Squid Pro Quo

Right, I decided to make up for yesterday's lack of productiveness today by making a whole host of things - white and brown soda bread because they may well come up in the bread exam (with any luck, so much easier than yeast bread which I still suck at after all this time), I've not made them since about week 2 so a bit of practice can't be a bad thing - they came out really well but even against my slightly stogdy yeast breads, I have to admit that yeast bread wins hands down, I'm just going to have to get better at them, aarrrgh the thought of all that kneading, yuk! Made a batch of puff pastry after that which we'll be using on Thursday apparently - a pound of flour to a pound of butter, multiple rolling sessions and ta da, puff pastry.

Made my poached pears next, they really are divine and some little mixed spice tuille biscuits to go with them just for fun, and then finally the main event, the eight legged creatures had arrived and it was time to de-head and de-leg my squid and you know what, they're really easy - miles better than their fellow ocean going buddies, fish and crab, the key thing is to separate all the bits without bursting the ink sac because that's not fun, a few of the others had the misfortune of doing so and their breadboards looked like an oil slick, it was BP all over again and to clean it up, well it ain't fun, that ink is the permanent marker of the sea. So I handled my little guy with kid gloves and managed to keep my work station ink-free, YAY! Brushed the bits with a little olive oil and pan grilled them on a super hot pan, squid is another of those fun things where if you don't cook it long enough, well it's just all slimy and nasty but if you go the other way and over cook it, then you may as well just gnaw on your chef shoe for lunch, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. So it was on and off in a matter of minutes and then straight to the plate with a small rocket salad and some chilli and parsley oil, yum.

Before and after................

I also had a go at making small pastry tartlets filled with caramelised onion, roasted red pepper, goats cheese and pesto as a potential exam menu dish and it was fab but wars have been fought and won in less time........................let's put it like this, the squid probably took about 20 minutes tops, the pears and tuiles ditto, both breads another 20 minutes which means that of the 3+ hours I spent in the kitchen this morning, most of my time was spent fannying about making, resting or rolling pastry tartlets, caramelising onions (so slow, why they can't just get on with it and go brown and sweet I don't know), roasting and peeling peppers (always a fiddly business) and making pesto so whilst it may have been good, producing one course out of three probably won't fly and I'm afraid I'm going to have to down grade radically - back to the drawing board tonight for more recipe file trawling and a large pinch of realism in terms of what I can actually manage in 3 hours.................!

Fab, relatively low fat lunch (so unusual it deserves a mention) of squid and poached pears and then straight onto demo with Rory for an action-packed afternoon - we did about half an hour on more puff pastry things, vol au vents which translate literally as a breath of wind so in other words, you better hope your puff pastry does its thing and rises like it's supposed to instead of just sitting stubbornly on the baking sheet like a lump - he filled them with tthe most delish apple compote and Calvados flavoured pastry cream, you can keep the vol au vent, I could have just eaten the bowl of filling straight. He showed us to roll and cut the pastry to make the little cups, as well as all sorts of other shapes - sacristains (little twists covered in chopped almonds and sugar, heavenly), fold over tarts and another square tart with a border for Tarte Francaise which then gets filled with sliced fruit or a savoury option, think creamy mushroom and chicken or soft cheese, tomato and pesto. They all looked beautiful, you could just picture them lined up in the window of some zgoogy (my favourite word but I have no idea how to spell it) Parisienne patisserie on the Champs Elysee - mine of course may be worthy only of a dodgy back street but it's good to have goals.

Keeping with the French theme, it was time for croissants - we learned how to make the dough first and then to cut them so that they hopefully bear some resemblance to the real thing when they're cooked - as Rory said, most croissants that you see these days are "stodgy lardy lumps of mediocrity" and I'm afraid he's right, most of the ones you see or have the misfortune to taste are truly ghastly, no pressure of course...............

Onto warm salads which are just what you need right now - forget everything I've said so far about winter and cold weather, I knew nothing, this week is truly the real McCoy and it's supposed to just get worse and worse over the next few days, Scotland and lots of England and even parts of Ireland due for snow and in the meantime it's just so incredibly cold that trying to get your yeast going in the morning to make bread is a bit of a non starter. You're supposed to sit it somewhere warm (where, where, forget the yeast just take me there instead) in a little lukewarm water so that it can wake up and start working but at the moment it just sits in the bowl and stares at you nonchalantly, "no way am I doing anything until you sort out the damn heating in this place". Whoops, sorry, waffled a bit there - back to the salads, there were a few different varieties, warm smoked chicken with berries and parsnip crisps, chiken livers with ginger, and another chicken liver one with apples and hazelnuts - I'm not a huge fan of chicken livers unless they're blended with a ton of butter or cream and a dash of brandy and sitting on a plate in the form of paté next to a small mountain of melba toast but the smoked chicken one was fantastic. Most of the smoked chicken I've had to date has been a bit dried out and ukky but this was wicked, smoked by Ummera which was one of the places we visited on the school tour which feels about a hundred years ago, still gorgeous and moist and delish.

The final event of the day was tuna and I've been waiting for this for literally ages so I was heartbroken to learn just how incredibly endangered they are - for the record, none of us should be eating tuna, there really are so few left in the oceans and at the rate we're going, they won't last long but unless the demand stops, greed will keep on ensuring people supply it, too sad. I felt bad even trying it after that - Rory explained that they have to show us how to cook it but other than that, it doesn't feature at Ballymaloe at all, that made me feel a bit better. I just wish it wasn't so damn good - we had it three ways, with chermoula which is a brilliant North African spice mixture that was used as a marinade, with salsa verde and with peppers and tapenade, all delish although the chermoula was by far my best, would be fab with chicken or pork I think so will have to try it with those little fellows instead.

In between all that, an award winning Chilean wine maker named Adolfo Hurtela of Cono Sur Wines popped in and brought with him a few bottles of wine for us to taste, the reception was warm and welcoming as you can imagine.......................we tried a Sauvignon Blanc and two Pinot Noirs, all fanastic, the second Pinot was especially good, retails at €45, sadly not featured in the marked down, plonky section of Tescos that I loyally visit each weekend so it was such a treat to taste.

The group of us that had helped out at Rory's birthday party a few weeks ago were so kindly invited to dinner with Darina, Tim (Darina's husband) and Rory and we just had the most lovely evening - Gillian, one of the teachers here who spent years at the River Café in London cooked and so it was a genuine Tuscan feast, a really special evening, I loved every minute.

Lucy, Charlotte and Ems, bubbles in hand!