Children of Bob

Bob has had babies! Twins, in fact.

I shaped the loaves late last night, slipped them into their proving baskets (Tim had said to line the baskets with clean tea towels, but those are hard to come by in our house so I used a pillow slip), tucked them safely up in a black bin liner and just about managed to resist the urge to read them a bedtime story. This morning I woke up before my alarm with a head full of bread, and crept downstairs feeling like a kid on Christmas morning.

In the black bin bag in the kitchen I found two voluptuously, extravagantly swollen loaves. One was so big that it was threatening to flow over the sides of its basket, so I switched on the oven, waited impatiently for it to get hot enough, flipped the loaf clumsily onto a baking tray (one pillow slip between two proving baskets suddenly not seeming like such a great idea), slashed its surface, sprinkled it with flour and slid it (carefully, carefully) into the at-last hot oven.

Forty minutes later - my first sourdough loaf! It was a bit wonky looking, and my housemate Charlotte said it smelled funny, but nothing could dent my maternal pride - and when I took it and its as-yet unbaked sibling in to school to show Tim, he said they looked lovely. He showed me how to brush water around the sides and top of the second loaf to soften the crust while it was baking and allow it to expand as much as it wanted to.

Not much left now, and there's no better compliment than that.

Growth spurt

Our house has been a hotbed of fermentation this week. Everywhere you look there are plastic tubs of beige ooze. They don’t look like much, but they contain MAGIC – the magical beginnings of sourdough bread. How exciting is it that you can mix together a bit of flour and water, keep adding little bits of flour and water each day, and then after a few days add a bigger bit of flour and water and some salt and make a beautiful, crusty, chewy loaf of bread? Very, that’s how.

Sometimes the starters get a bit over-excited – never keep one in a glass jar, apparently they can explode with such force that they shatter the glass.

My starter (Bob – apparently you’re supposed to name them - the leaky one pictured above is my housemate Conor's offspring, Bernie) is 8 days old, and tomorrow, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be baking my first two naturally leavened loaves. Earlier today it looked like this – I think at this stage it's called a sponge (Sponge Bob - ha ha). Or perhaps it's still a starter – need to read some more Andrew Whitley.

I kept some back as a starter (sponge?) for next time I want to make bread, added more flour and salt, and mixed a craggy looking dough.

After 15 minutes of good hard kneading, it was starting to look lovely and smooth and round, like an ostrich egg, or a big pregnant belly.

It’s been growing all evening, and before I go to bed I’m going to knock it back, shape it, and put it into baskets for its final proving, ready to be baked tomorrow morning.

Other things have been growing too. Spuds, for example. This is Darina's husband Tim Allen, our gardening teacher (and bread-baking guru), lifting the very first new potatoes of the season.

(As they’re grown in the glasshouse, these potatoes are so early that when I worked on the Ballymaloe stall at the farmers’ market on Saturday, we were selling them at €8 a kilo. One woman brought a bag over to the scales and I had to tell her that that would be €28 please. It was quite a big bag, admittedly, but still. She politely declined.)

The broad beans are ready for picking too, and the courgettes are in full swing, and my little spring onions are coming along nicely.

Our windowsill salad garden has contributed towards several dinners...

...and the seeds I planted in gardening class a couple of weeks ago have come up lovely and are ready to be snipped into salads.

A first chick has hatched in the incubator in the office (you might just be able to make him out)…

…and the adopted duckling is now almost as big as his surrogate mum.

What else has happened? I’ve learned to cook some proper hearty Irish fare, including a full Irish breakfast, complete with fadge (stop sniggering at the back – it’s potato cake) and black and white pudding (but omitting the optional kidneys, because as everyone knows they smell of wee). I overcooked my egg a bit, but other than that it was a very tasty plateful, eaten for lunch yesterday, washed down with a glass of Bucks Fizz. Beats a sandwich sitting at your desk, I think you will agree. (Apologies if you're reading this while sprinkling your keyboard with Pret crumbs.)

(Hmm - not sure why this photo is sideways.)

I’ve also made Irish stew…

...and white yeast bread...

…and some fancier stuff, like crab pate…

...and my very first Hollandaise sauce.

(Blogger - stop messing with my photos.)

We got to watch Philip, one of our teachers, butcher half a pig.

And there have been more walks to the beach, sometimes even before-school ones…

…and more fuzzily documented trips to the Blackbird…

Will write soon with news of Bob’s progress. Betcha can’t wait.

A couple of local birds

Time is sliding by at an alarming rate - we're nearly a third of the way through the course already, and they've started talking about exams. In a couple of weeks time I will be expected to demonstrate my herb and salad knowledge (should be ok), and any two skills out of a very long list including 'melt chocolate' (yep, can do that one), 'segment citrus fruit' (easy peasy), 'joint a chicken' (erm...) and 'fillet a fish' (eek).

But all work and no play and all that. There have been walks along the cliffs...

...and along the beach...

...and nights at the pub - this is a very blurry photo of the Sunday night jam at the Blackbird in Ballycotton.

Matt came over the weekend before last, and we spent the weekend in Cork City. We had a lovely dinner at Cafe Paradiso, which Matthew Fort described as "a restaurant which treats food with wit, knowledge, spirit and enjoyment" that "just happens to be vegetarian." We ate local asparagus with salt flakes and rosemary aioli; a watercress, lemon and asparagus risotto; a spiced aubergine and potato gratin with lovely fresh goat's cheese on top; and a brilliant dessert of vanilla ice cream, a shot each of espresso and frangelico, and brutti ma buoni ('ugly but good') cookies - two tiny, chewy hazelnut meringue biscuits. They've offered me a week's work experience after I finish here, I think I'll probably do it.

The next day, in the name of balance, we ate bacon, sausage and black and white pudding sandwiches at the Farmgate Cafe in the English Market, where you can buy organic vegetables, all kinds of cheese (including lots made in County Cork), very many different bits of pig (might get myself a pork bodice if all the butter and double cream starts to show)...

...and all manner of other regional delicacies. Battered burger, madam?

Back at Ballymaloe, I've had a couple of early morning salad and herb duties, which involve going down to the glasshouses before school to 'help' Haulie the gardener pick the produce to be used in that morning's class. Haulie manages to be remarkably patient with the incompetent townies as we snip off stalks of chervil one by one - occasionally muttering "Don't be frightened of it" and "You'd never make a hairdresser," but in a friendly sort of a way.

Cookingwise, I have made redcurrant jelly...

...and mayonnaise (very satisfying)...

...and cooked langoustines (to serve with said mayo)...

...and stuffed and roasted a guinea fowl...

...and made mashed swede, caramelised onions, game chips and parsnip crisps to go with it. (Knowing how to make your own crisps - is this a good thing?)

(Still can't get the hang of the fancy-schmancy presentation - my teacher Rosie did most of this.)

One afternoon we had a talk on game. As the birds they showed us had been in the freezer, they needed to be eaten and were given away to the students after the class.

We made off with this handsome mallard.

First he had to be plucked.

Next came the gutting. Totally unfazed, my housemate Charlotte, a farmer's daughter whose dad runs a shoot, gave her dad a quick call to check that she had the basics right and then got stuck right in. Those of you of a sensitive disposition may want to look away now.

When Charlotte had divested ducky of his innards, we roasted him with baby carrots and young beetroots and new potatoes from the farm. He smelled a bit funny while he was in the oven, and we started to wonder whether it had been worth all the effort, but when he came out he was surprisingly tasty, if a little over-done.