Finally feeling more like a human and less like ET today, thank Heaven, sick to death of being sick!
Straight into the kitchen to get busy after a number of slightly pathetic efforts last week - made olive dough today (which will hopefully become foccacia tomorrow, it's one of those 2 day efforts), cinnamon ice cream (seriously good) and some little orange tuille biscuits to go with it, fished out my pate de campagne from Friday and plated it up, delish, made classic Caesar salad, some buttered spinach and finally flaky pastry which I'll be using tomorrow so it's got it's feet up in the fridge tonight. Not bad huh, I took lots of gorgeous pics which you'll sadly not be seeing because when I got home this evening and went to download them, I noticed that the memory card was actually still in the card reader so I took lots and lots of pictures of sweet bugger all today......................I know, rather don't comment.
Best part of the day, the olive dough - it's completely different to any of the other bread doughs that we've made, it's really wet and sloppy and so you can't knead it normally and instead you get to chuck it around for about 20 minutes, literally flinging it up and then slapping it down on the work surface and then repeat as necessary - I forgot to warn my partner that I was starting with this whole shebang and she almost had a heart attack. I tell you one thing, you wouldn't want everyone in the kitchen to be making this bread on the same day, you'd risk permanent hearing damage and quite possibly have the local Bomb squad out on call.
Rory did afternoon demo, YAY - the list was a shocker, so long but full of deadly things and as the afternoon went on, it got colder and colder and colder. When we broke half way for a few minutes, a whole bunch of the girls dashed home to their cottages to get their hot water bottles and bought them back for the second half, honestly that cold - when we finished and headed home at 17h45 it was just hitting zero so a proper freeze tonight, I'm writing this in our lounge where we've finally managed to get a decent fire going and it's fab and cosy!
Waffled a bit there for a minute, sorry, but I was talking about the weather because of the dishes we learnt today, brace yourself - wicked coarse salmon paté made with almost equal parts fish to butter, oxtail stew, beef and kidney pie, boeuf bourguignon, parsnip and potato mash (at least a quarter block of butter), celeriac and apple purée (amazing), roasted root vegetables, all sorts of handmade chocolates with different fillings, a passion fruit mousse and yoghurt and cardomom cream mousse with pomegranate, both too good, I loved the yoghurt cardomom one. But the stews, oh my word, the boeuf bourguignon was beyond incredible, literally melt-in-the-mouth delish and my absolute best dish of the day, the beef oxtail and I'm gutted I don't have this picture to show you but it started off with the whole oxtail which I've never seen before (well, except for when it was still attached to the ox in which case I tend to a.) try not to be that close and b.) even if I am, definitely not at that end. So we learnt how to portion that into bits and turn it into a bowl of heaven after that, my mom's favourite dish so this'll be on the "Things to Make" list when I get home, just need to find myself a friendly ox looking to lose a bit of weight off his bum, shouldn't be a problem...........
I've a few pics that one of my housemates took, YAY, so I can show you a few of the dishes from demo.
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