasted good and, b) was ready on time. What a turn-up for the books that was.

Day 29 - Masochism

2010-05-17T21:13:00.002+01:00

I have decided not to open this post with a hello - I am tired of them. From now on, please just imagine that there is a cheery hello at the beginning of every post.

My capacity for stupidity continues to amaze me - I, an avowed opponent of all things to do with creaming butter, once again found myself creaming butter: an activity that was entirely pointless given that we are now permitted to use Kenwood mixers to do it instead. It turns out that once we know how to do something by hand we are allowed to graduate to cheating by using machines; Darina does insist that there is a definite difference between a cake baked using hand-creamed butter and one that used a Kenwood, but I have to say that I'm not convinced. The silent curses that I roared upon finding out that I had incapacitated my right arm for nothing really weren't any sort of consolation and my internal rage was not helped by my noticing the sentence in the recipe: 'no need to over-cream', words which had hitherto failed to present themselves to me and which nearly induced a mental breakdown. What I had done was cream the butter until it was soft and fluffy, as I would have done for a cake. Unfortunately I wasn't cooking a cake: I was making a sweet pastry which - because of my judicious creaming - was now about as soft and unworkable as a cake mix. Into the fridge it went. Out of the fridge it came. Into the freezer it went. Out of the freezer it came. Into the giant freezer it went. Out of the giant freezer it came, giving me about a five-minute window of firmness before the butter once again softened and the pastry became unworkable. I quickly lined the tart-tin with it and put in the filling of chopped up apples; sealing the lid, I put it straight into the oven from where hopefully a reasonably good tart would emerge. I am pleased to announce that, provided that you don't mind a not very attractive tart (the pastry was so wet that the lid shrank away from the sides leaving a small gap in places) it was a success, which is to say that it tasted like an apple tart should taste. I would provide you with a phot, but I forgot to take any.

As I tried to mitigate the disaster of my pastry I was also attempting yet another bread: when I was making the spotted dog (fruit bread) last week I noticed a variation called stripey cat, which is essentially similar except for the fact that the raisins are replaced with chocolate. Who could resist trying that? I can report that a) it went well - I'm getting better at bread-making; and b) that the recipe needs some sugar - the bread recipe is exactly the same as a normal bread and given that I was using dark chocolate I really felt that the bread needed to be a bit sweeter.

The third thing that I made for the first time today was a green soup - that great standby of the culinary world. Surprisingly, given the amount of time that people can spend going on about it, it really isn't all that difficult to make a delicious soup that you can be proud of. The secret is concentration right at the end of cooking: because the greens are added only right at the end and are cooked for just a few minutes you have to be careful that they don't get over-done. If they are cooked for even two minutes too long then the whole thing turns into a horrible grey-green sludge. When the whole thing is cooked then it has to be blended to make a lovely smooth green soup - except that mine, predictably, didn't: the bits of wild garlic leaves stubbornly refused to be blended and I was left with a lovely, but every so slightly bitty soup. Never mind.

The lecture this afternoon was on breakfast - how to cook it and how to make it look lovely on a plate. Confusingly, the cooking of a breakfast managed to take just under four hours - so much for a quick meal.

Day 28 - Sunday (again)

2010-05-16T18:32:00.000+01:00

Please see previous posts on the matter for details.

Day 27 - Birthday

2010-05-16T15:12:00.002+01:00

Hello

Today was, all-in-all, quite pleasant: there was very little in the way of activity or for that matter anything at all. The highlight (which is to say, the only light) of the day was going for a pizza for lunch - there is a pizza restaurant run on saturday afternoons by the school in one of the dining rooms. Before lunch I opened my birthday present which was a fishing rod - an extremely good one which I am looking forward to using - and accompanying reel. The whole day was rounded off with a barbecue which may go down in the annals as one of the most inexpertly done meals ever cobbled together by man. We lit the barbecue at 5:00 and it still wasn't hot by 7:30. It was at this point that I helpfully enquired as to why exactly David and Tom had a) chosen to use coal on the barbecue and, b) why, when there were several people on the course from Australia and South Africa, they had chosen to attempt the barbecue themselves rather than get someone who knows what they're doing to help. Eventually Tom quietly turned on the grill in the house and cooked some burgers on that to tide us over until the coals got a bit warmer.

Not my worst birthday by far, I think.

Bye

Day 26 - Gluten Free Sunday Lunch

2010-05-14T22:45:00.003+01:00

Hello

Theory day #4 - and what a fun day it was too. My prime excitement of the day was managing to get one of the few comfy seats in the demonstration room before they were all taken. This may not sound like much but trust me: it is just about the most important thing to do in the afternoon as it can make the difference between surviving the three hours in the demo and spending the last hour in agony. As you can imagine, this becomes doubly important when you're going to be sitting for not three hours, but seven. As usual, the day was essentially divided into two unconnected demonstrations: the first, in the morning, was taken by Rory and focussed on roast beef; the second (afternoon) lecture was all to do with gluten-free cooking for coeliacs.

I have to say that the roast beef lecture was extremely interesting. Be honest: how many times have you accidentally ruined a piece of meat by overcooking it? and how many times have you roasted a piece of meat that should have been stewed or slow-cooked? Rory showed us how to make yorkshire puddings (easy), horseradish sauce (easy) and roast parsnips to go with the beef (also easy). As well as the roast lunch, he showed us how to make marmalade and also how to make hummus, cassoulet, beef stew, pesto and anchoiade - the morning was essentially similar to any ordinary afternoon lecture.

The afternoon lecture was a little different, but very relevant and interesting: how to cook for coeliacs - people who can't eat gluten. Obviously, we were shown how to make gluten free breads and pastries and similar, but it was much more complicated than just that. Coeliacs can't consume any gluten at all - if they do then their intestines become inflamed and they suffer dreadful cramps and nausea for a few days - so cooking gluten free food has to take into account the fact that the work-surfaces might have traces of flour on them (containing gluten) and will therefore contaminate any food that you make on them. All of the utensils have to be spotlessly clean and you have to be sure that all of the ingredients that you are using are completely gluten-free; if, for example, the rice flour that you are going to be using was scooped out of the bag with the same scoop that you use for ordinary flour then it has been contaminated and can't be used. You even have to keep gluten free and ordinary breads separate so that they don't become contaminated. It's all very complex and would be a huge challenge in the kitchen of a restaurant unless you take it very seriously indeed.

The day was rounded off with a birthday cake which the teachers at the school cooked for me. It was delicious and looked incredible, which is a pity given that it really didn't last very long - I always feel sorry for the people decorating cakes beautifully when their work is just going to be massacred half an hour later.

Bye

Day 25 - Busy

2010-05-14T13:27:00.004+01:00

Hello

I didn't mean today to be a busy day - looking at my order of work, you would see that I had planned to do only an Irish stew and 'spotted dog', a bread with raisins in it. How then, it is to be wondered, did I manage to end up doing quite so much and how on Earth did I manage to nevertheless finish before most other people in the kitchen? The problem was that my partner was ill - I had factored into my plans the assumption that she would also wish to cook something and had therefore not included potatoes, fruit fools or indeed potting of shrimps in my order of work; when she didn't appear I was not unduly concerned except in the sense that there might be a shortage of potted shrimps on the table at lunch, which is to say that I really wasn't bothered. I started (determinedly) on my stew, cutting the meat, chopping the carrots and peeling the onions before carefully browning them each in turn; the whole lot then went into a Le Crueset casserole dish and into the oven. The bread was quite simple - just another soda bread really, so that went into the oven pretty quickly too. By 10:30 I decided that I really needed something else to do whilst the stew was cooking and so started to cook some prawns. Then I discovered that I had to do the potatoes because I was one of only a few doing them and there wouldn't be anough if I didn't do them. 'Not to worry', I thought - potatoes don't really take very much time anyway. My potted prawns went very well (except they took an awfully long time to set) and I happen to think that they were a triumph. Unfortunately whilst I was potting prawns I forgot that I had to add a few potatoes to my stew as well as the ones that I was boiling which meant that my stew wasn't done until quite late in the day - whoops. My bread (with raisins in it) tasted very nice and I have brought it back to the cottage rather than put it out on the lunch tables on the grounds that it really wouldn't go very well with stew anyway. Despite the fact that I did so many different things I managed (God only knows how) to finish with time to spare and I am pleased to say that I got high marks in all of my dishes which I was very pleased about.

The lecture this afternoon was a little shorter than yesterday's: it was given by Rachel and focussed mainly on green soups and a bacon dish. We were shown how to make a watercress soup, a nettle soup and a spinach soup as well as some boiled bacon chops which were served with a mixture of mashed potatoes and scallions called champ. Pudding was a rhubarb tart.

There was also a lecture given today by the manager of Blues Agency which provides cooks for things like corporate lunches and parties. She told us a bit about the different work that we could get through an agency and how being a professional chef works in practice. It was all very interesting and I am now much better informed about the whole subject.

Bye

Day 24 - Meat Paste

2010-05-12T21:35:00.002+01:00

Hello

I think that today I have finally managed to work out exactly what it is that I'm not to keen on in pates - it took making one to help me see the truth. Pates are something that I've never really managed to like: they're too rich and the texture is not exactly appetising and I now know why. Pates are 50% butter. At least. I'm not joking - when you put a lovely smear of pate on some bread what you are essentially doing is eating an unhealthy amount of butter; no wonder they taste so rich and... buttery. The pate that I made today was made with chicken livers, and it was quite good - you gently fry the livers in a pan with some garlic and thyme, add a few tablespoons of brandy and allow it to flame; then you let it cool, whiz it up in a food processor, add the butter and whiz again until smooth. It takes half an hour, plus a little extra time for the livers to cool. What could be simpler? Given the ease of this recipe and the inevitable amazement of your friends when you tell them that you made it yourself, this really is one recipe that I think that you should all have a go at; it's a lot cheaper than buying pate, too - chicken livers are not exactly dear.

The other recipe that I had a go at today was the one that I was really excited about: one of the greatest puddings ever invented - lemon meringue pie. And what a lot of bother it was: because the filling is so wet the pastry has to be completely cooked before anything can go into it and not entirely surprisingly it took an age to be ready. This wasn't too bad though because it gave me plenty of time to make the lemon curd - something that I've never done before. I am pleased to say that it did not scramble or curdle or indeed do anything other than that which it was supposed to do. The only thing left to do after that was the meringue: the only thing that I have to say about that is that it is going on the curriculum of my gym. The assembled article went into the oven for a few minutes to brown the top and then it was done. I was complimented on my nicely arranged meringue, which made me very happy.

The demonstration this afternoon continued with the theme of pate, this time with fish: there was a salmon pate, a crab pate (including instructions on how to open crabs), a smoked mackerel pate and of course potted shrimps. Rory made them into a sort of layered terrine of fish which looked very impressive and would be right at home on a summer buffet table (provided it could be kept cool). The other main thing this afternoon was stew - what else but irish stew (Ballymaloe style, obviously) which I will be cooking tomorrow and which I am looking forward to.

Bye

Day 23 - Crying

2010-05-11T20:12:00.002+01:00

Hello

I think that I am beginning to settle into a fairly recognisable and simple to follow pattern of behaviour when it comes to choosing what recipes I want to attempt of a morning - every single thing that I do seems to require at the very least an hour of chopping, slicing, dicing and general mucking about with knives before I can even get started. Take today for instance: I had only two things on my list for the day - brown bread and French Onion Soup. 'No problem', I thought: 'a nice relaxing morning', I assumed. Ohhh no. Not for the first time I failed to anticipate the time involved in thinly slicing 3 pounds of onions, all of which had to be cleaned before use - it took me just over an hour before I could finally get the damned things into the pot where they sat stubbornly taking their sweet time over caramelising and generally refusing to play ball. Once again I chose the recipe which was easy but would take all morning and make me late for lunch: what a suprise. French onion soup is a very simple recipe and if you have the time then it can be lovely - all you need to do is caramelise the onions until they are extremely dark and then add chicken stock; it tastes great, but by god does it take a while - at least two and a half hours. The slicing of the onions also allowed me to perform an experiment with my knives: I brought with me two different chef's knives - an 8" and a 10" and I wanted to know which one was more useful in general. I am pleased to say that I have a conclusive but perhaps surprising result - the larger knife is not only easier to handle and chop with, it is more delicate and better suited to fine work than it's slightly smaller brother. How about that.

Today was also my first foray into the world of baking bread with yeast (at Ballymaloe, anyway - I bake quite a lot of bread at home) and I was started off with the most simple of loaves that could be conceived - one rising, no kneading and straight into the oven. The only thing that you have to watch out for is the yeast: all of the yeast here is fresh and you have to 'activate' it before you put it into the bread. This means putting it in warm water with the sugar (in this case treacle) in order for it to start producing gas. Fresh yeast only keeps for a week in the fridge so you might be forgiven for thinking that it isn't worth using it at home, but you would be wrong: you get a much better, less yeasty loaf if you use the fresh stuff and most importantly it freezes perfectly so you can keep it for much longer than a week.

This afternoon's lecture contained much to be excited about: Darina showed us how to knead bread and gave us the recipe for white bread (which has to be kneaded). She also gave us the recipe for a simple sourdough loaf and showed us how to make a sourdough starter; hopefully I'll be able to do that quite soon as I'd love to have a go at it. We were shown how to make a few different types of baked fish as well as how to pan grill them. Then came the interesting recipes - chicken liver pate (which I will be making tomorrow) and - joy of joys - lemon meringue pie which is possibly the greatest dessert ever in the history of everything. Naturally I shall be making both of these tomorrow (there was some argument with my partner over who would get the pie - I won because she got to do the chocolate cake today) and I am looking forward to them immensely - when making the pate I have to add brandy and then flame it off which will be very exciting. Not that I'm being at all immature about that.

I am pleased to say that the response to my gym idea has been overwhelmingly positive and I am now looking for investors.

Bye

Day 22 - Creaming

2010-05-10T19:59:00.005+01:00

Hello

Today I made a cake (amongst other things - I'm not that lazy) and as I stood there, bowl in hand, I had an epiphany, a flash of genius. In short I was visited by that rarest of gifts - inspiration. But let us not get too far ahead of ourselves - first I must explain how this particular vision of glory came to me. The cake I was making was a sponge cake (which is deceptively difficult to master) and it was to be made by the 'creaming method' which is to say that in order to give it lightness the butter and sugar must be beaten vigourously, or 'creamed'; this is quite simply agonisingly painful - you just have to stand with wooden spoon in hand stirring, beating and cursing the butter until it is lighter in both colour and texture or alternatively (and more probably) your arm gives out and you have to take a rest. It was this exhaustion of my arm that set me thinking: whilst I waited for it to recover I reflected (with relief) that by the end of the course my arm would be stronger and I wouldn't have to stop at regular intervals. This led on to the obvious observation that given that creaming butter would strengthen one's arms it really ought to be offered in gyms as an alternative form of muscle-building activity. It was at this point that I saw the light - the Cake-Bake Gym(tm): Fitness Through Cake. Not here the sweat-drenched bench-press, treadmill and cycling machine - instead work-tops and bowls; not here the smiling trainers who cheerfully add another 2mph to the speed of the treadmill - instead a carefully selected crack squad of little old ladies trained in the dark arts of cake baking. This will be the place where grown men are reduced to tears by the words 'that's not quite there yet, dear: I should give it another five minutes creaming if I were you', or 'I'm afraid that's curdled, dear: you'll just have to start again. Never mind'. And at the end of every exhausting session a cake as a reward to take home and the glowing sense of satisfaction of a job well done whenever a colleague compliments you on the deliciousness of your work (not here the vulgar aims of impressively large biceps) - unless of course you fail to produce something worthy of consumption, in which case you will have to endure the humiliation of a cup of tea and gentle commiserations from one of the ladies. This gym is the future, and as soon as I leave Ballymaloe (and eventually university) I shall be at the very forefront of the cake-diet revolution (weight-loss foods to include butter and flour): I shall make millions and will be held up as an example to all aspiring entrepreneurs everywhere. How could I possibly fail?

In other news, I also made redcurrant sauce today which was peculiar because I couldn't work out what it was supposed to go with - the main course was roast chicken. That said it wasn't at all difficult and can easily be made from frozen berries in ten minutes: it's a useful thing to know how to cook. The last thing that I made today (and the one that gave me the most grief) was the caesar salad: a salad of cos lettuce, croutons and caesar dressing. Rather embarrassingly, most of my problems stemmed not from my lack of experience or even uselessness - they were simply stupidity, to wit, obeying instructions to halve the recipe but only remembering to halve the amounts of certain ingredients. Thus I carefully and slowly added twice the amount of oil to the egg-yolk as the yolk could hold: what a suprise that it split spectacularly. Happily this gave me the perfect opportunity to try out the method for recovering curdled sauces - you get another egg-yolk and add the curdled mixture to it slowly, whipping all the time, just like adding the oil to the egg the first time around. The end result was that I made the whole recipe rather than half and brought some back with me to the cottage in a jam jar. As Darina says - 'there are no mistakes, only opportunities to learn'; or maybe that's just wishful thinking. In any case, I fixed the problem and managed to serve everything on time which I was pretty pleased with: it tasted okay, too. I am delighted to say that I remembered my camera today, so here are a few pictures.

The lecture this afternoon was rather peculiarly split into two quite distinct halves - the ordinary one that we were expecting, given by Darina; and a cake-decorating lecture given by one of the teachers whose name is Pam and who is insanely good at cakes and showed us how to make beautiful (and expensive) items which could be sold at a tea shop - chocolate cake which actually tasted nice (she puts a little ground almond in in order to make it moister), lemon cake (with lemon curd, or course) and coffee cake (made not with real coffee but with Camp Coffee from a bottle). Peculiarly, Darina's lecture - like the famous pudding - lacked a theme. We were given the recipes for french onion soup, a mexican dish called chilaquiles, a thai chicken salad and chicken filo parcels. Needless to say it all tasted delicious and I shall be making the french onion soup tomorrow which will no doubt be a disaster.

We also had another wine lecture this evening, this time on wines from South Africa. Colm also brought along two chardonnays from Burgundy - a chablis and a chateau de beaune - in order to demonstrate to us just how different two wines made from the same grape can be. I am ever so slightly ashamed to admit that I really thought that the difference was so minute as to be insignificant: I had to concentrate to taste anything between them. I'm not sure that this wine course is going to come to much if I can't even taste that.

Bye

Day 21 - Sunday

2010-05-10T19:55:00.000+01:00

Zzzzzzz...

Day 20 - The Market

2010-05-08T22:43:00.002+01:00

Hello

Today, being a Saturday went unsurprisingly slowly - a good thing given that pretty much everyone was knackered after another week of cooking. It's nice to have a break.

I visited the local market today with a couple of the other students from my cottage - it was the first ever farmer's market in Ireland and was started by our very own Darina Allen. The school has a stall there which the student's help out with on a rota basis - I think that I'm going some time in June. I bought some cheese and a bottle of cordial which I think is very nice.

The rest of the day was spent doing not a huge amount - I attempted to read the latest Dan Brown novel but gave up after about fifty pages. On discussion with some of the other students, it appears that page 50 is a pretty common place to give in and stop reading. I wonder why.

We were going to go to a movie this afternoon but it was gloriously sunny so no-one actually felt like it when the time came to leave. The trip has been postponed to midweek.

Bye

Day 19 - Butterscotch Omelettes

2010-05-07T22:32:00.002+01:00

Hello

I'm not sure how best to summarise the goings on of the day - on the one hand nothing went disastrously badly and everything that I attempted seemed to turn out (to within an acceptable degree of error) basically correct. On the other, and for reasons that I am truly unable to fathom I finished cooking and went for lunch fully an hour after I should have done so. 'What could possibly have caused such a delay?' I have asked myself countless times (to no avail); however, with the narrative help of my blog, I think that I may be able to begin to piece the story together in simple and easy-to-understand terms.

The morning started off in normal fashion with the weighing of ingredients and the preparation of the work-area; it continued in normal fashion with the baking of a loaf of bread which went into and came out of the oven at the right times. Having put the bread in, I moved my focus on to the cooking of a tomato fondue which is where I first started to fall behind - skinning frozen (fresh ones are not in abundance) tomatoes is fiddly and boring, but most importantly it is time-consuming and by the time I had got my fondue in the pot and on the hob to cook I was fifteen minutes behind schedule - hardly worrying since I had removed the making of pesto from my plans. However, the next item on my agenda was a selection of petits fours made from marzipan sandwiched between walnuts and - horror of horrors - the marzipan that my partner had made was stubbornly refusing to cool down and set fast enough. So I waited. Finally it was ready and so I put the walnuts together and started to make the caramel that was to cover them. I truly believe that it was that caramel that was my downfall - I burnt it. The second batch of caramel went much better than the first and I used it to coat my petits fours and I then found myself with a dilemma: it was approaching eleven o'clock because of all of the delays, but that still seemed too early to start making omelettes, I also had some caramel left over and therein were sown the seeds of my destruction - the teacher suggested that I make it into butterscotch (she was busy supervising the omelette making - it didn't occur to me that given the fact that she was going around one at a time I should do the omelette sooner rather than later). Butterscotch is easy to make from caramel - stir into it a little water, butter, a tablespoon of cream and a dessertspoon of golden syrup and stir. By 11:30 the butterscotch was finished and I was ready to move on - just half an hour to go until lunch, but I consoled myself with the thought that omelettes are fast-cooking. Then disaster struck - I couldn't find the smoked haddock for my Omelette Arnold Bennett! Then someone helpfully cleared the butter away, so I couldn't find that either! The story of my final half-hour's cooking could have been turned into a farce: by the time I started my omelette arnold bennett (OAB from now on) it was nearly 12:00 and I realised that given that I was going to be using the same pan for my french omelette, I would have to wait for the OAB to finish cooking and be served and before it could be served it had to be marked by a teacher who seemed busy and who I felt it would be rude to disturb. The whole thing got quite ridiculous and by the time everything had been tasted and marked and the section cleared it was 1:00. I am very determined that this shall not happen again. On a positive note though, most of what I cooked went quite well (when I got around to cooking it) - the OAB tasted lovely (although in the rush it got left under the grill for perhaps ten seconds longer than it should have done and was no longer 'golden') as did the butterscotch, petits fours just had to be arranged prettily and the tomato fondue (which is essentially similar to the tomato sauce that is used on pizzas) turned out fine, so it wasn't all bad.

The lecture this afternoon was given by Rachel Allen and returned to the subject of chicken - this time roasted. There was also a short lecture on the subject of game birds and how to prepare them for the table: unfortunately, because they aren't in season we aren't going to be cooking any but it was very interesting nonetheless. The chicken was roasted with a herb-and-onion stuffing and Rachel cooked celery in cream and mashed swedes to go with it on the side (mashed swede is much nicer than mashed parsnip - please take note). There was also bread sauce, cranberry sauce and redcurrant sauce to go with various different things and, for pudding, a summer pudding (made just with blackcurrants) which is surprisingly easy to make. The starter was that great standby - caesar salad and Rachel also showed us how to make a sponge cake with a kumquat compote (try saying that fast) in the centre rather than boring old strawberry jam. It all looked delicious and I'm looking forward to cooking it myself (and staying within the time limits).

Just a note on today's recipes - I mentioned yesterday a recipe for baked apples stuffed with marzipan which sounded lovely: having tried it, I'm not convinced and I still think that brandy-soaked raisins is the way to go on the subject of baked apples. Rather amusingly (or worryingly, depending on your point of view) I was compared to Keith Floyd for advancing the hypothesis that brandy improves the flavour of raisins - I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

Bye

Day 18 - Chopping

2010-05-06T17:20:00.000+01:00

Hello

Today started off so full of hope, of expectation and of anticipation of the delicious chutney that I would be making: how naive I was. What I had not fully realised was the enormity of the task that lay ahead - I spent fully a third of the morning engaged in peeling, chopping, skinning, crushing and mixing in order to produce a glop which smelt strongly of cleaning fluid. It was then placed (with ceremony) on the hob and had to be stirred occasionally to stop it sticking to the pan. I had sort of expected making chutney to be simple, like jam-making with vinegar: what a fool I am, and how much wiser now. That said, I am now much better at chopping and I have a (hopefully) lovely jar of chutney which will be ready to eat in a month or so, so it wasn't all bad.

In the minutes that I could spare in between chopping and stirring, I made another truly momentous thing: home-made mayonnaise. No Helman's is used here! What really suprised me was how easy and quick it was to make - it certainly takes less time than putting on your coat and going down to the shops to buy a bottle of ready-made stuff: all you really need is two egg yolks, a spoonful of vinegar and another of mustard and a pinch of salt which you mix up and then gradually add 8fl.oz. of oil (cheap sunflower oil is absolutely fine) whisking all the time. Literally at the end of five minutes you are left with a lovely bowl of mayo which can then be used in sandwiches, with food or simply to show off: I encourage everyone who reads this blog to have a go at it. One caveat though: it's supposed to be a light yellow colour, not white. If its white you've made a mistake - put the jar back.

The mayonnaise was made to go with some lovely Dublin Bay Prawns which I spent a great deal of time trying and failing to get to look pretty on the plate and for pudding I sliced some mango into a lime-flavoured syrup which tasted lovely. All in all it was a very successful morning with perhaps just one exception - glazed carrots (take two). I am pleased to report that they were not (as yesterday) burnt; I am less pleased to report that they were instead overcooked. I am determined to get them right though so keep an eye out for future reports.

The lecture this afternoon was, as usual, riveting. Once again Rory was in charge and the general theme of the afternoon was omelettes - how to make them (including how not to end up with brown shoe-leather) and various fillings which can be put inside them. Also included were fritatas and an Omelette Arnold Bennett which is more of an egg-souffle thing really. I'm going to be making a lot of omelettes tomorrow (most of which will no-doubt be disastrous) as well as some caramelised walnuts. To make those I'm going to be using the other important thing that we were shown how to make today - marzipan. Unfortunately my partner wants to do that so I'm going to wait for another day to make my own: the marzipan will be used as the filling for a baked apple that Rory showed us how to make. Along with all of these delicious things, Rory also made a mushroom soup during the demonstration which we will be having for lunch tomorrow. I can't wait.

Bye

P.S. It's the general election today - I would like to say that the level of processed foods in shops is appalling and I have heard nothing from any of the political parties about it. How shameful.

Day 17 - Tea and Cakes

2010-05-05T21:46:00.000+01:00

Hello

This post brings to a close the third theory day of the course which I am pleased to report went quite well (as far as sitting down for eight hours can go well). The morning started off with a brief (half hour) exposition on the subject of blue cheese by Rory O'Connell; we were also shown how to make a few different orange-flavoured cakes. At about 9:30 he gave way to Colm who is the sommelier at Ballymaloe house and will be teaching us about wine for the next few weeks; he spent most of the morning taking us through the various regions of France and the different ways in which they make wine and we were then introduced to a charming frenchman who sells wine in a shop somewhere in Ireland. He went into greater detail, telling us about the Burgundy and the South West regions of france and he brought us six different wines to taste. After lunch we were given a short lecture on the subject of tea and then Rory re-appeared to give a somewhat longer demonstration of the fine art of cake-baking.

The wine lecture was essentially an introduction to the modestly sized subject of French wine making. Not at all a tall order. Colm took us through the basic concept of terroir first: the terroir is the all encompassing term which the French use to describe the varied and multitudinous factors affecting the growth of wine - the soil type, the wind, the drainage of the field, the slope of the field and surrounding areas, the climate of the area and so-on. The science of terroir is so exact that a Grand Cru field can be situated right next to or across the road from a field fit only to produce Vin-de-Table or similar: it defines to a huge extent what the final wine will taste like - it's acidity, lightness, aroma and flavour are all affected hugely by the terroir and this has over time led to the gradual solidification of a few specific wine regions in France. The French worked out that it is the soil and the climate of the chablis region that produces the chablis wine rather than a claret - terroir rules French wine and pretty much everything to do with it. This all leads nicely onto the labyrinthine subject of Appellation Controlee - the laws enacted by the french to make sure that Beaujolais continues to be made in Beaujolais, yea even unto the very ending of the World. For a wine to be called Chablis, it must (fairly obviously) be grown in Chablis. It must also use only the chardonnay grape, which precludes any red wines ever being grown in Chablis (because chardonnay is a white grape). If a winemaker decides to make a different style of wine or use a different grape then he is forbidden from calling the wine Chablis, even if he thinks that the terroir would suit another grape better. Thus times change and French wines solidify around the norms of the 1930s rather than the terroir.

We were then taken through the various different regions of France, especially Bordeaux which is organised in a simple, easy-to-understand manner, and Burgundy which isn't. Bordeaux is split into several regions on the left and right banks of the Gironde estuary; it's a truly massive area and produces the same amount of wine as Australia. A lot of the most famous chateaux are situated in the Medoc region which includes Chateaux Margaux, St. Julien and Pauillac; this is a mostly red wine producing area and it concentrates on Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes, it does however produce some white wines as well as some very famous sweet wines (Chateau D'Yquem). Burgundy on the other hand is a mess - there are no big Chateaux or large producers. Wines are instead labelled after the village from which they come and also with the name of the individual who made them - thus it is possible to buy Montrachet wines which were grown practically on top of each other but where made by different people and therefore have very different prices and tastes. The whole situation apparently came about due to French inheritance laws which insisted upon the division of an estate equally between all the heirs on the death of its owner and it means that there are growers in Burgundy with enough vines of their own to make only one or two barrels in each year - people own little sections of a field, most of which go for absolutely silly money whenever they come up for sale. All of this means that the only way to tell Burgundy wines apart is the name of the vintner - there are simply too many for a wine to be labelled just by village or region. That said, the lower quality wines will just have the name of the area in which they were grown.

The visiting wine merchant brought along several different types of wine from Burgundy and Bordeaux and I would tell you all about them, but given that I've no idea what I'm talking about I think that I wouldn't be very interesting. Moving on...

The afternoon session was all about tea - making it and making cakes and other wonderful things to go with it. Rory showed us how we could make a fruit cake, cupcakes, a rum and raisin cake, buns, crumpets and drop-scones, sponge cakes and the most absurd creation of all - a 'sandwich chest' which is made by carefully cutting the inside of a bread out, leaving the crust intact, making sandwiches with the bread that you have removed and then replacing them in the handy receptacle of the crust to create the most overdone sandwich presentation ever. I look forward to having a go at it soon.

As a nice way to end the day, I and two of the others in my cottage decided to go for a walk in the lovely countryside evening sun. The idea was to do a big loop, walking down by the sea however not all went to plan. We got lost and instead ended up on a fascinating and adventurous trek through the fields and woods surrounding Shanagarry village. What fun.

I hear that my efforts to simplify the comment-leaving process have not been in vain and I encourage comment and discussion - it gives the whole blogging exercise something of a point that it would otherwise lack.

Bye

Day 16 - Work Resumes

2010-05-04T22:55:00.000+01:00

Hello

Well, I'm back and hard at work in the kitchens. After a weekend of indolence and luxury (I got to watch TV), my quest to become an averagely good cook has re-started and I am pleased to say is not going disastrously; happily, a long weekend is not sufficient time to forget all that one has learnt and reduce one's competence to the level of a three-year-old. Thank heaven.

I'm in a different kitchen this week (if you're interested) and once again have a different partner to work alongside. Today I cooked a roast leg of lamb with coriander, made a mint sauce and some gravy, made some lemon-squares and attempted to cook glazed carrots. I say attempted because I failed: I burnt the carrots. It turns out that turning your back for even a second really isn't an option when it comes to glazing carrots - they burn at a moment's notice if the water boils away (which it did). That said, the basic recipe is very simple - boil some carrots in water with a pinch of sugar in a covered pan and let them cook until the water boils off (which takes about 15 minutes, or in my case 14); I recommend giving them a go if you have the chance. Mint sauce is, by contrast idiot-proof: chop some mint, add a little sugar and vinegar and then pour on some boiling water to get it to the right consistency; if you can, it's worth just making it fresh whenever you have lamb because it really does taste very nice when it was made only a little while ago. The lamb itself didn't pose too much of a problem in that all that I really had to do was stick it in the oven; I did rub in some crushed coriander seeds and put a little garlic into it, but fundamentally it was simply a case of opening the oven door. What was tricky though was a little thing called the aitch-bone which we had to remove before roasting - it is essentially the hip and it's normally removed by the butcher because otherwise people would probably cut their fingers off trying to get it out themselves. This, however is Ballymaloe Cookery School and fingers are considered to be for wimps - it took me just fifteen minutes to get the bugger away from the meat and I barely mangled anything which I am quite proud of.

I have to say that it was quite nice to have a big roast for lunch - meat has so far (as you may have noticed) not featured heavily on the course and it was lovely to actually get a chance to eat some, particularly with the roast potatoes of death mentioned in previous posts. On the lunch front, I've also decided to hold off on having puddings from now on for two reasons - first, it isn't good for you to be always eating puddings and second, as one of the other students pointed out: you get a sugar high and then are falling asleep by half-way through the afternoon and you don't get to learn from the demonstration, which is a bit of a waste really.

Demo this afternoon was taken by Rory who seemed to show us how to make half a book's worth of recipes - all of which were vitally important for us to know how to do. He started off by making a chutney which I want to have a go at on Thursday - I've always wanted to be able to make one. We were then shown (oh joy of joys) how to make yeast bread: nothing fancy, no kneading or anything, just really easy bread which after all of the soda bread was a welcome relief - it's not that I don't like soda bread but variety is always good to have too. The only thing that I'm ever so slightly concerned by is the fact that I haven't yet made one of the last type of soda bread; I'm sure that that won't be a problem though. After the bread, we moved on to the important new technique of the day: mayonnaise. I'm pleased to say that it doesn't look all that difficult and that I will be trying it on Thursday too - I'll be doing some Dublin Bay prawns to have with it as well which will I'm sure be quite delicious. Most importantly, we were shown what to do if the sauce curdles - add the curdled sauce very slowly to a new egg yolk; a little hot water can also save it if you catch the sauce early enough. We were also shown how to make a shepherds pie, moussaka, mashed parsnips, really nice baked potatoes (useful), spinach and a lovely mango and syrup pudding.

Tomorrow is another theory day: we will be having a wine lecture, a lecture on tea and we will be learning about cakes and cheeses as well. I can hardly wait - and I know that my loyal readers will hardly be able to contain their excitement at the thought of the length of my post tomorrow as I write it all down.

Bye

P.S. I've changed the rules on commenting and I thing that it should be easier now. Please have a go and tell me if it works.

Day 12 - Fish

2010-05-01T11:50:00.000+01:00

Hello

Well - today was the first instance of a new techinque - filleting and skinning fish, which it turns out is a minefield - one wrong move and the whole thing looks dreadful. Basically, you have to separate the fillets from the fish by carefully cutting along the back of the fish and proceeding with caution - the idea is to leave as little meat as possible on the carcass; the problem is that fish have bones inside them - quite a lot as it turns out - and they're all tricksy little buggers, particularly a set called the pin-bones which stick out into the fillet and get in the way of your knife in a rage-inducing fashion. Most of the skill lies in cutting away the fillet without keeping these bones in it - you have to sort of push the meat off them gently and hope for the best (not that cooking has anything to do with hope, crossed fingers, praying, etc. ahem...). Skinning is much easier - you just use your knife to cut it away. You do have to be careful not to cut through the skin though because any holes leave little bits on the fillet which looks dreadful: the way to do it is to have the fish skin-side down on the board and then keep your knife pressed as flat as possible to the skin(which is one of the reasons why a bendy filleting knife is so useful); after that, you just keep a good hold of the skin and cut it away in a sawing motion. After liberating the fillets from the carcass, I put them into a bowl and covered them with a mixture of grated cheddar with a little cream and dijon mustard which melted in the oven to give a lovely cheesy sauce; I also piped some duchesse potatoes around the edge and put a blob in the centre of it as decoration - it looked incredibly seventies. Unfortunately, my potatoes weren't of the top order - I only just managed to stop them burning at one point (we cook them by bringing them to the boil for 15 minutes and then pouring off most of the water and letting them steam the rest of the way through - unsuprisingly, I forgot about them when they were steaming and all of the water boiled away) and because one of them was quite large it hadn't cooked all of the way through, leaving little lumps in the mash; happily this problem was solved by my teacher who told me to put some foil over them and leave them in the warming oven, get on with something else and then by the time that I needed them, they would be cooked. Happily, this strategy worked and I managed to retain my venir of competancy. On top of my fishy tray bake, I cooked the same hot salad as the one I did yesterday in order to have a go at preparing and cooking kidneys (there weren't enough yesterday) - a salad of kidneys and oyster mushrooms with pink peppercorns. Unfortunately the extra day in the fridge had done nothing for the kidneys and they smelt extremely strongly before they were cooked - they were fine to eat but a nose plug would have been an advantage in my opinion. Anyway, at least I got the practice and I now know what to do with a kidney should I see one.

The demonstration this afternoon was done by Rachel Allen - Darina's daughter in law - who you may have seen on TV. She showed us how to make roast lamb, extremely delicious (by which I mean extremely unhealthy, artery-clogging and death-inducing) roast potatoes, glazed carrots, mint sauce and gravy - a lovely sunday lunch. She also cooked a new loaf of bread - brown soda bread (we're progressing gradually on the bread front), tapenade (on toast), hollandaise sauce to go with the fish cakes that she made from the leftover fish from lunch, a salad with candied walnuts and pears as well as a whole lot of different sorbets. It was all quite delicious. I'll be doing the roast and associated vegetables on Tuesday and partner will be doing the sorbet and salad - I have to say that I'm quite looking forward to lunch as meat has so far not featured heavily on the menu and who wouldn't want a lovely bit or roast lamb?

I say Tuesday because that's my next day of cooking: Monday is a bank holiday. I'm taking advantage of that by spending the weekend in London - an idea with which my parents agreed very readily; presumably they want to see whether they're getting their money's worth from this course. I don't think that there's any point in my posting until Tuesday evening, given that I'm not in Ireland, so check back then.

Bye

P.S. Sorry about problems leaving comments - apparently it's rather harder than I thought that it was.

Day 11 - And Relax...

2010-04-29T23:22:00.000+01:00

Hello

Well, the only thing that I think that I can say about today is that it was far less stressful than has been the case so far this week - I was cooking a raita, soda bread and a warm salad this morning which was not exactly the heaviest of work loads. I managed to finish early enough that I could do some little cakes and also cook the rice that my partner needed. I am also pleased to report that there were no disasters today and that on the whole it went a great deal better than on tuesday.

The lecture was mostly to do with fish - we were shown how to fillet round fish perfectly without leaving any bones in and then given a few good recipes for them. Tomorrow I will be cooking a Gratin of Cod with cheddar and mustard and piquant beet-root - exciting stuff. I will also be making mashed potatoes. Weirdly, friday seems to be a pretty relaxed day as well, perhaps because filleting fish is going to take up so much time in the morning session. We were also show how to make a lovely vegetable soup which my partner will be making. Tomorrow will also be the first time that I make lemonade - it's all hand made here and extremely good - so I shall get back to you on how that goes (not that it's likely that I'll mess up making what is essentially water, lemon juice and sugar).

Darina has been telling us all that we should be applying for jobs now so that we will have them by the time that we leave. She assures us that even though we may not be ready now, we will be fully capable of working in a kitchen in ten week's time; I have to say that I'm not so sure myself, but I have faith.

This weekend is a bank-holiday so I'm going home to visit my dog for the weekend. Hurrah!

Bye

Day 10 - Bubbles

2010-04-28T21:47:00.000+01:00

Hello

I have to say that I am now starting to dread the theory days just a little - it's not that they aren't at all interesting (they are - very), it's just that by the end of the day your brain is idling pleasantly on stand-by, your back is in agony from sitting down in the chairs for so long and your ability to keep your neck straight and your eyelids up is rapidly diminishing. This admittedly may have had something to do with alcohol, but more of that later.

The morning consisted of a lecture on milk, butter and cheese. Apparently, milk is one of only two substances in the world which are solely food and have no other purpose (the other is honey, if you're interested), which means that it is incredibly nutritious in just about every way. This is why it's so good for us. For those of you who don't know, after the milk has been removed from the cow (see previous posts) it is separated into cream and skimmed-milk with a machine that I believe works through the use of some sort of magic. None of the milk here is pasteurised because Darina and her family (who actually drink it) prefer raw milk - the taste and the mouth-feel is different in unpasteurised milk and it has more in the way of micro-organisms, exposure to which will strengthen your immune system. Darina assures us that it tastes much nicer, but unfortunately it is illegal to sell it in the EU unless the farmer is selling directly to the person who wants to drink the stuff; this is yet another reason for us to buy a cow for home. Just a small one.

Once you have your cream separated from the milk, you can turn it into butter by churning it (a kenwood mixer speeds the process up considerably); once it begins to look a little like scrambled egg, you should remove the butter and drain the buttermilk that will be leaking from it with a sieve. Churn the butter a little longer then put the butter in water in order to get every drop of liquid out of it - it will go rancid otherwise. Repeat the process until the water runs clear. This is the moment to add salt to it if you want, otherwise it's time to use a pair of butter-pats (which have to be very cold - put them in the freezer before you start) to pat the butter into shape. It's astonishing how easy it is to make butter really.

Alternatively, you could leave the milk un-separated (so it still has some fat in it) and use it to make yoghurt or cheese which is essentially milk which has been set by using rennet, an enzyme which is taken from the stomach lining of calves. Lovely. Cheese making is more difficult and it takes a lot of time; that said, we were shown how to make gouda, a camembert-style cheese and simple cottage cheese which I am definitely going to be having a go at. It's worth saying that cheese cannot be made with milk bought from shops - it is nearly always homogenised which is a mechanical process which evenly distributes the fat globules throughout the milk and thereby prevents the cream from rising to the surface. This is desirable in a lot of cases but unfortunately it can't be used for cheese. What a pity.

This afternoon was something rather special and unusual - a representative from a little-known champagne producer called Bollinger dropped by to give a lecture on champagne and Bollinger, including how it is made, what grapes are used, the difference between grands and premiers crus and also some of the extraordinarily strict laws on production in the region. Champagne can only be made with three different varieties of grape - pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay; to call a wine a grand cru, it has to come from grapes which were grown at one or some of the 17 grand cru village in the champagne region. Below that, there are 47 premiere cru villages from which grapes could be taken. Only pinot noir and chardonnay grapes are grown in the grand and premiere cru villages - pinot meunier is very much the third grape whose purpose is mainly to add fruit to the wine. Champagne also has to be manufactured in a very specific way, including a secondary fermentation in the bottle to produce the bubbles. Bollinger is a very traditional producer and still uses oak barrels for the primary fermentation as well as removing the yeast sediment from the bottles by hand for all of its vintage wines. After listening for two hours, we were given some Bollinger to taste (3 different champagnes) and I am pleased to report that they tasted very much like champagne. Unfortunately I still can't get away from the idea that it's just an awful lot of fuss over what is simply fizzy wine. So shoot me. That said, it was fascinating to learn how it is made and blended so that they can get the same bottle of champagne year-on-year: Bollinger has a special system of reserve wine whereby they keep a vast 'library' wine in their cellars and add to it each year. That way, if they decide that e.g. a wine in a particular year is not quite acidic enough, they can add some slightly more acidic wine to it from their reserve in order to achieve the same flavour of champagne all of the time. That's just for their ordinary entry-level champagne though - a vintage must all be from the same year.

After that (my concentration was beginning to flag at this point), we thanked the Bollinger-man and were then given a brief introduction to what we will be studying on the rest of our wine-course which runs alongside the cooking course. I shall return to you fully clued-up on wine in twelve weeks time and I shall be able to order the stuff with confidence at any restaurant. Whether I'll want to drink it is of course another matter...

Tomorrow, I shall be having a go at cooking some offal as well as some bread. I'll update you on how that went tomorrow evening.

Bye

Day 9 - Chickens

2010-04-27T22:29:00.000+01:00

Hello

Well - today was quite difficult. We were supposed to joint half a chicken each, but the teachers wanted to give us a second demonstration before we got started so I didn't manage to start cooking until 10:15 which meant that everything after that was a little bit rushed. It also didn't help that my teacher decided that I should do a tart instead of vegetables which ever so slightly threw my timings off. I managed to do everything all right, but it was just so hectic trying to get everything done; doing silly things like burning the onions didn't help either. The food tasted good at the end though and I'm getting much better at arranging it artistically on a plate so it looked quite nice too - it wasn't all bad.

I turns out that jointing a chicken really isn't all that hard once you know how to do it and you can get quite a few meals out of just the one - particularly when you turn the carcass into a stock with which to make a soup.

This afternoon's lecture was done by Rory O'Connell (who you will remember is the brother of Darina) and it was very interesting. The general theme was lamb offal - we were shown how to make a couple of different hot salads with some bits of fried kidney or sweetbreads as well as how to roast a lamb heart and serve it (again in a salad). He poached the sweetbreads in some chicken stock to cook them through before frying them just to seal them just before serving. the stock that was used to poach the sweetbreads will apparently make a fantastic base for a soup - remember that. I have a recipe for the lamb hearts so if someone can provide me with some the next time that I am with them, I'd quite like to have a go at cooking them. We also were shown how to make white soda bread and some spicy ways of cooking chicken along with one or two raitas to have with them. The pudding was a chocolate fudge pudding.

An interesting thing that I learned in the lecture this afternoon - the fat that surrounds lamb's kidneys is not normally used for cooking and it can be rendered down in the oven and then used to seal jam jars - you just pour the molten (but cool) fat onto the top of the jam when you make it and it will seal the jam completely from the air. Jam that's sealed using this method will keep for more than a year, so that's worth knowing. Rory also told us (while beating egg-whites for the chocolate pudding) two useful things - first, that all-copper bowls are very good for whisking egg-whites in; and second, that when adding the egg whites to the mixture it is a good idea to stir in a little blob of the egg-white before you fold in the rest. It just helps the chocolate to mix with the light egg-whites.

Tomorrow is another theory day and I think that wine is going to be featuring heavily in the morning lecture. Not good planning to say the least - I wonder how many people will really be concentrating after lunch. On thursday, I'm going to be making a soda bread, a lovely lamb-kidney salad and some raita. I can hardly wait.

Bye

Day 8 - The Difficult Second Week

2010-04-26T18:47:00.000+01:00

Hello

So here we are - week two has begun and the cooking has resumed in earnest after the brief rest afforded by the weekend. I actually quite enjoyed my cooking this morning - it was a black-eyed bean stew (which was actually more of a curry) and also corn tortillas. Both actually seemed to go okay for once, partly because I did one then the other rather than mix them up in a horrendous and messy way. First I made tortillas which it turns out are extremely easy; they are just corn flour and water mixed to make a dough. You have to have a little tortilla press if you want to make any number of them but apart from that, it's really simple - you just fry the tortillas briefly and then put them under a cloth so that they can sit in their own steam. After that, I made an indian bean stew which was extremely delicious and also incredibly easy to do. Also, because it's indian it has spices in it which mean that it smells absolutely divine when it's being cooked; if I'm honest, I think that that was the best part of it. Amazingly, I finished early, the stew tasted lovely and by an amazing stroke of luck I had got the seasoning perfect the first time around so I didn't need to add anything to it at all. I have to say that I think that that will be the first dish that I cook when I get back home: it really does taste good. After I finished, I had some extra time, so my teacher suggested that I make nachos out of my tortillas - that was slightly less successful because the tortillas were a little too thick for nachos so I had to very carefully slice them all in half before deep frying them. The end result though wasn't all that bad, actually - they looked quite nice because I had used blue flour to make them with - and I artistically grated some cheese on top of them. I think that the whole thing went quite well.

Unfortunately today was the first time that I have cut myself so far on the course: I was washing up one of my knives (I wasn't even using it - how embarrassing is that?) and accidentally nicked my little finger. At least I can now be sure exactly how sharp my knives are - I barely touched the blade but it still managed to slice through my skin with quite remarkable and painless ease. It's a weird sensation being cut by a very sharp knife - it doesn't hurt at all for a second because the cut is so clean and precise.

Tomorrow will be our first chance to joint a chicken - I'm looking forward to being able to do it properly and quickly - and I'll then use the bits and bobs to make into a lovely recipe with mushrooms and rosemary. I'm also going to be doing really nice boiled potatoes and some lovely onions.

A note about boiling potatoes - if the potatoes are old potatoes (i.e. very late in the season) then they need to be brought to the boil in cold water. New potatoes can be put straight into boiling water - it's quicker.

We all had a barbeque this evening at one of the students' cottages - everyone brought some meat and a salad and we each donated €2.50 to charity. It was good fun and the weather wasn't too bad either.

Bye

Day 7 - Sunday

2010-04-25T23:35:00.000+01:00

Hello

Nothing happened today.

Bye

Day 6 - Pigs

2010-04-24T22:55:00.000+01:00

Hello

I have an announcement to make - I am now able to butcher a pig. Seriously: if you have a pig and you need it butchered but for some reason don't want to entrust the job to someone who actually knows what they're doing, then I'm your man. Today, at a loss for anything better to do, I attended one of the multiple one-day courses that the cookery school do throughout the year; this one was on pig-butchery. Technically, I think that it was really aimed at people who keep pigs and want to be able to cook them but I am happy to say that I have a solution to this problem: our first pig will be a gloucester-old-spot and it will be called Geraldine, which is a good name for a pig. The whole thing was fascinating, though: we were shown how to remove the leg and the shoulder from the carcass (which was cut in half for ease of use), how to get the fillet out, how to separate the belly and the loin and also how to separate all of the meat from the bones. After we had cut up our pig into smaller bits, we proceeded to turn it into bacon (streaky and back), prosciutto, salami, sausages, roast pork and brawn (which for those of you who don't know is essentially boiled head). I'm not sure how much of what I learnt today I am actually going to remember, but I've got the notes from the lecture and at the very least I think that I can have a go at making some bacon or some brawn - they were the easiest things to make. At some point you may see me driving up to the house with a pig's head on the seat beside me, but don't worry - the brawn tastes quite nice and it has the advantage that no-one seems to know what it actually is so they're normally quite happy to eat it. It's just jellied pork, after all.

I missed Dr. Who this evening which was extremely disappointing.

Bye

Day 5 - Tarts

2010-04-23T22:30:00.000+01:00

Hello!

Today was a momentous day indeed - I had my first go at making a tart! It was a chocolate and hazelnut tart I think that it went quite well, considering that it was a new skill; it didn't go entirely according to plan either, though - for a start I managed to make only half the necessary pastry which meant that the walls were a bit too thin and crumbly. Also, for some reason the filling went much browner on top than everyone else's - still I suppose that it makes things more interesting that way and you could barely tell after I dusted the top with icing sugar. On the whole though, I think that it was a triumph.

That wasn't the only thing that I made, of course: I also did a couple of jars of raspberry jam (to go with the scones that my partner made) which went quite well; and a salad made of rocket, Ardsallagh goat's cheese, walnuts, dried figs and pomegranate seeds. I have to say that it really is quite difficult to make a salad look nice on a plate - I spent a good ten minutes trying to make it look artistic before my teacher came over to mark it and re-arranged everything; perhaps not one of my finest hours. I should also say (as an aside) that the Ardsallagh goat's cheese is lovely and that you should get some if ever you see it in a shop or supermarket.

Lunch today was particularly good - we had the salads as a starter, followed by a pasta with little bits of chorizo sausage in a tomato sauce which is an inspired combination. I stole some of the leftovers after lunch so that I wouldn't have to cook myself supper.

This afternoon's lecture was with Rory O'Connell again - Darina was in Dublin promoting the cause of artisan food producers to the food inspectors - and the basic theme was mexican. We learnt how to make both corn and wheat tortillas, along with various associated recipes (nachos, quesadillas, etc); salsa (which is surprisingly easy); guacamole; re-fried beans; and also a little indian food in the way of a black-eyed bean stew which is a perfect meal to cook if you have a vegetarian or even a vegan around for supper. Interestingly, the mexican theme didn't seem to extend to puddings - we were shown how to cook creme caramel and orange scones (which were extremely good); I'm looking forward to having a go at doing caramel for myself after today.

It turns out that today was also my last day cooking alongside my current partner - I'll be with someone else for next week which I think is quite good; it means that I'll be used to cooking alongside lots of different people. I'll let you know more on Monday evening, but I can tell you that I will be cooking the bean stew and the tortillas.

One more little anecdote before I leave you this evening - it was brought home to me today quite how grateful I am that I have my own knives and didn't buy the ones that the school sell. Apart from the fact that the Victorinox knives sold by the school are all very light and not very nice, I have a new reason for being happier with my own: one of the teachers called out this morning and told us that we should be careful because the carving knife and the palette knife look very similar and could be confused. We were told to make sure that we weren't using our carving knife for pastry as someone had already managed to cut themselves. Oh dear - I thank the Lord that that particular advice didn't apply to me (my carving knife does not look like a palette knife) because I almost certainly gotten confused and ended up severing an artery by accident.

And on that happy note, I leave you.

Bye

P.S. Finally, someone has left a comment! Keep them coming - how else will I know if you're actually reading this thing?

Day 4 - Drinking

2010-04-22T22:08:00.000+01:00

Hello

How are we all today? I have had a pretty tiring day, which may seem odd since all that I actually did was sit still in a chair - it was six or seven hours of solid concentration and I'm quite looking forward to getting back into the kitchen tomorrow and doing some cooking. The one upside to the theory day (which is a weekly phenomenon, taking place on a Wednesday usually) is that we get a lovely lunch which the teachers cook whilst we're concentrating on something or other in the lecture room: it's always nice to have a completely free meal. I have helpfully taken a picture of it so that you can look upon it with envy.

The day started with a lengthy lecture on cheese - how it's made, the different types of cheese and so-on. Darina showed us how to make crackers to go with the cheese and also how to make redcurrant jelly. Mostly however, she talked about the growth of cottage industry in Ireland, particularly cheese making. There has been a phenomenal growth in artisan cheese-makers in Ireland over the past twenty-odd years and they are producing cheeses which can rival the best cheeses from around the world; we tried a few different cheeses, which I shall list:

Mileens cheese

Gubbeen cheese

Cashel Blue cheese

Durrus cheese

They were all delicious, although the durrus was a bit strong for my taste. I recommend at least trying them - particularly the Gubbeen. We will get taught the very basic rudiments of cheese-making whilst we're on the course, and we will be making our own cottage cheese which I'm looking forward to quite a lot; the school is also building itself a little cheese making room next to the milking parlour which will be ready soon and so hopefully I will be able to help them make their first proper Ballymaloe cheese (which it is freely admitted will probably be disastrous).

Following that, we watched a video on wine which was, in a word, hilarious. A confusingly large amount of time was spent illuminating the best way to order wine at a fancy restaurant if you are a middle-aged man taking a twenty year-old out for dinner and want to impress your date. It did at least explain how to store, decant and serve wine so it was by no means a complete waste of time, even counting its rather more bizarre tangents. Then to lunch (see picture above).

After lunch we had possibly the two most interesting lectures that I have ever attended - fire safety and food hygiene. I understand that these two subjects are important, but I really don't think that putting them right next to each other was such a good idea - we were all so blown away and amazed by the first lecture that we could barely concentrate on the second. Joking aside, the hygiene one was actually quite useful - it's quite amazing the hoops that you have to jump through just to keep the inspectors happy, but a lot of the advice was the sort of boring, basic stuff that you wouldn't normally think about so I suppose that it was useful in reminding us how easily germs can spread.

Anyway, that's been my day. I've spent most of the evening doing all of my filing so that I can find all of the recipes that I need easily - riveting stuff, as you can imagine. I'm not sure what I'm going to do on the weekend, but I'm looking forward to having a chance to travel around and see a bit of Cork - I'll keep you posted on my movements.

Bye

P.S. It's lovely getting e-mails from people saying that this is a good blog, but it would really make me feel better if you could leave some comments at the bottom of the posts instead - that's sort of the point of the whole thing, and in any case it means that the blog looks as though people are actually reading it.

Day 3 - Work Continues

2010-04-21T18:53:00.000+01:00

Hello

Good news! I've finally taken some pictures of the school, so you can see for yourself what it's like - this is a picture of the room that we have lectures in. Darina stands up at the front behind the work top that you can see and the mirror gives you a good view of what it is that's being cooked from above. It's all quite easy to follow, really.

I got up slightly earlier today to watch the cows being milked - there are two jersey cows on the farm and they get milked once a day. Unfortunately, cow-milking is one area where the Ballymaloe cookery school does not appear to prefer the old fashioned way of doing things: I was half expecting a three-legged stool and a bucket and so I was disappointed to find a clean and shiny modern milking parlour with a machine which milks the cows for you. It just didn't seem right, somehow. Anyway, the cows were duly plugged in and the machine milked them; actually, only one of them got milked - the other one was in a bad mood and did its very best to make life difficult for us, and so eventually we just gave up on it and let it go. After that, the whole machine has to be rinsed out with water and it spends about ten minutes gurgling to itself: the whole thing seemed like an awful lot of trouble to milk just two cows, but then again I'm sure that it makes it much easier if you have the machine.

When I said yesterday was the first actual day of cooking, what I meant was yesterday was the first day that we were actually in the kitchens. We didn't have to do very much beyond chopping vegetables to go in the soup. Today however was the first proper day of work and therefore the first day where we were actually being tested on the food that we produced. Basically, we first had to produce a time sheet which was examined and ticked off by the teacher to make sure that it was vaguely accurate - it's essentially a minute-by-minute breakdown of what you will be doing and when, so you have to know (or guess) the time that it will take you, for example, to chop six onions and two potatoes. It turns out that this is a very difficult thing to do, especially when you are doing three different dishes all at the same time and the upshot of that was that mine was wildly inaccurate - I finished about 1hr 20mins after I thought I would, although that was partly because every single potato that I picked up and peeled turned out to be bad. I would like to stress that it was definitely not and in no way my fault that my timesheet was so optimistic.

What I actually cooked was an onion and thyme soup, a rhubarb compote and a loaf of 'extremely easy' soda bread. Ironically, the only thing that didn't quite go as planned was the one that had the words 'extremely easy' in the title - it is supposed to be quite a wet dough, but mine was a little (i.e. a lot) too wet and so the whole thing took ages to cook and was a little dense at the end. The other two dishes went quite well though, and I am pleased to report that I thought that my onion soup was very tasty. I'm getting better at chopping onions and the like, and I'm sure that by the time I get home I shall be doing things like this soup in my sleep but for the moment, I'm quite proud of the fact that I made an onion soup all by myself. A peculiar thing that I noticed while cooking today was that everything gets more frantic towards the end - partly because some things have to be done just before serving but even so, it was odd; at the beginning of the morning, you start to cook at quite a leisurely pace, trying your best to follow the timings on your sheet, but by the end you're running all over the place with pots and pans and everyone starts to talk loudly out of instinct and the whole thing starts to look like one of those scenes from Hell's Kitchen. Everyone starts to channel Gordon Ramsay (except to a lesser extent, of course: Ballymaloe is a dignified academy) - it's quite peculiar.

The lecture today was done by Darina's brother Rory, but we did see Darina at the beginning of the afternoon when she introduced us to one of the local artisan food producers; in this case, it was a woman who makes goat's cheese. She stood up and told us about how it is made and what her cheese is like. It's called Ardsallagh, if you're interested; we used it in a salad that we made later on with some rocket and figs and it was delicious, particularly if you aren't keen on cheeses with flavours that are just too strong. After that, we got down to some hard watching as Rory showed us how to make raspberry jam (which I shall be having a go at on Friday) and scones; a delicious upside-down rhubarb tarty, cakey thing (rhubarb is in season right now, so it's featuring in quite a big way on the menus); a fantastic looking pasta sauce with tomatoes and chorizo sausage; a chocolate and hazelnut tart (which I'm cooking on Friday); candied orange peel; a chocolate biscuit cake; and two salads which both included the Ardsallagh cheese (one of which I will be cooking on Friday).

Tomorrow is a purely theory day - no cooking whatsoever. I'll let you know how that went tomorrow evening.

Bye

Day 2 - Work Begins

2010-04-20T22:11:00.001+01:00

Hello!

Today was our second day at Ballymaloe cooking school. How exciting is that? I finally got to wear all of my chef's outfit and I can report that I look just like a much less impressive version of Gordon Ramsay. I am pleased with my knives, though: they are quite impressive, ridiculously sharp and as of yet I have no idea how to use them. They do however look very professional, which I think is a good thing, on the whole.

Things started with a quick lesson on salads from Darina. We were shown how to make a basic salad dressing, which it turns out is actually extremely easy (emphasis there on basic) and there was a short briefing on different types of leaves that can be used. The idea was that Darina would pick up a bunch of leaves, tell us its name and then pass it to the nearest pupil so that it could make its way around the room and everyone could taste it. Unfortunately because she was doing so many, no one could remember what each little bunch was. I can therefore report that leaf A tasted peppery, leaf B tasted peculiarly like lemon and leaf C tasted of mustard. I'm sure that I'll pick it up as I go along and make the salads anyway. We were also told (at great length) about the difference between properly grown plants and hydroponics: apparently we get eleven different nutrients from plants, but hydroponics farmers will put only the minimum nutrients in to get the plants to grow, meaning that they are not nearly as healthy as proper plants. We were also warned to stay away from pre-packed salad as it is washed in water with a chlorine content 16 times higher than that of a swimming pool.

After that illuminating lecture, we were finally let loose into the kitchens! Actually, today was just learning how things are done in the kitchen and getting some practice in with the knives: the teachers did the actual cooking, but we chopped the vegetables and fruits and so-on. We were shown where everything was and quickly produced a carrot soup, mushroom a la creme pasta and a rhubarb crumble which we then ate for lunch. This is apparently to be the rhythm of the next few months - a lecture in the afternoon, cooking what we saw in the lecture the next morning and then eating it for lunch. And repeat. I got burned for the first time this morning when I tried to wash up a saucepan lid. Apparently it isn't enough for it to look cold.

After lunch, it was back to the lecture theatre to learn how to make quiches and flans, pesto, potato soup, fruit salad and a strawberry and rhubarb compote. We were also introduced to the way in which we would be working for the next few weeks - in pairs which will change around every week. We get given a selection of the recipes that were shown that afternoon and then have to decide between us who will do what recipe the following morning. The whole thing is apparently carefully planned so that whilst a student may not do every recipe on the course, he will cover all of the necessary skills over the twelve weeks to be able to follow any recipe through to it's finish. It all seems quite sensible really.

For tomorrow, I have to prepare an order of work - a piece of paper detailing exactly what I will be doing and when (e.g. 10:00, chop onions). Given that I don't really know how long these things should take, I doubt that mine will be very accurate - it will probably predict my finishing everything within forty minutes; I look forward to seeing the look on the face of my teacher as I hand it in for inspection.

Things I learnt today:

1) Pinenuts should be sweet. Bitter ones are rancid

2) Fresh pesto keeps for a long time - up to four weeks in the cupboard

3) A cold marble slab is good for rolling pastry on

4) Cook the pastry before putting any filling in, or else it will be soggy and horrid

5) Whipped cream tasted nice with some crystallised ginger in it

Bye

Day 1 - Beginning at the Beginning

2010-04-20T20:18:00.000+01:00

Hello from Ireland!

I'm quite new to blogging (4 minutes and counting), so I'm not entirely sure if this is going to work, but I will give it a go anyway.

I suppose that the first thing that I should write about is me (whilst trying not to be too narcissistic) and why on earth I have decided to devote three months to learning to cook. I'm currently in between school and university which unfortunately makes me a gap student. I'm sorry, but I can't help it. So far I've been to Italy where I looked at churches and (surprise, surprise) India where I worked in a school. But what to do with the rest of the year? a vast chunk of time stretches before me and although I wouldn't have minded spending most of it at home doing not very much, it was made abundantly clear that this was not an option. Damn. The question really had to be whether I was going to do something useful with my time or simply follow the normal pattern of a gap year (work in a shop for four months and go to Thailand); given that I'm going to be spending the next three years living away from home and without any parents to cook for me I decided that it might be a good idea to learn how to cook more than a steak. I already knew that I wanted to do this course - I went on a weekend course in 2008 as a birthday present and left with the idea of doing the whole course firmly lodged in my mind - and I was delighted to be able to come up with such a good reason for doing it. I should stress now that I am not angling for a job as a professional chef - I'm simply here to learn what the hell to do with food: not, I think a totally pointless desire.

Anyway, enough about me. I am now happily ensconced in my room, which is quite comfortable and can now start to write about life here. Day 1 started with a tour of the gardens and the farm, led by Darina Allen (who is in charge) who helpfully warned us that she would be indoctrinating us throughout the course in the virtues of organic food; keeping chickens, pigs and cows; and growing as much as is physically possible ourselves. I have already decided that we (by which I mean my parents) are going to be getting a cow when I get home. It will be called Harriet. The farm itself isn't big, but it seems to provide most (or quite a lot, anyway) of the food for the school to use, which given the amount of stuff we seem to get through says an awful lot about how much work it must be. We were all told about how important it was to keep the soil healthy and nutritious because ultimately whatever we eat has a direct connection to the soil. Everything at Ballymaloe gets recycled - all scraps are given to the hens or put on the compost heap which ultimately gets put back into the soil; it all works in a great big 'circle of life' sort of a way which most people don't seem to be aware of these days (where would we be without The Lion King to teach us about such things). Anyway, we were then led into the greenhouse which covers an acre of ground and shown all of the different things that are grown before being presented with a little maize plant which we had to plant and then pledge to look after for the rest of the course: mine will almost certainly die. It was mentioned here as well that it was our solemn duty to look after the plants in our rooms and in the living areas. I can hear mine wilting behind me as write.

After that, it was back to the school for lunch (presumably the last lunch that would be cooked for us) in which everything was either grown here at Ballymaloe or made by local producers (Darina is keen on local) - locally caught shrimps, locally smoked local salmon, eel and mackerel, locally produced chorizo sausage (yes - incredibly there is a man living just down the road who makes spanish sausages) and so-on. It was, needless to say, delicious.

And then the first lecture - how to make stock to be used in a carrot soup, mushroom a la creme, rhubarb crumble, lemonade, bread and oatmeal biscuits. We got to taste them afterwards and they were all delicious; it's our turn to make them tomorrow...

Some things that I learnt -

1) Butter is good. Never use margarine - full fat, salted butter is the way to go. Nothing can compete as far as flavour goes.

2) Stock is easy to make - just stop throwing away all of the off-cuts of vegetables and other bits and bobs. They're all good.

3) There is more salt in cornflakes than seawater.

Bye.

P.S. It turns out that my phone doesn't work in Ireland, so no phone calls and no texts. Sorry.