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!

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!

Sticky Wicket

Bit of a funny Monday, brain was doing a go-slow and I couldn't seem to get going, not good when you're supposed to be producing decent food en masse!

All I managed the whole morning was sticky toffee pudding (good) and some pumpkin ravioli - bit pathetic for 4 hours to be honest and the ravioli was a monster mission, it made the tagliatelle of a few weeks ago seem like a non-starter, you've to roll it so much thinner, you have to be able to read the morning paper through it which means about 25 trips through the pasta roller, it must have been dizzy by the time I'd finished with it. Yummy filling, pumpkin roasted slowly (it didn't have an option since it was in my hands for the morning) with fennel seeds, garlic, a touch of chilli, ricotta and parmesan and then once the ravioli is finished and cooked, a touch of sage butter, not at all bad.

I woke up a little over lunch thank God, nothing like a few seriously strong cups of coffee to get you sorted. Afternoon demo was with Pam and there were some truly delish things on the menu for the day - our first introduction to squid and how to get them from slimy tube thing with many more legs than me to rings you can pan grill in garlic butter. And the fun didn't stop there, it was straight onto lamb and how to butterfly it, or in other words get rid of the whole leg bone, knee bit and all, so that you can either cut it up easily or stuff it and roast it or something. For us, it was about cutting it up and turning it into the most fantastic curry, fair bit of cream I'm afraid and loads of different toasted spices and lime juice and oh my, so good in the end especially with these two brilliant chutneys that follows - fresh apple and mint, amazing, and tamarind and banana, and then to really get the party started a hat trick of Indian breads - your good old favourite, naan, and two others, pooris which are new to me, deep fried and thus I'm sad to say, fantastic, and chapatis which are huge in East Africa and just totally delish.

The Middle Eastern theme continued with pears poached in saffron syrup and cardomom (just loved them, think I might add those to my final practical exam menu, yes I've still made no decisions and we have to submit them in a few days time), a prune dish which wasn't my best to be honest (not a bad thing considering the typical after effects of a prune eating session) and then our first introduction to filo pastry which I'm beyond pleased to tell you we don't actually make, I wouldn't know even vaguely where to start, the sheets are so thin you could use them as printing paper if you didn't have a ream of A4 handy. So it's just about using filo rather than producing it, the relief! We wrapped it around an almond orange mixture, not too shabby and then to complete the picture there were a few lassis to try which are chilled Indian drinks made with yoghurt and all sorts of flavourings and my taste of the day, ginger and lime lemonade or I suppose that should be lime-ade, just incredible and we all need to be drinking masses of anything containing ginger at the moment - everyone is sick and ginger really helps, it's a natural anti-biotic and I'm desperate not to get sick again so it's going to be ginger all the way!

Menu Madness

Right, I've spent the day filing, going through a mountain of recipes from the last 9 weeks, trying to decide what to cook for my final and in my standard non-decisive style, I simply cannot make up my mind - have now emailed your man, my mom, my sister and my lovely chef friends for help, fingers crossed this esteemed Menu Consultancy Panel can help because I'm deadlocked.

It is freezing cold and my housemate Amelia and I have been in the lounge for most of the day, it's only the two of us here this weekend, we've had the fire going and the door closed to try and keep out the cold - you realise how cosy it is when you venture into the kitchen to make the umpteenth cup of tea and instantly lose all feeling in your feet, the thermometer thingy says it's 3 degrees, lovely and apparently there's a cold front due to hit on Tuesday because of course right now it's warm........................

The start of Week 10 tomorrow, I can't believe how quickly the time is flying by now, only 3 weeks left and your man arrives in the Emerald Isle in 13 sleeps, YAY!

Happy Thanksgiving

So Saturday was Thanksgiving in the States and the girls in the Playroom Cottage hosted a full on Thanksgiving dinner and it was brilliant - it was a charity event actually, we all paid €10 and the girls managed to get almost everything donated by either the school or suppliers and stall holders at the Farmers' Market which was brilliant because most of the money raised then could be kept as a donation to the India Fund, a Mumbai-based charity which the school supports - the school also matched whatever was raised and in the end the total figure was well over €1,000, really good!

There were about 45 of us and dinner was fab, so great to have Christmas dinner in November and know that there's another one still to come - turkey, gammon, roast pots, roast artichokes, parsnip and pumpkin mash, caramelised brussel sprouts, stuffing and gravy, bet you're looking forward to Christmas after reading that!

There was mulled wine on arrival, the perfect thing to defrost with, it was bloody freezing and so of course I needed quite a bit of it........................soaked it up with bruschetta to start, main course as above and then pecan pie and apple tart for pud, what more could you ask for, I love Thanksgiving. And I won a raffle prize, a massage at Ballymaloe House, YAY!

Mastering The Art Of French Cookery

So Friday was officially my French cookery day and I was channeling Julia Child all morning - had one very quick non-French moment where I made an Irish soda bread to start with, ever since we moved onto yeast breads which are so much harder, the comparatively easy soda breads have taken a back seat and I've not made one since Week 3 but they're a possibility on the bread exam and so they're back on the agenda for these last few weeks - am so going to have to make bread every day now until the end, the thought of that particular exam makes me want to run away.

Once that was done and banged in the oven, it was Francaise all the way - I started with the consommé and OMG, it's torturous, every moment of it. You've to start by getting enough meat off a beef shin and making sure that every bit is free of fat, tendon, what have you - I can't begin to tell you how hard that it, as far as I could see the whole damn shin was pretty much made up of tendon, my cow had done far too much exercise that's for sure, bloody laps around the field every day evidently. Those of us on consommé duty kept abandoning our stations to visit each other and find out if everyone else was also losing the will to live - anything for a minute or two away from your shin. Straight from there it was onto the other ingredients, all to be finely diced, and then for a truly fun moment in my day, brunoise garnish - brunoise is French for "chop everything so small you need a microscope to find it again", see what I mean!

Thank God it all came out right in the end, sparklingly clear consommé, if it had done anything else after all that work there's a strong likelihood I'd have resorted to a tantrum of historic proportions.

After that I made a pastry type of thing, classically called a Jalousie although I changed the filling and put a cinnamon, apple and pecan mix into mine - mostly I wanted to see whether my puff pastry had actually worked and it was OK, there's definitely room for improvement which is a good excuse to make it again. I'm afraid to tell you that puff pastry is horribly easy to make which is not good because I adore it and battling the Ballymaloe Bulge is already a full time occupation for most of us, more Bellymaloe than Ballymaloe at this stage of the course to be honest.

And finally for the major test of the day, Soufflé Grand Marnier but you know what, it's really not that hard, I was stressing about it something special but in the end it came out "grand" as they would say here and got perfect marks! This piccie was taken a few minutes after it came out the oven so it had started to sink a bit but still, not too shabby huh, I'd make these again for sure, they're delish.

Afternoon demo was with Darina and for the most part, the focus was on hamburgers and about a million variations of what to do with them - mushroom and goats cheese, caramelised onions and pesto, blue cheese, guacamole and French fried onions, mushroom and bacon, the options are endless. The two American students, Madison and Christina, went up to make a classic American burger - lettuce, sliced tomato, mayo, ketchup, a touch of mustard, caramelised onions and bacon, bit of a super size me moment.

For one day and one day only, Heinz ketchup, squeezy yellow mustard and Hellmans mayo made an appearance at Ballymaloe - quite a moment because normally if we want mustard, mayo or tomato sauce, we've to make it from scratch. It was good to see my old friends especially Mr. Hellmans, life just ain't quite the same without him.

We obviously made the patties from scratch, you have to don't you, the ones you buy at the shop are so solid they could double as a frisbee and whilst we were busy with the mincer we also learnt to make homemade sausages and burger patties from around the world, Middle Eastern lamb burgers and Vietnamese pork and lemongrass patties, yum.

There were a few gorgeous soups too, curried parsnip with parsnip crisps and celeriac with hazelnut, so good - I've never really cooked with celeriac before coming to Ireland and I'm so going to when I get home, have some celeriac seeds which need to be planted, easy peesy to grow too I'm told which helps since my gardening skills remain fairly pathetic.

And of course a day at Bellymaloe wouldn't be complete without a couple of cakes - sticky toffee pud, caramelised banana tart and the clear winner of the day, spiced pan roasted pear cake, deadly!

Bit of a nuclear bomb drop just before we headed off for the weekend - the run down on our final practical exams which are on the 8th and 9th of December, time slots still to be drawn, three hours to cook a three course meal of your choice with the menu and list of required ingredients to be submitted next Thursday, November 25th with no changes permitted after that which is a good thing I suppose since I'll need to practice the damn dishes every day between then and D-Day. Speed is not my strong point, I'm more of a tortoise, always get there in the end but I like the slow lane so I'm going to have to practice a lot if I'm to get everything done within the three hours - I know it sounds like ages but trust me, it's not and the kitchen wall clock seems to be on speed or amphetamines or something..............lots of menu brain storming planned for the weekend, wish me luck!

The Name's Dory, John Dory

Sorry I didn't write yesterday - it was our theory day and we did a full day course on food costing and the like and whilst it was hugely informative, probably not that interesting to read about but we were back in the kitchen today and I had a really good morning, managed to get full marks for all my dishes.

I was on salad and cheese duty which entailed preparing two massive bowls of greens first thing - if there's one thing I'm really going to miss when I leave (and that's a blatant lie, there are so many things), it's the salad every day, it's too fab for words, huge assortment of greens picked first thing in the morning from the glasshouses so just super, super fresh, will have to take a pic. So salad duty means tearing up all the leaves into eatable bits, washing them and the water coming out the taps in the morning now would bring a smile to a polar bear's face, bloody arctic, I couldn't feel my fingers or to be honest, anything up to about elbow level! And then there's a massive salad spinner to dry them off, huge so got a bit of arm toning in too which is always good.

Back to the kitchen after that to make cheese biscuits which equals more arm toning, it's quite a firm dough and then you've to roll them out to see through thin-ness, bit of a battle but they came out well in the end. Plonked them on a board with some fig leaves and a whole bunch of different cheese for lunch and that was my duties for the day done, better than washing up!

Then it was onto pumpkin and rosemary soup, pretty straight forward and all worked fine, a vegetable dish with leeks and peppers, a mousse for pud and then my main course arrived, Mr John Dory, delivered by the fishermen from nearby Ballycotton - there were so many fish dishes on the menu today and the boxes were chock-a-block full, prawns, salmon, monkfish, mussels, clams and my little guy - took a few pics and somehow managed not to get one of John, not so bright.

Anyway John Dory is officially my new most favourite fish - firstly he's flat, always a positive factor and secondly, he's only got one fillet on each side compared to his other flat buddies like sole plaice who have 2 fillets on each side so he was ultra quick and easy, and to seal the deal, he taates brilliant. He does have some impressive body armour in the form of his dorsal fin bit thingys, my God they're sharp and trying to cut them off was a bit of a mission but after that, it was an easy swim in the sea. Pan grilled the fillets and served them with a dot (OK, a large blob) of watercress butter, yum. I had a blonde moment and forgot to take pics of my dishes but they did look pretty good.

Demo was really fantastic today, Rory was on proper form and had us in giggles the whole afternoon - there were quite a few classics on the list and a lot of dishes involving Donald Duck. We started with consommé which is about as classic as you get, on paper after a fair amount of fiddling you should end up with a sparklingly clear soup - it took quite a while to get to that stage but in the end there was a pot full of gorgeous consommé and I can hardly bear to tell you what happened next. There was another pot nearby, full of hot duck fat which looks quite similar I suppose and Pam, who was assisting Rory today had a roasting pan fresh from the oven which had more duck fat in it that needed to be ladled into the duck fat pan and by mistake, was ladled into the consommé - shame, her face, one of those slow motion moments where you know what you've done almost the moment you do it but it's too late, felt so sorry for her. Rory took it really well, bit of an opportunity for trouble shooting although in the end it couldn't be salvaged. Bless, Pam went to the back for a while and a few minutes later, the door opened again and a long wooden pole peeped out with a white napkin tied to the end, was so funny. I'm down to make this tomorrow and I might add a large white sticker to the lid of my pan advising all parties to step away from the soup, I simply couldn't bear it.

The duck was fantastic, Rory jointed one again to show us where we could be in a few weeks time (his words, a few years in most of our minds) - it took him 45 seconds, the Stig of the cuisine world, and he wasn't even happy with that........................I know, I still feel a bit sick.

Anyway there was a virtual flush of ducks ( had to Google that) on the menu and they were turned into all sorts of things - pan grilled duck breast with spiced lentils and caramelised apples, roasted duck with honey and rosemary, duck legs with onions and thyme, duck salad with walnuts and apple, another salad with orange segments, green beans, crispy bacon and croutons which Rory made from slices of baguette and begged us, when we make them tomorrow, to take them out the oven at the golden and crispy stage as opposed to the dark brown, dried out, bearing a close resemblance to a dog biscuit stage. We also finished off the duck confit which we started on Tuesday, couple of days in salt and herbs and then today it went into a lot of duck fat and you've to simmer it slowly for a few hours so that you end up with a gorgeously tender, melt-in-the-mouth crispy duck rather than something deep fried that could be sold by KFC or KFD in this case. I wasn't so sure about this whole malarkey but despite the oil spa bath, it's not greasy at all, just completely sublime.

Rustic rosemary potatoes and roasted Jerusalem artichokes (beyond good) made an appearance too and for pud, sweet soufflés - a flourless lemon soufflé and a true classic, Soufflé Grand Marnier - as soon as those came out the oven, they were sent around the room, we were all armed with spoons and didn't need a second invitation, I'm down to make that one tomorrow as well so I'll be having a proper Julia Child day, classic French cuisine the whole way.