Chop chop Charlotte

I finished cooking an hour late this morning. Not sure what happened - perhaps I dallied too long over jointing my chicken. Ah well, it's only week two, plenty of time to speed up.

Here are some of the things I've made over the past few days.

Scones and rasperry jam

Little lemony fork biscuits...

which turn out like this:

A mushroom and thyme tart

- not bad, but my tart case lining needs a bit of work

Fruit salad with geranium leaf syrup

Goat's cheese, honey and rocket salad

- a tricky one to balls up

Brown soda bread

Wild garlic pesto (very nice, if I do say so myself)

And creme caramel - not a patch on my pa's

My new house

Maybe half the students on the course are living in cottages on the school grounds – this is The Barn, the house I’m sharing with ten (yikes) other people. We are two boys and nine girls from England, Northern Ireland, the States, Australia and Sicily. Antonio made pizza tonight - Sicilians make good housemates.

This is my lovely room-mate, Rachel from Adelaide.

Sunday night is homework night.

(And also live music night at the Blackbird in Ballycotton - photos of that later.)

The school is surrounded by fantastic organic gardens which supply quite a bit of the produce we use in our classes.


There is an acre of glasshouses (they used to heat them but they don't any more), producing all sorts of veg...

...like onions...

...carrots and beetroots...

...broad beans...

...and every herb you can think of.

Once a week there's a gardening club before class. On our first day we each planted a spring onion so that we can watch it grow over the next few weeks...

...and we've planted a little tiny salad garden in front of our cottage.

There are chickens and pigs and ducks and dogs all over the place, it is quite the rural idyll.

The chickens know when it's dinner time.

Mmmmmm delicious...

This is Muffin. Or maybe it's the other one.

Apparently ducks make lousy mothers, so this duckling has been adopted by a hen.

Welcome to Gastro Boot Camp

On the first day of the 12 week certificate course at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Cork, Darina Allen (founder of the school, and a very big cheese on the Irish food scene) welcomed us to 'gastro boot camp', and I think she was only half joking. One week and two days in, the teachers are still being fairly easy on us, but you can already feel the ante slowly-but-surely being upped.

We cook four mornings a week, and there is one teacher to every 6 students, so we get lots of one-to-one attention - and we're graded on everything we produce, which is a bit scary but a good incentive to try your hardest. In the afternoons there are cooking demonstrations by Darina and her brother Rory, who used to be head chef at Ballymaloe House, a posh hotel and restaurant a few kilometres away, and has worked with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in California. On the other day we have lectures all day on things like cheese and wine, as well as boring-but-useful stuff like how to put out fires and avoid poisoning people. As well as practical classes, lectures and homework (and later on, exams) we have all sorts of duties to carry out – feeding scraps to the chickens, picking vegetables and herbs to use in our classes, making salad for lunch, and helping to serve, clean, hoover and polish.

Every lunchtime we sit down together to eat a three course meal made up of the food we've cooked in the morning (ok, so it’s not quite a boot camp). So far my jeans still fit – I am going to have to exercise some serious portion control for that to continue to be the case, it's all about the butter and the cream over here.