I can't believe it's our last proper week in the kitchens - we cook next Monday but only for one day and then Tuesday through Friday are over to exams, yuk. So for the last full week we're back in the first kitchen we started in which for me was Kitchen 1. More importantly though was the temperature this morning, we could see our breath in the kitchen until about 09h30, it was ridiculous - leggings under my chef trousers, two pairs of socks and two long sleeve tops under my chef jacket and I still couldn't feel a thing - forget your chef hat, you needed a beanie if you wanted to hang onto your ears, it was utterly, utterly bitter!
I had quite an easy morning to be honest, roast artichoke salad with hazelnut oil and berries, almond meringue with strawberries and cream and Moules Provencale, those steamed mussels topped with a veritable mountain of garlic butter and breadcrumbs and popped under the grill for a short stint, delish - all went pretty well and for once I wasn't the last person out the kitchen, OK only second last but still, made for a pleasant change............
I started making marmalade too which is a two day affair and one of the last few things on the Technique List that I've never done so step one today was to juice the oranges and lemons and scrape out everything from inside and then leave them to soak overnight - tomorrow it'll be onto boiling them and chucking a massive amount of sugar at the whole thing and with any luck it'll actually set and turn into marmalade, I live in hope.
Afternoon demo was with Darina and was an absolute highlight for me - pasta, pasta, pasta, absolutely incredible. I know I said this a few weeks ago the very first time I made pasta but it truly is a complete revelation, all I wanted to do was eat and never mind the actual carbs, the sauces alone were enough to leave you reeling from a cardiac arrest, lashings of butter and cream and parmesan and all things nice. We learnt to make tortellini, ravioli, capelletti, lasagne, cannelloni, pappardelle (thick noodles, like tagliatelle but much wider), it was all just fantastic and I'm so buying myself a pasta machine as soon as I get home, "To Deb, From Deb", the only problem of course is the end result.......................it seems my Bellymaloe may follow me to Seth Efrica, at least your man and my dad will be pleased, they adore pasta.
It must be said that making your own lasagne according to strict Italian principles is a bit of a faff and that's putting it nicely - as one of the students remarked, it'd be quicker to catch a Ryan Air flight to Tuscany and order a bowl of it there. Between making the actual sheets and the ragu which is the traditional meat sauce which takes about 2 hours longer to make than my standard version at home (although granted, it is nicer, almost wish it hadn't been), and then the Bechamel to go in between the layers and over the whole thing, well you need a morning off work. I'm down to make this tomorrow so we'll see, I've a sneaky suspicion that it'll be another of my manic mornings with me straggling out of the place well after lunch time, I can hardly wait.
Lots of Italian desserts to go with the whole thing if the pasta hadn't already sent you over the edge in terms of your daily calorie intake - lemon tart, a date tart which was fab, panna cotta and tiramisu, laced with booze, just how it should be.
There was an olive oil and balsamic vinegar tasting after demo, was fascinating, can't believe how different oils from different places tasted - we tried Italian, Spanish, Greek, Australian and one from good old Morgenster at home in Cape Town, YAY! And then a man named Fabio spoke to us, he's from Modena and his family have been making traditional balsamic vinegar for the past 3 generations, since the 1930s - how's this for a cash flow challenge, if you take 100 kgs of grapes today and make them into balsamic vinegar strictly according to the age-old traditions of Modena, it'll take you 25 years and you'll only have 2 litres of it at the end! It's sold for about €80 per 100 ml bottle which actually makes sense once you've heard the history - it is without doubt one of the best things I've tasted and you'd obviously keep it for use in salads and so on, this is not what you make onion marmalade with that's for sure, and it's so concentrated and precious that they even use one of those dropper things (like for ear drops) to add literally just a few drops to a salad, incredible!
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