Chop Chop Charlotte

The final countdown

2009-07-05T16:08:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the long absence – what with all the cooking and studying and going to the pub and swimming in the sea, the lovely visitations from loved ones, the gardening classes and the yoga classes and the drumming classes (don’t laugh), not to mention the cleaning out of fridges, laying of tables and sweeping of stairs as dictated by numerous rotas pinned up about the place, it’s not easy to sit down at a computer.

And suddenly here I am with just three days to go. In less than four hours I have my practical exam (cooking and presenting a three course meal and baking a loaf of bread in three hours – deep breaths now), and then all day Friday there's a theory exam, followed some frantic packing and tidying, a farewell dinner at Ballymaloe House, and a final, misty-eyed trip to the Blackbird. And then back to the real world. Will we remember how it works?

So... some edited (food-related) highlights of the last six weeks, in reverse order.

Gone fishing

First off, my maiden fishing trip, with seven of my classmates and our friendly and patient skipper, Michael.

I caught mackerel! Bucket loads of them! (Well, at least six.) And was only sick once, and very discretely.

Glenny was the undisputed champion of the voyage, catching a pollock that was nearly as big as her. (In fact the girls beat the boys hands down, not that it's a competition, obviously...) That night Darina and Tim had invited all the students that had helped on the market stall for dinner, so we took a few fish over with us. They were swiftly filleted and dispatched to the frying pan, and they were sweetly delicious.

Ballymaloe beach barbecue

On Sunday we had a nearly-end-of-course barbecue on the beach, brilliantly organised by my class-mate Zoe. There was a hog roast (more of a hoglet roast really – Tim and Darina had donated a piglet for the party, and very delicious he was too), and a sound system (decorated with sweet peas from the glasshouse), and more booze than you could shake a stick at (including a gin, gooseberry and elderflower cocktail I made, which I'll wager was the best use of an overcooked gooseberry compote ever), and sunshine and rain and a full moon and singing and dancing and even a bit of cross-dressing swimming in the sea (thanks for that, Conor) – what more could you want of a beach barbecue? (Ok, a bit less rain perhaps.)

There were onions grilled with thyme to accompany the hog, and all the students chipped in with salads and breads.

I made a lurid pink beetroot and horseradish salad...

...and a delicious-if-I-do-say-so-myself spelt focaccia (the recipe is here – shhhhhh it’s not a Ballymaloe one – I did double the recipe and put a bit more olive oil in and a bit less water, and cooked it in a big roasting tray).

A bevy of birthdays

Matt J and Sigrid came over last weekend – the trip was Matt’s 30th birthday present from the rest of the Jarmans. We went on a little adventure to West Cork and stayed in a caravan on Saturday night, and it was ace, and the Goldfrapp song ‘Caravan Girl’ has been going round in my head ever since.

We slept in our funny little cupboard rooms and woke up to the rain drumming soothingly on the caravan roof, and cooked nice food (a highlight: flat French beans fresh from the Ballymaloe glasshouse, boiled till squeaky and then stirred into fried onions and little bits of local Gubeen chorizo), and walked along the cliffs to the next village for a pint (Owenahincha, where we were staying, boasts only a derelict hotel and a chippie – Rosscarbery is much posher), and had lunch at the lovely Glebe Gardens & Cafe, and wandered through their beautiful gardens...

(who would have thought you could grow apricots in an unheated polytunnel in Ireland?)

...and stumbled across a little festival in Baltimore, and had Guinness and oysters even though we weren’t really hungry because it would have been rude not to.

The weekend before that, Ayanna, Frank, Damani, Dave and Matt G all came for Ayanna’s birthday, and we ate fantastic wood-fired pizza, which Philip, the German butcher and baker and Darina’s son-in-law-to-be, is now making at school on Saturdays with his fiancé Emily, assisted by a few of the students (my housemate Antonio mans the oven). The toppings use lots of local ingredients, with as much produce as possible from the school farm, and have included potato, red onion, bacon and rosemary:

...and the unlikely sounding but delicious (really must look 'delicious' up in the thesaurus) courgette and glazed new season carrots:

I made birthday brownies (as tradition dictates - see recipe below), and we walked round the gardens and ceremoniously harvested the spring onions I’d planted on the first day, to be roasted for brunch the next day with thyme and olive oil and sea salt.

Frank and Dave were smitten by Tommy the duck, who has now been installed in the glasshouse as a slug extermination device (perhaps a slightly flawed plan, as he seems to have as much of a taste for lettuce as he does for slug – but a nice idea).

There seem to have been student birthdays at least once a week, which I suppose is normal when you spend a quarter of a year with 60-odd people. For Antonio's birthday I made the usual brownies, tweaked to make use of my new-found (and still slightly wobbly) paper piping bag skills:

I thought it was about time I included a recipe on here, so here is the one for the brownies. They are gluten free, so will make any coeliacs or wheat-intolerant people you know very happy indeed.

Brownies

Makes 24-48 (or more tiny bite-sized ones)

375g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids, preferably Fairtrade and/or organic)
375g butter
400g unrefined caster sugar
6 very large, 7 large or 9 medium free range eggs
4 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder - again, Fairtrade and/or organic
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
250g ground almonds
1 double espresso worth of strong coffee
Large handful of walnuts or pecans if you like

Preheat the oven to 180C.
Put the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl, set over a pan of cold water and bring the water to the boil. Turn the heat off and prod occasionally with a spoon until chocolate and butter melt.
Whizz the sugar, eggs, cocoa and bicarb in a food mixer or with an electric whisk. Add the ground almonds, the melted chocolate and the coffee.
Pour into one or two baking trays lined with baking parchment, sprinkle with nuts if using and cook for between 20 and 30 minutes, depending on how deep your baking trays are, how fierce your oven is and how squidgy you want the brownies to be.

Note: If you’re making these for a birthday, a thank you or whatever, you can toast the nuts first and stir them into the mixture instead of sprinkling them on top, melt some white chocolate, and pipe H-a-p-p-y B-i-r-t-h-d-a-y or whatever onto the tops of the brownies. Arrange them on a big plate and decorate with raspberries and mint leaves, or edible flowers. Even if, like mine, your piping skills aren’t up to much, they never fail to look lovely.

Other notable birthdays of late have been that of the lovely Peggy, who threw a cocktails and canapés party (there are, as Peggy noted, benefits to having your birthday at a cookery school). Here is Peggy hostessing it right up with her half-time oranges (famous on three continents):

The Barn contributed a big plate of tiny bruschetta (bruschetti?) to the party, made on pieces of Bob's number one son who'd been in the freezer.

...and I also made some little courgette, feta and dill cakes from Thomasina Miers’ lovely book Cook – they were a bit messy to make (partly because all the fridges in the cottages were so full of booze that there was nowhere to chill the mixture before I shaped them), but very tasty indeed - so tasty, in fact, that by the time I'd thought to take a picture of them, there was only one lonely and rather unphotogenic little fritter left... so no picture here to entice you, but make them, they really are the business.

Little courgette and dill cakes

Feeds 8 as a nibble or starter

500g courgettes, coarsely grated
2 eggs, beaten
6 spring onions or 3 shallots, finely chopped
2 heaped tbsp chopped fresh dill
80g fresh breadcrumbs
100g feta cheese, crumbled
a little flour, seasoned with salt and pepper
olive oil for frying
sea salt and black pepper

Put the courgettes in a colander and sprinkle with sea salt. Leave to drain for 30 mins (I put a weight on top), then squeeze out excess moisture, patting dry with kitchen paper. Mix the courgettes with the eggs, spring onion, dill, breadcrumbs and feta, and season. Refrigerate. Shape into small, flattish, bite-sized patties, roll in seasoned flour. Fry in batches in olive oil over a medium-high heat, cooking on both sides till golden. Drain on kitchen paper, and serve straight away with lemon wedges, parsley salad or tzatziki, or reheat in the oven later on.

The copious canapes were washed down with considerably more cocktails (and wine, and tequila) than is advisable, and the day after Peggy's party several of us were in a somewhat sorry state... but my housemates Brooke and Henrietta fed us back to something approaching normality with Brooke's speciality, spaghetti Carbonara. Brooke has treated us to Carbonara a few times over the past few weeks, and hers is the best I've had - nothing like the scrambled-eggy versions I've eaten (and made) in the past.

There is so much more to tell you about – the school trip... The fancy tasting menu at the Cliff House Hotel... (see Deirdre’s post about and lovely photos of that here.) The amazing peas that have all but disappeared now from the glasshouse, and the tomatoes that are just arriving... But I think this is probably more than enough for now... and besides I have to get out of bed and get down to the glasshouses to pick some salad leaves for my exam. Wish me luck!

Children of Bob

2009-05-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-20T13:51:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-13T23:09:00.000-07:00

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.

A salad for my mum

2009-05-01T00:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a better day. The sun shone, I finished cooking pretty much on time, and we had a lovely walk down to the sea after school.

I made some cucumber raita, a passable loaf of white soda bread...

...and a salad of sweetbreads and walnuts that I will have to make for my mum when I get home - she is a big thymus gland fan.

Chop chop Charlotte

2009-04-29T13:47:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-28T12:40:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

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.