Let me start by saying that I have a llllooonnggg way to go before anything I make that involves pastry could actually be sold or offered to a guest, at the moment they'd probably ask me for money. It took me almost 3 hours this morning to produce one French onion tart (which let's be frank, the French would likely have disowned) and one tomato salad so at the moment any food operation of mine would be running at a bit of a loss...........! I've great faith however that after 12 weeks with Darina and the team of teachers, I'll be whipping these up with my eyes closed.
We're required to be in the kitchen by 08h30 to weigh up and prepare our ingredients and equipment for the day, to start cooking at 09h00 - I was there on the dot of 8, determined not to let this recipe get the better of me - I measured everything out so carefully, floured down my work surface and got cracking ASAP. Not that much of this effort helped, I still somehow managed to end up with a slightly sad looking ball of pastry that was not keen to be rolled out, had no intention of lying across a flan tin or basically of cooperating with me in any way whatsoever. It always looks so easy when the teachers do it, especially that part where to get the rolled out pastry off the work surface and into the tart tin, the chef (and by that I don't yet mean me) rolls the pastry onto the rolling pin, lifts it effortlessly and then unrolls it again on the tin - anyway this certainly wasn't my experience but I've much hope that one day it will be. I'll be making more of these, with different fillings next week, and things are going to be different.
My filling at least tasted amazing, mostly due to the masses of cream and butter it contained - they may be bad for you and likely to vastly increase the diameter of your thighs but WOW, they taste good. The tomato salad was thankfully much simpler and turned out perfectly, YAY!
Lunch was fantastic as always - I tried my own tart and then moved swiftly onto someone else's Quiche Lorraine which was wonderful, had that with some of my own salad which was not too shabby at all.
Our afternoon demo was given by Rory O'Connell, Darina's brother, the co-founder of the school and Head Chef at many wonderful restaurants during the course of his career to date. It was fab - he showed us how to make tomato and basil salad with buffalo mozzarella; traditional Greek salad; penne pasta with tomatoes, chorizo, parsley and cream; rustic peach tart with summer berries; chocolate and hazelnut tart; scones and jam; and candied peel dipped in chocolate.
The best part was Rory's comments during the class, all delivered absolutely deadpan............when talking about scones, he told us he would show us "how to make a scone that slaps you across the face" and recommended that we check our scones very carefully before taking them out of the oven because "there's nothing worse than a soggy bottom if you're a scone". He also requested that when we floured our work surfaces to cut out our scones that we simply flour it, rather than create a winter blizzard in the kitchen.........
With the rustic tart, it's pretty important to roll the pastry out so that it bears some vague resemblance to a circle - as Rory told us, "there's rustic and then there's agricultural" and so he suggested to us that we make a template for rolling out our pastry and showed us a 30 second way to do this, so fab, and with any luck we'll now be able to roll circles rather than a map of Italy.
With all of the tarts and the scones, you want to be sure to leave them in the oven long enough so that they're a.) not soggy or stodgy in the middle and b.) to make sure they've some colour, nothing worse than an anaemic looking bit of pastry but then you've to watch them very carefully, as we were told "colour is flavour but black is burnt", very solid advice.
Brilliant afternoon, I loved it and when everything was plated up and looking swish, well it was fantastic and certainly a great inspiration.
My kitchen partner and I met up and we worked out what we do the next day, thankfully it was his turn to do pastry and so I'm doing pasta with mushrooms and marjoram, loganberry jam, scones, brown bread and Greek salad, really looking forward to it - the marjoram by the way is unlike anything I've smelt before, obviously all the marjoram I've met to date has been working undercover or was another herb altogether simply masquerading as marjoram, it's just the most special herb with the most incredibly sweet and soft smell - one day the clever people who write computer programmes need to work out a way to upload a smell because I simply can't explain how good this was, note to Microsoft.
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| Pasta with chorizo, tomato, parsley and cream; tomato salad with basil and mozzarella; rustic peach tart; chocolate and hazelnut tart |
My housemates and I spent the afternoon trying to sort out the massive amount of paperwork we've accumulated already - when we all arrived on Sunday, there was a thick bunch of papers waiting in each of our rooms which some heavy duty stapler took strain getting through but on close inspection we discovered that these were only our recipes for the first week, gasp!! More importantly, you've then to decide HOW to file them all and oh my word, has any conversation about filing ever lasted so long or been so intense - you've have thought we were trying to solve the Middle East peace crisis. But honestly your filing choices are quite wide - do you go by starter, main course and dessert and if you do, then where do savoury tarts go, would they be a starter or a main? Or do you go by food type, i.e. all chicken recipes together, all pork recipes together and so on - bottom line it took us the entire evening, we ran out of file dividers long before that and our files, FOR THE FIRST WEEK ONLY, are already suffering from over filling strain - it is fantastic though to be receiving all these wonderful, tried and tested recipes, such a treat and so looking forward to next week's already (which we get each Friday afternoon) to know what's coming up - that way at least you can start to plan in advance how many sit ups you're going to have to do every day in order to be allowed near the demo tasting.....
Must go and sleep now but before I go, I've posted a few quick pics here of the White Cottage, looks especially pretty at the moment in the sunshine, yup still no rain and lots of blue skies, gorgeous!
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| Front and back of the White Cottage and the view onto the farm from our sitting room |
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