Phew, Friday was manic, still not entirely sure why but the 6 of us in Demo didn't finish till 13h30, an hour late, and it was just a horrid day of rushing around and none of us getting anything quite right - I went to check my bread in the warming cupboard in the office and found a (small and cute but still) mouse nibbling the pumpkin seeds decorating the loaf so that was that, into the bin it went and bless, the traps were set, it is the country after all but Mickey and Minnie sadly just can't be welcomed into a cookery school and have likely gone to Heaven by now................more importantly, all that kneading for nothing!!!
From there it was onto the chicken casserole and let me tell you something, casserole might look like a walk in the park, casually throwing things into a dish and serving up perfect comfort food a few hours later and perhaps it actually is and I'd just taken stupid pills for breakfast or something. Nonetheless, it took me ages and Margie, who was also making it had the same problems which did make me feel a bit better - we were united in our uselessness!
The recipe did get doubled after we'd started which set us back a little and meant more vegetable peeling and chopping and what have you, not to mention chicken jointing, stock, herbs, etc, etc, it felt endless - finally got it into the oven just after 10h30 and then started on Millionaire's Shortbread, you know the one, shortbread base topped with toffee and finished off with a layer of melted chocolate, absolutely wicked. The main reason we all have to make it at some stage is because of the toffee, no whipping it out the can like I used to do at home (Caramel Treat in a tin, I remember it distantly from my former life when I didn't make everything from scratch). Don't get me wrong, the homemade version is miles better - sugar, butter, condenseded milk and golden syrup in a pot, cooked until it gets to the toffee stage, it's truly delish but getting to the toffee stage involves stirring briskly for 25 minutes and if you step away for so much as a minute, you go from toffee in the making to declaring a disaster area so you've to surgically attach yourself to the wooden spoon and stir like a mad thing. It took ages, I'll not be making those again anytime soon partly because they're such a fiddle and worse, once they're done you just can't stop eating them, not good!
Last two things on the list were a mushroom dish, not too painful, managed some of that with my left hand whilst my right hand stirred for the first team and then finished off with the mashed potatoes, to go with the casserole, fantastic as always, made with the standard creamery's worth of butter, parsley, hot milk, a few peas just for a change and masses of salt and pepper, Class A comfort food, you could just eat the whole bowl.
Finally fished my casserole out the oven, faffed around with a perforated spoon for ages getting the big bits out the way, then ladled out most of the sauce so that it could be thickened with my good friend roux (equal parts flour and butter), all fairly painful although it was quite nice in the end and got full marks. By then, our teacher Pam (senior teacher at the school) was about ready to kill us all - there'd been disasters all round, over risen bread, burnt crostini, botched tapenade, dried out chicken, I think she would have run away if she could, as it is the looks we got grew increasingly filthy, X rated by the end of the morning.............
No time for pictures I'm afraid, we had to clear up and get out of there as fast as possible and of course, when there are mess ups there also tends to be a huge amount of mess - demo kitchen was hardly recognisable and it took us ages to get it right, I think the dishwashing machine may have put in for overtime.
Afternoon demo was with Darina and to start with, Jeremy Lee spoke to us for a few minutes, he was absolutely lovely and gave us all a giggle, told us we were obviously deranged wanting to learn to be chefs - Jeremy is Head Chef at The Blueprint Café in London which shares a building with the Design Workshop on the Thames, go to http://www.blueprintcafe.co.uk/. And then Claire Ptak spoke to us for a while and did a demo of her fab, fab cakes - Claire owns Violet Cakes, http://www.violetcakes.com/, a bespoke cake company based in London, she's been selling out of the Broadway Market in the East End for the past 5 years and very recently opened her first shop - she's also just had a book published and was just lovely, basically if you're looking for the best ever cupcake, you go to Violet for one of Claire's, rumour has it she delivers to Buckingham Palace.................
Once that was over, and Claire's cakes had vanished (and by that I mean eaten by all of us with embarrassing speed, couldn't even manage a picture in the scrum) we moved onto the rest of the dishes for the day - duck for the first time, roasted and then also popped into small Chinese pancakes with slivers of cucumber and spring onion and plum sauce, my best, best thing!! Roasted belly of pork, so good but soooooo fattening, I'm going to visit Mrs Pig this weekend just to remind me of what I don't want to look like - a few soups, braised artichokes for the first time too (or fartichokes as I'm afraid they're known, sadly renowned for their flattulence-inducing properties, I was on serving after demo duty this afternoon and it was a difficult sell......)! There were some brilliant spiced aubergines, too good, grilled and then covered in spicy sauce made with tomatoes, fennell, cumin and coriander seeds, garlic, ginger, turmeric and a touch of cayenne pepper, delish! Oh, and a cabbage dish, I know, I know, more flatulence possibilities and cabbage can be so boring, normally overcooked and vile but this was quite funky, done with apples and with red cabbage, neon pink in the end but really quite yum. And lastly for pud, other than the distant memory of Claire's cakes, there was another type of chocolate mousse, lemon posset (basically just lemon, sugar and cream, the guilt) and macaroons which I adore, anything with almonds and I'm your most enthusastic customer.
Week over and I was off to Mrs Walsh's Cottage for crostini, bruschetta and a bucket of wine, lovely!
No comments:
Post a Comment