Yo Sushi

My God, it was a busy day - canapés and finger food in the morning, Sushi and a few Turkish dishes in the afternoon, and a fun filled evening of final menu decisions and planning, I'm wrecked just thinking about it all.

We kicked off at 9 with a half hour cheese talk, honestly people need to stop with all the cheese making, I can't keep up - today it was a whole array of goats and ewes milk cheeses from all over the show and then straight onto a truly manic morning demo with Darina and Rory on canapés, the list of goodies was endless, I'd need to apply for more bandwidth I think to write them all down so will just tell you about a few favourites.

Smoked salmon spirals were near the top of the list for me, nothing terribly new or exciting but you just can't beat smoked salmon as far as I'm concerned - paper thin crepés filled with cream cheese, spring onions and lashings of smoked salmon, rolled up and sliced into spirals, heavenly - apparently the general calculation is about 6 canapés per person at a party, well if they were featuring these at a party I went to the food costing would have gone out the window, give me 6 of these just to start with please and then I'll move onto the rest.

Tenny weeny Yorkshire puds filled with rare roast beef and horseradish sauce, amazing, little Shepherds Pies and chicken satay with the most incredible peanut sauce, I'm not always such a fan of peanut sauce, sometimes you feel like you're eating Black Cat straight out the bottle but this was just exceptionally good.

And then I adored the pea guacamole miniature warm tortillas - such a good idea for when you can't get avos, well I mean you can always get them these days but out of season they're either doing a spot on impersonation of a hand grenade or you've to re-mortgage to buy the perfectly ripe ones so peas are such a great alternative and it was really good.

Darina also showed us how to make these brilliant little "cheat's tarts" - normally that really dodgy sliced white bread in the supermarkets doesn't so much as get a look in at Ballymaloe, it's stopped at the door and escorted off the premises but for one day on the course it makes a brief appearance. The thing with this bread is that if you buy the truly rubbish stuff you can slice off the crusts and then roll it out so that it's paper thin, the rubbish-ness means that it doesn't bounce back and you then cut it into rounds with a scone cutter, pop it into a mini muffin tin and into the oven for a short stint and ta da, it looks like you've slaved for ages making eensy little pastry tarts when if fact all you did was stroll down to your nearest supermarket.

There was a heated discussion later in the morning about doilies - some parties in the room were fond of them and others thought their use should be restricted solely to kindling, I know they might be considered a little retro now but still, I'm just not a big fan.

Rory also reminded us to provide little bowls and so on for people to pop their skewers, satay sticks, olive pips and the like into during a canapé party - so often this gets forgotten and people wonder around not knowing what to do with all the paraphenalia and leaving the party with a handbag or pockets bulging, laden down with odds and ends.

Straight after lunch we moved onto sushi, my absolute best thing (I'm going to have to do a count at the end of the course to see just how many times I've said this, me and food are enjoying a far too intimate relationship at the moment)! But you know the really fab thing about the demo was that I've discovered sushi isn't actually hard and believe it or not, pretty cheap to make, you wouldn't think so considering what you pay for it when you're out but honestly it's a seriously good business model. The key thing is to get the rice right and cooking it is a bit like conducting an intense scientific experiment, down to counting minutes and measuring flavourings really carefully but in the end, if you get it right then you're sorted. The whole rolling part is easy too, as long as you're not trying to be a Sushi Master - seriously, the people that train to do this in Japan spend 10 years as an apprentice before eventually qualifying as Sushi Masters and one of the checks on the list is that fact that every grain of rice has TO FACE THE SAME DIRECTION, can you imagine it?? I get myself into a complete tizz just trying to peel a grape and these guys are fiddling about with individual grains of rice, I think life might just be too short for that.

So we learnt to make maki, nigiri, temaki, gunkan and Californian rolls, and a few hot dishes too with seared beef fillet and duck breast - it's only sashimi that has to be entirely raw, the word sushi actually applies only to the rice so as long as you've got that as part of the dish, you've got sushi.



Darina and Shermin fanning the rice to cool it down quickly



Loopy having a go at rolling sushi

The lady that came in to do the sushi demo, Shermin Mustafa Thompson, is half Turkish/half Irish and so she also showed us a few delish Turkish dishes - dolma which I learnt I knew from Greece but the Turkish version is different (and I'm sorry to say, better), it includes minced lamb or beef and they were fab. There were also lamajun which is best described as being sort of like a pizza (although I'm sure the Turks would be horrified to hear it described like that), merjemec choba which is lentil soup and a fab bulghur wheat dish made with tomatoes, yum.

Straight from demo we all raced home to fiddle about with our menus and finally take a decision on what we'd cook for our final practical exam - having learnt my lesson with the pastry debacle on Tuesday and accepted that I really am horribly slow, I've decided on pea and coriander soup, pan grilled John Dory with mashed herb potatoes and leeks and peppers with marjoram, and yoghurt and cardomom cream mouuse with saffron poached pears and brandy snap petit fours. In between all that I'll have the joys of produing some form of bread which hopefully doesn't weigh more than I do (I sadly have a real skill when it comes to making heavy, stodgy bread) - should be fun, I'm down for 09h00 on Wednesday morning, December 8th, going to have to practice frantically until then.......................having finally made a choice, I put down recommended wines (part of the requirement), drew up an order list for all the ingredients and equipment I'll need, started praying for some kind of time warp that will turn 3 hours into 4, had a gigantic glass of wine and went to sleep exhausted, tomorrow's another day!