15 May 2012

This morning I met one of the school's gardeners at 8am to pick fresh herbs for the day's cooking. It was such a lovely way to start the day. Later that morning I would realise I should have paid closer attention to what some of the herbs were, instead of getting distracted by all the other fun things on the farm ('Look! piglets!!').

Today I had to make a shepherd's pie, which involved making the minced meat sauce and Duchess potatoes (a fancy mashed potato with butter, milk and egg yolks), a chard gratin with gruyere, a salad of summer fruits and the raspberry sorbet that I didn't get to finish yesterday. We have three hours to cook but today I ran out of time. In the end the gratin became blanched chard with a topping of cheese and toasted breadcrumbs (I call it "low fat gratin'). My sorbet was delicious, but unfortunately one of the other students managed to drop it on the floor and shatter the dish it was in (Sorbet should be smooth, not crunchy with broken glass). Luckily the girl who dropped it had already taken a scoop, so I got to serve it ... decorated with chives. Some of you may not know this but chives have the most gorgeous little purple pompom flowers which I thought would look very sweet next to the deep red of the sorbet. Aesthetically lovely, but onion and raspberry are not a culinary match. But there was one triumph this morning: my shepherd's pie. You know you're getting a bit 'chefy' when you put mashed spuds in a piping bag. I mean, I doubt there are any shepherds out there decorating their pies with arty squiggles, but how pretty is this? I had never used a piping bag before, but now we are friends.

Today in demonstration the teacher made: Caesar salad, Warm salad of bacon and poached egg, Traditional roast stuffed chicken, Roast guinea fowl with potato and parsnip chips, Cranberry sauce, Bread sauce (literally a sauce made of milk and breadcrumbs ... sounds strange but its actually quite yummy), Redcurrant sauce, Game chips (potato chips, not casino chips), Parsnip crisps, Creamed celery, Turnips with caramelised onions, Rustic roast potatoes, Great grandmother's butter sponge (Victoria sponge), Summer pudding and Summer blackcurrant pudding. 

Correction from an earlier blog - I had previously stated black-eyed beans were called 'black-nosed beans' in Greek. The Greek words for eye (mati) and nose (miti) are similar, so actually, I have just been mispronouncing the name of these beans my entire life (special thanks to my uncle for correcting me). Anyway, I still hate them. And if black-nosed beans existed, I would probably hate them too.