Bush Bunny Soup

Back to the kitchen this morning after a 4 day absence and it felt like ages - my fingers were at DefCon 5 in terms of knife-aversion alert and thankfully I managed to get through the day with all 10 intact, decided to burn myself instead but luckily not too badly, trying to wrestle my apple pie out of the oven where it had applied for permanent residence!

So I was down to make strawberry jam (which was postponed because there weren’t enough strawbs), apple pie, caramelised almond biscuits (those incredible ones from last Friday) and soup. It was supposed to be green soup day so all around me students were whizzing up soups fit for the Emerald Isle - watercress, spinach, kale - but I got stuck with cabbage soup. Now I know that sounds as about exciting as a night in doing needlework but it was surprisingly pretty tasty once I’d seasoned it to within an inch of it’s life but green it was not – I’d have parted with my new top from Zara for a few drops of food colouring (which would have had my teacher no doubt doing her own impersonation of Shrek). So in the end I, rather appropriately, made bush bunny khaki-coloured soup and cheered it up with some crispy green bits to give it a bit of colour.

Then it was onto the little almond biscuits which were easy enough and so good, I managed to leave the plate of them behind for someone else to eat because if they’d come home with me, they’d have had a very short life.

And lastly the blasted apple pie – it was made with a different kind of pastry which, hallelujah, you make in my new favourite friend, the food processor so that was all fine but it took forever to cook, hung around in the oven for ages and just didn’t want to emerge in any form of cooked and crispy state. In between managing to burn the side of my arm man-handling it out of the oven I forgot to take a pic but it wasn’t too shabby. I suspect I may have been a bit enthusiastic with the apple filling - when I tried to cut a slice it all sort of collapsed in a bit so I just hid the rest of it and presented a tidied up version instead – Moses and his parting the seas thing would have come in very handy.

Afternoon demo was a bit of a marathon session – it was a whole breakfast theme and there were enough recipes to bring tears to your eyes, everything from raw, toasted and bircher-style muesli, to granola to porridge (served with jersey cream and brown sugar which I’ve no doubt would be incredible but by God, it’s a slippery slope if your day starts like that), stewed fruits, fresh fruit salads, smoothies, pancakes, waffles, bread (soda bread with sultanas known as Spotted Dog and if you make it in individual portions, then Spotted Puppies, how cute) and then all manner of eggs – baked, boiled, poached, scrambled, fried, what have you, luckily there was a mammoth basket of eggs to hand, if I was one of the hens I'd have put in for overtime! Masses of accompaniments – bacon, sausages, black and white pudding (not a South African thing and I’m bracing myself to try it tomorrow, honestly if I told you what was in it you’d think I was mad), mushrooms, tomatoes, potato cake (or fadge as it’s known here) and more – all cooked in lashings of butter of course, the fry up alone was at least a week’s worth of calories, I may have to do the Cliff Walk again tomorrow afternoon after having all this for lunch, in fact it may have to be a Cliff Sprint – my arteries are braced for the event........

We finished quite late and I’m so glad I wasn’t on duty tonight, the pile of washing up would have made you weep – decided to skip the tasting since it’ll all be there again tomorrow and I think once will be quite enough. We were shown how to poach an egg properly (without using one of those nifty mould thingys) which I’ve always wanted to know how to do – my previous attempts have resulted in a blizzard-like whirlpool of egg white and a bastard of a pot to clean, Darina’s came out like a dream, all perfect and poached egg-like and it's on my list tomorrow to master once and for all. I’m also down to make muffins, a full Irish breakfast, granola (coated in butter and honey so dead keen to burn to a crisp and ruin my morning..........) and bread – could be a rather busy day!