Day 71: Small mercies

It’s okay - I’ve calmed down. A bit. Or maybe I’m just too tired to be angry any more, it’s hard to tell. I was still angry earlier, but resisted the temptation to vent my frustration, took a few deep breaths and started making a ciabatta biga in one of the kitchens instead of having my lunch in the dining room where I may have been tempted to have words with the twat.

I had to take the car in this morning, so was up at 7am after an inadequate weekend’s kip to drop it off and cadge a lift to school. I got in around half 8 to discover I was on stock duty, which starts at 8. I just didn’t know. But then ignorance of the law is no defence, so I will have to make up for it later in some ball breaking way no doubt.

I use my early arrival to flaunt the rules and practice an exam dish - ruby grapefruit and pomegranate sorbet. I use my own ingredients, and my own time, so I can’t see too much wrong with that. It’s a good job I did too, since I have sussed out a few things that will prove handy. Namely, that he sorbetiere I used is shit, and that there is a far superior one elsewhere in the school that I must use in the exam. I also get to check the sweetness of the recipe, and try out the presentation. Some people thought it needed more sugar, but I wasn't one of them.

For the exam we all have to make a bread, to be determined by ballot. This means I need to revisit some of the earlier ones I made just to remind myself, so I knock up a white soda. Except I balls it up totally, having forgotten all the golden rules of soda breads that I learnt about two months ago. Luckily my brilliant teacher, Debbie, puts me straight. They are a complete doddle to make, if you can just remember how.

I don’t really have a great deal else to do today - roast a rack of lamb, make redcurrant sauce and cook some cabbage. I start by prepping the lamb, which I have done a good few times before. In the hotel kitchen they just discard the section you cut from the rib, but today we are cooking them in breadcrumbs as Epigrams, meaning I have to be a bit more gentle and fillet the rib bones individually, which takes longer. The epigrams go in flour, egg and breadcrumbs and onto a tray. One guy can’t remember the order you do this. It’s easy I tell him - flour, egg, crumb, or “FEC” for short.

Ribs ready, epigrams fecced. I cheat on the redcurrant sauce recipe and whack the frozen redcurrants and sugar together in the pan. The frozen ones shed so much water you don’t need to add any. They cook until they burst, when the tartness of the currants and the sweetness of the sugar mingle and form the sauce. I prep the cabbage, and now have some time to kill.

Since I naused up the béarnaise a few weeks back, I want to give it another go. I can put fresh mint through it instead of tarragon to adapt it for the lamb. This time I keep the heat plenty low enough, and the whole thing goes off swimmingly. By the time I finish that, I’m ready to cook my cabbage, and once that’s out of the way the lamb comes out.

The way to test a roasted joint of meat’s readiness is with a skewer. You plunge it into the deepest part of flesh (the animal’s, not your own) and count to five. When you pull it out, you place it on a sensitive piece of skin, like the wrist or the cheek, to assess its heat. Obviously it takes a bit of practice to learn the different temperatures, but you have to start somewhere. I take my skewer out and it is hotter than the sun. I rest the rack for twenty minutes or so before plating up, when I carve a rib and discover that it is indeed well cooked. No one seems to mind though, since we were supposed to be cooking them no less than medium anyway.

With my lamb plated up I turn to the sorbet. It is formed of fairly large ice crystals, thanks to the crappy machine, which gives it an unsatisfactory texture, a bit like a slush puppy that you put in the freezer. I manage to get a few scoops out of it and plate up with grapefruit segments and pomegranate seeds. After tasting I decant it into the decent machine and am amazed when I return twenty minutes later to find a proper sorbet with the texture of ice cream.

I pretty much skip lunch, and head for demo, which today is pasta. It drags on a bit, as it often does on a Monday. There are a few highlights; ravioli with sage butter is very good. The desserts are promising but fail to deliver spectacularly. The panna cotta has the consistency of the strawberry jelly they serve up in Parkhurst. It has had a serious overdose of gelatine and is frankly, dangerous. The tiramisu sucks too. It is too boozy. I am really starting to see the appeal of the alcohol free tiramisu that my friends made a few weeks back. It’s funny because in the Trattoria in Youghal the other week I tried both the tiramisu, which was excellent, and the panna cotta, which was life changingly good. We’re going back this week, and I am asking for the recipe.

As if my day wasn't long enough already, we have an olive oil lecture and tasting. The definition of lecture round here is one person reading out loud a set of notes that everyone already has and embellishing them with a series of lengthy tangential anecdotes and incomprehensible descriptions of ancient olive presses. My penance for missing duty this morning is to clear up after this, so by the time I get home, it is gone 8.30pm. Still, the alternative was to get in at 8am tomorrow and mince beef for everyone’s ragu, so I guess I should be thankful.

Days 69 & 70: Falling Down

Aren’t people funny eh? They are all so very different. After ten weeks in a confined environment, you start to get to know them. Some of them reveal themselves quickly; others take their time. Others still are yet to emerge. The fun part is watching your first impressions and assumptions get overturned. Or not.

And then, as if things weren’t complicated enough already, people go and change. They respond to their environment. They grow in confidence and stature, or they shrink back from it as the world revolves around them. This place is incredibly intense and daunting at times, even for an old timer like me. Most of these guys are younger, and live thrust together in tiny rooms and cottages with washing up and detritus piling up to the ceilings. For the sake of my sanity I opted out of this arrangement, and will be forever grateful that I did.

When, to the recipe of this gulag, populated by a multitude of shifting characters emerging from the uniformity of their chefs’ whites, one adds the magic ingredient, alcohol, interesting things are bound to happen. I was in the Blackbird again last night. This time it felt different. I felt old, and over it.

At one point a nice young lad, one of the student’s brothers (who, it transpired, was only fifteen years old) asked me how many beers I’d had. I don’t really count, I told him, but he proudly confided in me that he had drunk eleven pints. I must look like the kind of person who would be impressed by this kind of statistic. I was more impressed half an hour later, when he returned from the bar with another pint, and declared it to be his tenth of the day. For a minute I thought that whole Time’s Arrow thing was happening again, and I would be forced to watch him get more and more sober as the night wore on. Thankfully though, the axis of time and its staunch ally, inevitability, took a confident grip on the situation and he had to run outside and vomit all over the road. Right in the spot where my car would have been, had I not been so old and wise as to park it a little further down the line.

Just to prove that it is not only young people who are stupid, another person stepped up to the plate to demonstrate their own tiny mind’s incomparable powers. There is a lady in these parts who is, in the parlance of our times, a celebrity chef. She is extremely pretty and likeable and a lot of people, the girls in particular, really admire and respect her.

They were delighted when she walked into the Blackbird last night with her husband, even more so when she enjoyed a little boogie with them, posing for pictures and generally having a good time. Her husband took exception to this however, snatching one of the girls’ cameras away, confiscating it so that their ‘PA’ could vet the pictures and refusing to return it to its owner. Fortunately I didn’t witness this episode unfolding. I fear my long history of intervening in such situations would have gotten the better of me. It will be interesting to see how this situation develops over the next couple of days, particularly as he is forever loitering around the school for no apparent reason other than it being run by his mother.

All of this contributed to a slight sense of frustration really. Maybe it’s the getting old (another birthday looms ominously in my mirrors); maybe it’s the uncertainty over what happens next. Or maybe I am just intolerant of idiots, and was unlucky enough to bump into a few of them in one night.

I like to think of myself as being quite considerate and chivalrous, despite my general air of curtness and arrogance. I always hold doors open for people and usually apologise swiftly and sincerely on the many occasions upon which I upset or offend them (except for my friends, who have come to expect this and know I don’t mean it). My patience is beginning to wear thin, and as the end (and my 32nd birthday) hunt me down so intently, it will surely become even more wafer-like. It has two weeks to hold out. Just two weeks. I sense impending doom, but know if I make it through without kicking any bins, then I really must be getting old.

Day 68: Dans le sac

With the stress of finalising my menu out of the way, I had a few beers on Thursday night, and was thus suffering from a slight slowness of foot this morning. Not as slow as some though, the kitchen had only slightly fewer cooks in it than the galley of the Mary Celeste when they found her bobbing around in the middle of the Atlantic. It is round about the time that people start dropping like flies, I am told.

On account of this, and the fact that I am still shy a few hours' sleep, I decide not to push myself too hard. The day begins with slicing 3lb of onions for a classic French Onion Soup. You can imagine what a ballache that is at nine in the morning. In order to make this dish well, you must first slice the onions as finely as possible, and then caramelise them way beyond the point at which you would imagine you should stop. I expedite the process my sweating them with the lid on until they are completely soft. They are then caramelised on a very low heat, stirring now and then, and whenever a spare few minutes come along I give them a blast of very high heat and scrape the colour off the bottom of the pan.

My sourdoughs have risen nicely overnight in their baskets, so I turn them out onto a baking tray. This is a delicate procedure, and only a true pro can do it without deflating some of their rising. The alternative is to bake them in tins. I will persevere with the baskets. You need them to get the crust:crumb ratio right and, well, sourdough just isn’t baked in tins, is it? I borrow a razor to slash them, and make a mess of it by using a blunt part of the blade and having to go over my cuts. I am slashing the life out of it, I am told. Another lesson learned. They go in the oven before I get the chance to undo any more of my hard work.

My other dish is a tangerine mousse that is supposed to be housed inside chocolate cases. I swapped dishes with someone, since I am yet to use gelatine and need to get it ticked off the list. I melt some chocolate and separately whisk up a base of eggs, sugar and rind. Meanwhile, I sponge the gelatine in lemon juice, and dissolve it in the chocolate’s bain marie. Into the dissolved gelatine goes the rest of the lemon juice and the juice of three tangerines, and this all gets folded back into the whisked up base and cooled on ice.

Now for the chocolate cases. You may recall my first encounter with them last week;

This is a complete pain in the arse, the kind of thing no one of sound mind would ever attempt. It involves melting and then painting it on the inside of petit four cases which you then later peel off. Except you don’t, since they melt the minute they come in to contact with you.

The cases might be bigger, but this doesn’t help. I have since discovered that you can buy them for 12 cents each. They take around two minutes each to make, plus another two minutes to peel the case off without breaking them. Someone with smaller, colder fingers and the temperament for this kind of operation might get the whole thing done in two minutes at best. Even if they did it in a solitary minute, yielding sixty an hour, that would only save you €7.20. The minimum wage in this country is €8.65. And if you’re lucky enough to have someone that skilful on the payroll, you might as well get them doing something useful.

There seem to be a lot of scones being baked around the place this morning, and things get civilised when a teapot is produced along with some butter and jam and we all indulge ourselves a little. I love Kitchen One; it is so very genteel. "No it focking isn’t", says a familiar voice.

I whip some cream and fold a little into the mousse. I pour some into two of the 12 cent chocolate cases (mine all collapsed at the unwrapping stage) and a martini glass for presenting. I spread my remaining melted chocolate onto cardboard to make chocolate caraque and some other shapes for garnish. You need the temperature exactly right for caraque. My attempt is a bit like three putting and going past the hole each time. Too warm; too cold; too warm; oh fuck it. I borrow someone else’s and we eat the evidence. I put tangerine rind and juice through the rest of the cream with a little icing sugar to pipe on for garnish.

The sourdoughs are out of the oven by now, and look grand. The onions are getting close to being ready - they have to be so dark. We are adding chicken stock, since there is an obsession with the stuff round here, but for authenticity one should really be using beef. This goes in, the seasoning is corrected and we cook for a further ten minutes or so. A bit of toasted baguette goes on top, sprinkled with gruyere and then the whole dish popped under the grill. There is a shortage of proper French onion soup bowls, but I manage to lay my hands on a very small one (keeping up the genteel theme).

I garnish the mousses with the I am all plated up on time, they look nice, taste good, and a solid week’s cooking is securely in the bag. The sourdough has cooled so I cut it, and it is good, definitely the best of the three batches I’ve made so far. I picked up a few things along the way, dodged a few bullets, and have plenty to go to war with next time. They kind of make up for the disappointment of the ciabatta texture, though I have a plan to rectify that next week. With only five days in the kitchen remaining, I need to be baking every day to make the most of it.

After demo I squeeze in my customary Friday evening powernap. I make a quick trip out to Cork airport to pick up a friend of a friend, followed by dinner for nine of us in Nautilus in Ballycotton (duck pie followed by roasted cod, very nice). The usual session in the Blackbird ensues, and after a long and happy night's sleep, order has been restored in the galaxy.

Day 67: Delivering the goods

Stock duty. That means 8am in the school making huge pots of stock. Not the way you want your days to start, especially not ones as cold as this. 8am. I never function too well this early in the morning.

I’m done by about quarter to nine so make an early start on some bread. I use yesterday’s biga to make a ciabatta dough, sticking to the same flour proportions. It is too wet still, and takes only 75g water to 100g flour, and not 80 as the recipe suggests. I am hoping to get good bubbles and an authentic, chewy texture. I also make up a sourdough, using 25g rye flour for the first time, to try and draw the sourness out of the starter and give a greater depth of flavour.

My listed dishes today are grilled tuna steaks with salsa verde, Tuscan noodles and curly kale (yet again). Buggering about with my breads takes care of most of the first hour, during which time I also make up the dough for my pasta, which consists of just 00 flour and egg. The recipe calls for a very small quantity, which has to be kneaded for ten minutes until it is smooth and silky. Kneading something this miniscule is virtually impossible. It is a job for someone with extremely small hands.

The salsa verde we tasted the other day was overpowered by the capers. I wring mine out and rinse them, but still they dominate. I bump up a few other ingredients to compensate; the anchovies, lemon juice and garlic, and get it roughly where I want it. Seasoning and balancing it is tricky, as it is designed to accompany the tuna. Without the foil, it is tricky to get it right. That’s where experience comes in, and I don’t have enough.

I’m still backwards and forwards on the breads, and time, as is its want, is evaporating. After my pasta dough has rested for a bit, I roll it out on the machine. It reminds me of Christmas time, when Dad would roll out reams and reams of the stuff on a long workbench in the garage in readiness for the great Boxing Day family meal. Maybe it’s a bit warm in the kitchen but it is not rolling that well, and it definitely can’t take it on the thinnest setting, so I have to finish off with a rolling pin, before leaving it on a clothes rack to dry.

By now it is time to shape my ciabatta, which is tricky at the best of times. I’m pretty pleased with myself; despite the dough’s wetness (it spills out onto the worktop) I manage to get some proper slipper shapes out of it, and there are some good bubbles under the skin.

As I mentioned, the minutes are flying from me, when I suddenly remember I was supposed to be making curly kale. I grab a load from the larder, get a big pan going and start prepping it. I get a little cream and season it up with nutmeg and salt and pepper ready to go in. Everything is going to come together at once here, so I will need my merde en place again. I get a serving plate and bowls warming n the oven, and lemon and parsley garnishes ready for the tuna. My salsa verde is ready to go. I have the magimix standing by for the kale.

The kale is done and I drain it off (the water is the craziest luminous green I have seen since some tiny weird frog hopped across the balcony in Greece years ago). Into the mix, blast it, add butter and the seasoned cream, taste, tweak, and into the bowl. I get it tasted before it goes into the oven. There is a slight moment here. I have tasted it. I know it is well seasoned, and is good. I don’t think it; I know it. I trust myself.

The pasta is starting to turn a little leathery, so I get it off the rack and roll and cut it. In a bowl I grate Parmesan, a little garlic and add olive oil and some fresh basil. I have another sprig ready for garnish. I fill the pan back up with water to boil for the pasta, and get the griddle on the heat for the tuna. They will both take a mere two minutes. I have a colander ready to drain the pasta and the serving plates out. In goes the pasta, on go the steaks. After thirty seconds I turn them 90º to get nice gridlines. After a minute I flip them over and repeat. The heat comes off the pasta and I drain it and toss it in the oil straight away. The tuna is on the serving plate and the salsa laid on top. Done. The pasta I flip with my hands and into the bowl, top with the basil and I’m all done. The sink is full of pans that I have crashed and banged about, but I got two last minute dishes turned out side by side, and they’re both grand and piping hot.

As the lunch rush subsides I take my ciabattas out of the oven. The ultimate disappointment. The bubbles aren't there and they just don't look and feel right. It is a regression. Did I really think I would nail one of the most difficult breads in the world at the second attempt? Well, yes, actually. Why not? I'll take a couple of days to think about it all, read some more recipes, draw up a plan, and come back for more. Bring on the slipper.

Can’t say I learnt a lot in demo today - a few mousses and fish and chips, basically. Once we were done I turned my sourdough into baskets to prove overnight, and got in position for our final wine lecture. At 8pm I hauled my ass out of there, only to find the fucking windscreen had frosted over. Twelve long hours at Ballymaloe Cookery School. Before afternoon demo there was a very public ballot to determine times for the final exam. The first shock is that the earliest slot is 7.30am. Mon Dieu! Exams are on the 9th and 10th December. I desperately want to draw the 9th, since it is my birthday, and with the exam out of the way I can set about getting pissed unhindered. No such luck. I pull 8am on Thursday 10th. C’est la vie. At least the kitchen won’t be too busy, and I can just get on with delivering the goods.

Which, incidentally, is what I did today. Nothing spectacular - just solid, good food. Going through the motions. Exactly what I came here to learn. Making omelettes, breaking eggs.

Day 66: Menu du jour

Right, back to normal today. In my defence, I had just finished Time’s Arrow and sat down to scribble another day’s nonsense when the thought occurred. It was kind of fun to be honest, but it wrecks your brain, trying to think everything through in reverse. Amis must have been completely fucked by the time he finished writing it.

Today is double demo day. Canapés and finger food in the morning, sushi in the afternoon. The canapé demo has drawn a fair crowd of outsiders, and the school is out in team strength up front. Different people take us through different dishes, tag team style. The sous chefs are on fire. At one point there were five people behind the counter, all concentrating furiously as they assembled the most intricate and pedantic of all foods. Watching them, I secretly prayed that I would never have to do it myself.

Lunch was yesterday’s curry, which I didn’t fancy then, let alone now. I consoled myself with a bowl of soup and chatted to one of the few guys on the course, who, it turns out, is an ex-rally driver. As we chatted about Formula 1, it transpires that he is off to Melbourne at Christmas, which suddenly got me thinking again. That damn F-Word just won’t go away.

After lunch I quickly knocked up a biga as I am going to make ciabatta tomorrow. I’m going even stronger this time, half 00 and half baker's flour. I also refresh my sourdough starter with a big feed, ready to be made up tomorrow and baked on Friday.

Back in demo, it is time for sushi. One of the students, Satoko, is a cookery teacher in Japan, and she has been roped into taking part in today’s extravaganza (another bumper crowd in the galleries). She is extremely nervous, worried about her English, but delivers the goods in style. Her talk about Obento lunchboxes, and how one assembles them with more than food - with love - is quite touching. She hopes, she says, we will all go away and make them for the ones we love.

This would be the highlight of my afternoon, but Satoko proceeds to make miso soup. Miso soup is one of those things so ubiquitous these days, that we become accustomed to, and accepting of, its mediocrity. Not today though. Satoko’s 102-year old grandmother has sent over some of her homemade miso paste. It takes over a year to knock this stuff up. The soup is extraordinarily good and dwarfs everything else we have consumed in the day’s frenzy of cooking and sushi rolling. Something warms my soul when a little old Japanese lady kicks everyone else’s ass from the other side of the world, with her simple mastery of an ancient art.

My evening is consumed entirely by the bloody menu for my exam. Everything has to be in by 2pm tomorrow: the menu, accompanying wines, the occasion you have in mind, and your reasons for choosing it. Also, a complete list of all ingredients is required. Organising the whole shooting match must be a complete nightmare - 63 menus and ingredient lists that all need to be checked and ordered. The most daunting aspect of all this is that whatever goes on that piece of paper tomorrow is what you are cooking, and what you are getting. Forget to put those shallots on? Tough shit - you ain’t getting any.

Committing to the dishes themselves is scary enough. I sketch up a quick idea of what will take how long. I have three hours, and am coming in at nearer four. But I have a lot of fat in my timings. I think I’ll be good. I have a reasonable mix of last minute stuff and things that can be prepped ahead and either chilled or kept warm. The starter I was planning has been kicked up to dessert and I’ve slipped in the squid, with a caveat that I get small ones. My menu looks like this:

Chargrilled Squid with Chilli and Parsley Oil

William Fèvre Chablis Premier Cru ‘Vaillons’ 2006

----oOo----

Boeuf Bourguignon

Pommes Duchesse

Romanesco

Green Salad

Chateau du Cèdre ‘Le Prestige’, Cahors 2005

----oOo----

Ruby Grapefruit and Pomegranate Sorbet

In two week’s time, I will have three hours in which to knock that little lot up. Ten weeks ago, that would have been impossible. Now, I’m just looking forward to it.

It looks grand and sounds mighty posh, I know. Will it taste any better than a centurion’s miso soup? No. Impossible. Some things are just special. They require no embellishment. Write them in French - they don't get any better or worse. They are what they are. Those who make them are gifted beyond our comprehension. When we taste them, we are privileged. The gift of truly great food.

Day 65: Arrow's Time

I left the conservatory having just finished writing my blog a few minutes ago and walked backwards across the courtyard to my cottage. I sat in the armchair there for a while, and started reading a book by that Martin Amis guy. There were a lot of comments on the front cover saying how great it was, and it started out with a guy being born. Can’t see what’s so special about that?

After I’d read a couple of chapters I went outside and started the car. I drove back through the country lanes to the cookery school. It’s a real bastard driving with only those tiny mirrors to show you where you’re going, especially this early in the morning, before the sun has risen. It’s still dark when I get to the school and walk round to my friends’ house. I don’t bother knocking, and I’m the first one there, but people steadily arrive, always greeted with a fond farewell. We sit around and talk about what may or may not have happened in the past few weeks. None of us seem sure. Bizarrely, we seem to spend a lot of time talking about what is going to happen today with real clarity, as if we already know. We’ll see I guess.

As it begins to get light outside, some of us walk over to the school. One by one we arrive and pick up dirty plates from a trolley. We spill food onto them from our mouths, and then, all lining up in a big queue, carefully arrange the different foods on large serving plates. As we file back down to our seats, one guy takes centre stage behind a big counter. He takes the serving plates and removes things from them. He puts the food in frying pans, saucepans and onto trays, which he carefully slots into racks in ovens. They look bloody hot as they go in. As the pans suck the smoke out of the room, their contents change in colour. Eventually he takes things out of the pan altogether. He carefully disassembles them, and places their constituent parts into different pots, sometimes grabbing a few extra bits from the bin and almost magically combining them with things from the pans to create totally different objects. At one point, he takes slices of apple, and sticks them together one by one into an almost perfect sphere, and then wraps them in a beautiful green skin plucked straight out of the hens’ bucket.

Later in the day, I go into the kitchen. I take some long baguettes and somehow roll them from their sausage shapes into rounder balls. A couple of hours after that, I stick the balls together and put them in a mixer, which beats the whole lump around until it comes apart. Much later in the day, I extract the different components from this mixture - flour, water, yeast and salt - weigh them carefully and replace them in their various containers. I’ve unmade plenty of baguettes in my life but something tells me this will be the last time.

In between all that, I take some perfectly char grilled squid and pop it onto the grill pan until it loses its colour and goes all soft and floppy. While it does so, I take a plate of rocket leaves, undrizzle some parsley, garlic and chilli dressing that I will later painstakingly separate out and reconstitute from the tiny chopped fragments. The flesh of the squid has been scored, so I undo that with my largest knife. I also use it to stick them back together until they form a little tube like sack. I fish some strange looking bits out of the bin, rub ink into them under the tap and stuff them back inside the squid, having reattached the tentacles, again using my knife.

After putting the squid back with all the other squids to be replaced into the sea this evening, I turn to some almond fingers. I take them from a large serving plate, unsprinkle them with icing sugar and put leave them on a baking tray to get warm before I pop them in the oven. Half an hour or so later, they come out cold, and I brush off the melted butter that coats them. Then, one by one, I unroll them and remove the little lumps of almond mixture. I put the rectangles of filo pastry in a pile, and when I finally finish unravelling them all, I stick them together in larger sheets, roll them up and stuff them in a box. With my fingers I separate some sugar and ground almonds, and pour some orange blossom water out of the mixture back into the bottle.

I put all the things on my station away, and rub some dirt into my hands at the washbasin. I have to drive the bloody car back along those roads again, though thankfully it is just still light at this time of day. Only just though, and by the time the kettle has chilled the water from my mug and the toaster has sucked in the toast and turned it into stale bread, it is dark again. Luckily I’m feeling pretty refreshed, though after undressing, a quick blast in the shower makes me feel a lot more lethargic, and I crawl into bed backwards like a Neanderthal. No doubt I will fall asleep the second the alarm goes off. Something tells me it’ll take ages to wake up though, and I have strong feeling that I will spend the first hour of the day reading some more of that Time’s Arrow book by good old Martin Amis.

Day 64: Fries with that?

As if I weren’t dazed enough from the weekend’s thinking, I had to endure an inexplicable hour of alertness between about 4 and 5am this morning, so when I do eventually rise I am almost deliriously tired. Week ten. Almost impossible to believe, but that’s what I wake up to. And just to put the passage of time into perspective, I’m back in Kitchen One, where it all began nine long weeks ago.

Burgers. Spread thinly and revoltingly around the globe by The Scottish Restaurant, but also the plaything of many a three star chef. Burgers with foie gras and truffles cosy up with tournedos and filet mignons on the world’s most expensive menus. Today it is my turn. Except I am making Beef Burgers with Pesto and Caramelised Onions so I don’t think Daniel Boulud need sign up to jobs.com just yet.

My order of work looks thinner than a flame-grilled Whopper today. I squeeze in an extra half recipe of burger buns that are made using yoghurt, of all things. This should help balance out my morning, since the burgers and chips will all cook late. The dough is extremely wet and won’t come together in a mixer, so I have to hand knead it and try and work more flour in. It has a lovely soft, light consistency, so I won’t complain, but it is a bit of a pain in the ass to handle.

It goes in the proving oven and I get my meat. When making burgers it is essential that you use freshly ground beef, and that the beef be from a good source. You can’t make good burgers with shit mince. End of story. The recipe we use here is simple; softened, cooled onions, thyme, parsley and minced beef. That's it - no binding or rusk. But we do, if one wishes, have caul fat in which to wrap them. Caul fat protects the intestines of pigs. It is a quite beautiful, lacy substance - one of those curious wonders of nature. It is not to everyone’s liking, so I only wrap half of my burgers in it. I like it myself, but wouldn’t be in the mood for it all the time.

I make pesto, but with rocket instead of basil as there is a shortage. Doesn’t work for me. Burgers are made and chilling in the fridge, baps are rising, onions are caramelising on the hob, I cut some chips and rinse and dry them, and I am set. The buns take ages to prove and I won’t have them ready by midday. Luckily someone else got a batch started before me, so I nab one to plate up. We are all trying to finish on time now, since we only get three hours in the exam and we might as well get in the habit.

There was an eerie silence at times in the kitchen today whilst all this was going on. It was the sound of people who knew what they were doing and going quietly, confidently about it. It was quite something to witness, and seemed to almost materialise overnight. I have to clean up one of the sinks, so keep my beady eyes open for anyone dumping their crap in there. They don’t. They come and go and wash and dry, and everyone is happy and gets it done. I hesitate to use the word, because it might seem presumptive, or even pre-emptive, but the whole morning had an air of professionalism about it. That’s what nine weeks will do for you I guess.

I have spent the last two hours sat in the middle of my lounge surrounded by sheets and sheets of paper, slowly, methodically organising my recipes. There are two reasons: mainly, because I have to, secondarily, because I am still seeking inspiration for my exam menu.

I am definitely making Boeuf Bourguignon as my main course. No brainer. There is an issue with accompaniments - I want to make baguettes and serve them, but the examiners will want to see mashed potato. This is bollocks, of course, but you have to play to the crowd. There is also a question of balance. I was planning a pink grapefruit and pomegranate sorbet to start, with my orange-improved Gateau Pithivier to finish up. Concern has been expressed that the Pithivier might be too heavy after the Bourguignon. I don’t think it will be - Boeuf Bourguignon is rich rather than heavy (unless you stuff your face with mashed potato at the same time). But enough raised eyebrows have convinced me to change.

So having got all that thinking out of the way, I am now on the prowl for a dessert, and doubtless thereby condemning myself to a night’s sleep punctuated by thoughts of Tuscan plum tarts, bread and butter puddings and lemon verbena ice cream. Sweet dreams indeed.

Days 62 & 63: The F-Word

I set about this weekend with nothing to do, and armed with the steely intent to achieve just that. I needed time to relax, kick back and chill the fuck out. Whilst I managed to do very little to stress or tire me, my attempts to expunge any extraneous thoughts from my fragile mind were all in vain. Two things in particular were weighing on respective parts of my mind.

Firstly, I have to decide upon a menu for my end of term exam; to be submitted on Thursday. This means working out a three-course menu that can be cooked from start to finish in three hours, in an order that works. It must be balanced in flavour, texture, colour, weight and ingredients. It should amply demonstrate my range of culinary talents, but most crucially, it must be within the remit of those talents. I am edging closer to my final decision, but it has preoccupied my subconscious mind for most of the weekend. Last night I dreamt I was making omelettes again, like in the technique exam. Mon Dieu!

Whilst various dishes have been cooking away in my subconscious, the tiny part of my brain bold enough to peer above the parapet of consciousness has been thinking about something else. The dreaded F-word. My future.

The truth is I don’t have one beyond three weeks. The course finishes on Friday 11th December.I check out of the cottage on Sunday 13th. I have a car, and enough possessions to fill it. Back in Sussex, I have a 7’ x 8’ storage unit containing the rest. I have neither home nor job, nor the pressing need for either. That makes me lucky, but pensive too. There is a big, big gap, and it needs filling. Sometimes, having freedom of choice makes that choice so much harder.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the kitchen at Ballymaloe. I’ve enjoyed it, and learnt a lot. I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t maybe stick around and try and get a job. The course feels a bit like learning to drive - you pay someone for lessons, and eventually, you take a test, and they give you a driving licence. Only then do you start learning to drive. It’s the same with cooking. Go on a course, sure. Get a certificate - nice one. Wanna learn to cook? Work in a kitchen. I need to work in a kitchen. Somewhere. Here would be good - I know the people, I know I would learn.

There are two ways of learning. You either find someone who knows how to do it, knows how to teach it, and you get them to teach you. Or, you build a big pile of cash, drop your shoulders, charge right on in there, and learn by your mistakes. I think I will try and blend the two. I can afford to do fuck all for a little while longer, so I think I will hit the road, learning as I go. And then, soon, very soon, I will do the stupid thing.

I want to open a restaurant. Or a pub. Whichever it is will depend on where I am. Come the day, I will need a chef. A great one - probably a crazy one (they usually are). I can't do it myself. I want to blend what I think I know about food with what I think I know about running a business. I want to build a mousetrap, and will need someone to make the cheese. Before that happens, first I must learn everything there is to know about cheese. I may as well start tomorrow.

Day 61: Duck surprise

Sure got that Friday feeling today. And I’m definitely not the only one. Another (the ninth) long, long week is over.

I managed an early night last night and slept well, though had extremely vivid dreams, most of which concerned food. Again. I was trying to keep all this out of my subconscious and left my order of work until breakfast. I write my order backwards since everything comes together at the end today (Pan grilled Duck Breasts with spiced lentils and caramelised apples, and sautéed potatoes). Working back from midday, I have nothing to do until 11am. I decide to spend my first hour making some chocolates and praline. Between 10am and 11am I can practice some techniques, like making béarnaise or beurre blanc.

Well, that didn’t happen. The praline took five minutes. Next I heated the cream for my ganache, and tried to find some chocolate case to fill with it. There were six, meaning I had to make some. This is a complete pain in the arse, the kind of thing no one of sound mind would ever attempt. It involves melting chocolate (we use the finest quality Valrhona) and then painting it on the inside of petit four cases which you then later peel off. Except you don’t, since they melt the minute they come in to contact with you. I press on regardless.

Back in my old job, we used to send clients specially commissioned chocolates for Christmas. They were made by a dude called Marc Demarquette, a brilliant chocolatier. One of my favourites was a salt flavoured ganache, which I decided to replicate today. I mean, how hard can it be? I also decide it would be cool to have a pepper one to go with it, so split my ganache in to two bowls to whisk up. I overdo the salt and it is disgusting. I try and bring it back by adding more raw chocolate, but I think it is beyond redemption. It dawns on me later that they were salt caramels, and that without the rich sweetness of caramel, you are basically creating a kind of chocolate saline tablet. (If anyone needs the recipe for chocolate saline tablets, you are welcome to it).

Luckily the pepper ones are a bit better. Not a lot better, but a bit. They have some promise at least. Maybe one rainy day I will embark on a chocolate and ganache experiment (with shop bought chocolate cases). Though to be honest, for all the pissing about it entails, I think I might just leave it to the experts. I chill the pepper ganache and take it away with me, cutting off little pieces to roll in crushed praline, that are fairly well received by anyone who tries them. But then everyone loves chocolate.

Nestled (or should that be nestléd) in amongst all this chocolate nonsense, I have a duck to joint. Luckily the person having the legs of my duck isn’t interested in jointing it, so I get to do the whole thing. You can literally use every single scrap of a duck. Legs off first, same way as a chicken but you leave them whole. Next the breasts, they are much bigger and the breastbone much flatter than a chicken. I take the wings off. Excess fat is trimmed off each part, and then from the carcass as a whole. This is rendered down, the skin crisps up into duck scratchings, and the fat oozes out for the most wonderful cooking liquid. I trim the carcass of any usable meat, hack at it with a cleaver and it goes in to the stockpot.

Naturally this whole sorry little enterprise has taken far longer than anyone would think possible. Suddenly it is 11am and I haven’t even started either of my dishes for the day. I have a hob issue, in that I need more of them than I have. I manage to persuade the lovely Annette that I should oven sauté my potatoes to save hob space. I forget how long it takes to peel potatoes, and so spend the first ten minutes of my hour attending to this. I blanch them on the hob before transferring them to a hot oven and a tray of fresh duck fat.

I cook my duck breasts on another hob outside the kitchen. Although I am not getting to watch them through their cooking, I spare myself being splattered with fat and having my eyes smoked out of their sockets. The lentils get going in one pan and the apples in another. Bringing the dish together is a bit of a last minute juggling act. It goes pretty well, though the apples end up being on a low heat for too long rather than a quick blast on a high one (they burnt them in demo yesterday so I’ll let myself off the hook for that one).

I am on duty serving main courses at lunch. For some reason there is hardly any food. Not only that, but there is nothing but duck on offer. Standing over the spartan plates and asking "Duck?" of everyone who approaches, I couldn't help but think of Basil Fawlty, grinning maniacally and confessing "Well if you don't like duck, you're rather stuck".

It has been an exhausting week’s cooking. I’ve kept up keeping myself busy. I need to think carefully about the extra stuff I do in the next couple of weeks and lay off the stupid pissy stuff like making chocolates. I will be in a different kitchen next week, which is always a good excuse for a change of tactic. For now, I will ponder these changes over a night in l’oiseau noir. I have absolutely nothing to do for the next two days, and I plan to do it well.

Day 60: The Miracle of the loaves and the seafood chowder

I woke up this morning to the horrifying realisation that I had eaten all the food in the house. I was forced to shamelessly pause at the one shop in Shanagarry and avail myself of a sausage roll for breakfast. It was disgusting. Never again.

The dishes I have to make today are seafood chowder and a ludicrous creation named Gateau Pithivier. In addition, I have candied peel to finish off, some sourdough to bake, and ciabatta. I kick off by slicing the orange and lemon peels that had been soaked and boiled for three hours and get a syrup going to candy them in.

Next on my list is the ciabatta. My biga has been sponging nicely overnight, and is looking pretty lively. I decant it into a mixing bowl with more yeast (sponged in warm milk), water and a little olive oil. Mixing this together, I gradually add the remaining flour. I ignore the recipe again and mix half cream and half strong flour. This gets brought together for five minutes with the paddle before I switch to the dough hook for twelve minutes and leave to rise. It is springy, elastic and wet. Perfect.

Gateau Pithivier is a round cake of puff pastry filled with frangipane or a similar almond flavoured mixture. I cut two 10 inch circles of pastry, and chill them in preparation. Next comes the filling. The one I tried after demo on Tuesday tasted boring and vapid. A lot of effort goes into making one of these bad boys, and it just didn’t seem worth it. Armed with the knowledge that almonds and orange make a splendid combination, and with a vat of candied orange peel bubbling away on the hob, I make an executive decision. In goes a splash of Grand Marnier instead of the rum, and I finely chop a couple of tablespoons of candied orange peel into the mix as well. All this goes onto one of the rounds of pastry and is spread out to the edges. The other round goes on top, and the whole thing is egg washed and chilled.

I have to clean up the mountain of crap that’s growing on my station and treat myself to the first coffee of the day. Things are looking okay, but my order of work is staring to look flaky as it becomes apparent that I will have to fillet all the fish for my chowder. Back to the Pithivier, I decorate it with the traditional swirls out from the centre and flute and scallop the edges. It’s looking good. Back in the cold room to chill further, and I can bung it in the oven whenever I feel like it.

My sourdough hasn’t risen a massive amount overnight. I let it come up to temperature this morning in the hope that it will come on a bit more, but it doesn’t. I bake it anyway. It definitely rises a bit more than the usual spring in the oven, so maybe it could have proved a little longer. That said it doesn’t have stretch marks, so maybe not a lot longer. I actually take it out a little prematurely I think, and bake it for an extra ten minutes when I get home. But it is pretty good - sourer than the first and a better shape. At least I‘ve got something for breakfast now.

Once more the morning has disintegrated before my eyes. I need to get cracking with the chowder. Milk in the pan heating up with a bouquet garni. Bacon diced and in the pan while I chop onions. But the fucking pan is so hot I have to decant the bacon and clean it out. Back in with the onion and sweat away while I measure out fish stock and dice potatoes for the next stage. The pan is too hot again, and I have to decant once more. I add flour to the onion and bacon so the chowder has a nice thick base. The fish stock goes in bit by bit. It thickens into a nice looking sauce. Next the milk and spuds go in - I don’t want the spuds to overcook and break up. Meanwhile, I fillet a haddock and a monkfish and prepare nice sized chunks of their meat. I open some mussels in another pan. While I’ve been doing this, the bloody chowder has split, so I have to strain the whole lot and blitz the liquid back together with the wand. All back in the pan for the third time then, and in goes the monkfish, followed a couple of minutes later by the haddock, and finally some cream and the mussels. I work hard on the seasoning. There is mace and cayenne in there from earlier. It needs quite a lot more salt, and I decide on a little extra cayenne to give it a bit more fight. I plate up with fresh parsley and a couple of mussels in their shells. It gets a big thumbs up for flavour, but it has a slightly grainy consistency. Maybe it needed more cooking, especially for the potatoes, but I’m not sure. The spuds felt really starchy, and I can’t help wondering if a rinse would have helped. I don’t see how more cooking could make it less grainy, but anyway.

Now I have to shape my bloody ciabatta. It has risen like the proverbial salmon while I have been buggering about elsewhere. It is incredibly wet and very difficult to handle and shape. You need three things here - a dough scraper, another dough scraper, and a shitload of flour. You may well know that a ciabatta is a type of slipper, from whence the bread derives its name. I make four loaves - two of which have plenty of flour on them and seem fairly well structured. The other two look more like insoles than slippers. They can rise on the tray for another half hour or so and go in when the Pithivier comes out.

My midday target long since flashed past me. The puff pastry takes forever to cook. Once done, it is dusted with copious amounts of icing sugar and shoved under the grill to glaze the top. It receives universal acclaim for its oranginess. A genuine improvement - all that time and effort from hand making the puff pastry to pissing about scoring it with swirly lines - and it is worth it. I discreetly stash it under my counter - half for me, half for the teachers.

The ciabatta is good. My experiment with the strong flour has worked. It has more flavour than their recipe, and is still well structured, bubbled and chewy. Not only this, but it can take more water, because of the extra gluten. Plenty of people had to use less water than the recipe.

Speaking of water, it has been raining for approximately three days now without showing the slightest sign of abating. It took a long time to drive home tonight - two people flooded their cars driving too quickly through the massive puddles and had to be pushed or pulled free by passing trucks. When I did get home I had to park bloody miles away because of the flooding and am forced to make a giant leap, over my new moat, to the front door. I feel like I am not so much straddling the garden path as the Testaments; loaves of bread, fish and a bloody Great flood.

Day 59: Risky business

Not a lot to report today. Survived on coffee, just. Second half of the Cooking for Pleasure and Profit lecture today, so no cooking. Got in early though to do a bit of bread work.

I had refreshed my sourdough starter twice over the last couple of days. This morning I took half of the 40 oz and whisked it up to activate the yeast. The other half goes back in the jar and lives on as the starter for my next batch. I let it settle for a while, and set to work on a ciabatta starter (or biga to use the correct term). In the school's ciabatta recipe, we only use cream flour, which has a lower gluten content than baker's flour. This is to keep the dough lighter and preserve the texture. I had been chatting to someone about this. In Italy they use stronger flour for flavour, and you get the chewy consistency. I decide to experiment, so use half cream flour for my starter, and half double zero flour, that the Italians use to make pizza because of its high gluten content. I whisk it up with yeast and water, and leave it to rest until tomorrow.

Once that's dealt with, I knead my sourdough sponge together with the rest of the flour and water. I try and keep it nice and wet. I let it stand and rise at room temperature during the day, and after class I knock it back and shape it into a basket. Its next rising takes place in the cold room, to slow down the yeast activity and give the bread more time to develop the sour flavour. My last sourdough had a great texture but lacked sourness. The starter is more developed this time and I am keeping it away from loaf tins, as they reduce the crust to crumb ratio, thus inhibiting development of the bread's unique and wonderful qualities. We shall see what the day brings forth.

The lecture is interesting, though a bit frustrating at times. We cover costing, pricing, food percentages and profit margins. I am fortunate enough to be quite good with numbers, and this makes me selfishly impatient with people who are not. After lunch we go through a case study of some dude who was setting up a coffee shop/deli in a little town somewhere in Ireland. We have a good summary of his business plan, copy of his proposed menu and even a floor plan of the premises. We have to digest this and answer questions as a group.

I can't see it myself. The town has a population of 1,200. There is a supermarket that processes just 4,000 transactions a week. He is borrowing shit loads of cash to get off the ground. For me the risk/reward ratio is just too high. His menu is really comprehensive too, and in a town with such low footfall he's going to be throwing a lot away. If I was him I would be downscaling my project, reducing my borrowings and seeing how things pan out. But really, I can't help but feel that he has a vision for a business and is trying to make it fit somewhere where the hole isn't quite big enough.

The second half of the case study looks at the changes the consultant recommended, where the business is now (eighteen months later) and what his latest initiatives have been. He's doing really well. What that means, it transpires, is that he is breaking even. In the downturn he has developed an outside catering business, which is proving to be a fruitful diversification. But his debts from the coffee shop will last for another six years. (This is a success story, remember). It begs the question; should he really have opened in the first place? He is running credit crunch specials in the coffee shop and paying astronomical utility bills. I bet if he moved his kitchen gear to some industrial estate and ran the catering businesses from there he'd be a hell of a lot better off. But sans café. Of all the food businesses that fail, how many of them are driven by blind optimism and reluctance to face (or grasp) reality?

Why do I always approach these things with such negativity? We kind of talked about it today - not doing something will never cost you money, I said. It might cost you an opportunity, but it won't make you worse off. It's true. You might miss a few buses along the way, but it's getting on the right one that counts. It all comes down to risk. To take a big one, you need a lot of boxes ticked. You might have a dream, a vision, but on its own, it won't be enough - it has to work too, and it has to make money. You can't spend three precious years busting your balls to break even. Life is too fragile, and people too fickle, for that.

They say every successful business needs a dreamer, a do-er and a bastard. I never could quite work out which one I was. I can say for sure though, I definitely wasn't the dreamer. Come to think of it, I never really did a lot either...

Day 58: Out damned spot

It's funny what a good night's kip can do. With things back in perspective this morning, the cause of yesterday's mini meltdown was obvious. In a rush yesterday morning, I couldn't find a "Buff" (my usual choice of head covering) to wear in the kitchen. Consequently, and for the first time since the course began, I donned the white chef's skull cap I had previously rejected on the grounds that it made me look like I serve kebabs for a living. Disrupting this kind of routine can have fatal consequences.

In some ways, there was even more at stake today. I had stayed late yesterday to start my Boeuf Bourguignon, and in so doing had placed considerable stock by getting it right. If the wheels came off today, I would be in a bit of a hole. I tried to keep things simple on my order of work, though I have a couple of extra bits to do, including making puff pastry, which is rather time consuming. I get in just before nine, get the beef on the go and prep the extra bits that go in at this stage. There are two key measures of the dish - how well the beef is cooked, and how well it is seasoned. Obviously there are several other areas one could balls up, but these are the biggies. Get them right and you won't have too many complaints.

I nail them all. When you think the beef is ready - soft and tender and melting in your mouth, let it go another couple of minutes. Fortune, as I have said so many times in this blog now, favours the brave. (One of the causes of my derailment yesterday was the Crème Anglaise that took all day to thicken. Why did it take all day? Because the heat was too low. Balls out, turn up the heat and get on with it). Likewise the seasoning - when you think you are there, just a little bit more, and suddenly the whole thing transforms. So what do I feel when I taste my finished dish? Pride? Relief? Well I feel a bit smug, obviously, and vindicated for my efforts last night. But most of all, I just feel glad that I have something nice to eat for lunch.

I got to practice a bit more butchery tonight. It is difficult - you can watch other people doing it and look at diagrams, but there is no substitute for getting stuck in yourself if you want to learn how to do it. I have to take my time (not something that comes naturally). I have a whole lamb to deal with. Not quite whole, since his shoulders have been removed, but I have the rest. Firstly, I saw across his back, in the dip at the end of the loin and where the legs begin to fatten out. (Across the top of his arse basically). With the legs detached, I divide them in two by sawing through the spine and tailbone. Each in turn, I trim away the tailbone, and then set about removing the aitchbone. This is relatively simple, but somewhat ponderous. I feel like the archetypal blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat. That isn't there. Except it is there, and I find it. And doing it is great fun. It is strangely relaxing - in the way that some people might find doing the Times Crossword relaxing I guess. With the bone out I trim up and tidy the leg before tying it up.

Next, the ribcage. First of all I remove the fillets. Now I need to split the cage in two, which means coming down either side of the spine and breaking through the ribs. Which means using a cleaver. There are a few nice shiny new ones lying about, but the weapon of choice is an old wooden handled one that wouldn't look out of place in my Dad's garden shed. You have to work down both sides together, since if you remove one completely it becomes impossible to stabilise the animal for the removal of the other. Scott starts me off on my wrong side (he is left handed). Then I take the cleaver. My thumb and fingers are dangerously close, but they have to be. I hack away tentatively to begin with, without really getting anywhere. I make a small saw cut to get myself started. It is a bit weird - the temptation is to chop brutally and maniacally. But that doesn't help. You need short strokes, arcing the blade back in towards yourself, so you cut through the bone rather than just splintering it.

By the time I finish it looks like the blind guy has been chasing the black cat with a hatchet. But job done, I have two racks of ribs to prepare. I trim and clean, cutting away any excess fat. I remove the short ribs and remove a few inches of flank, to enable me to replace the fillet and roll and tie the end of the loin. I then choose my line and cut across the ribs, which creates the biggest bastard job of them all - cleaning the protruding bones. You scrape and scrape and scrape. My hands are bloodied and the skin rough and stained, but I am secretly loving every second of it. Time is ticking away and around me the other guys are beginning to clear up. Someone offers to do the other rack for me, but I decline. I'm having too much fun.

Sat here in the conservatory, the weather having taken a turn for the worse, I look at my hands. How different they appear now. Once they were soft and smooth. Now the lines are dark, stained with blood. I scrub them all the time as filthy hands are not appealing in a cook. But it doesn't make a difference. I have half a thumbnail on one hand, and cuts and nicks all over the other, from shards of splintered bone and the odd one from the knife. What hairs remained have been burnt off. The fingertips are beginning to harden and desensitise to the heat. And the smell of meat, of a butchers shop, has survived several washes. I'd scrub them again before I go to bed but it won't make a difference. Even great Neptune's ocean wouldn't wash them clean.

Day 57: Losing my religion

Not for the first time in the last couple of months, I desperately wanted to roll over and go back to bed this morning. My nightcap in the Blackbird turned into a whole hatstand full of them, and I was up scribbling until well gone midnight. The week is so knackering round here, and last week particularly so, that a restorative weekend is imperative. When you wake up feeling like I did today on a Monday morning, you know you’ve shanked it.

Last week was a good one. I could feel myself coming of age in the kitchen. I was thinking back to the first day when they gave out gold stars to the beginners. I wasn’t sure if I was a beginner or not, and wrote “I humble myself before the culinary altar and add a star, bottom left.” That self-abasement has long since evaporated. The altar I was humbling myself before, I now tower arrogantly over, like a life size Plastic Jesus. Only problem is, a bit like that daft twat Icarus flying too close to the sun with his wax wings, (what must he have looked like?) if I float too close to the great hob in the sky, I am in serious danger of going up in flames. Nothing to fear though, the culinary Gods intervene and send me wafting gently back from whence I came.

Nothing too demanding today, though I am mildly interested by the prospect of making a gooseberry tart with the flaky pastry from Friday. I love gooseberries. As I have mentioned before, they were my food memory when I went to the Fat Duck. As is so often the case, the thing you look forward to most shafts you. Poisoned chalice of gooseberries. They are frozen, obviously. I lay them out flat above the ovens when I walk through the door to get them defrosting - if they go in the tart frozen they will shed pints of water. I make shortcrust pastry for the base and, while it is chilling, make a crème Anglaise. I have allowed half an hour for this. It involves a mind numbing stretch of standing over the hob stirring. For some reason, the fucker doesn’t want to thicken. I am stuck by the pan stirring, desperate for a coffee and watching the morning’s precious minutes slip through my fingers like grains of cornmeal. Finally it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon but it looks thin and anaemic.

I’m still waiting for the bloody gooseberries to thaw out but they’re as hard as walnuts. I roll out my shortcrust and chill it ready for them. I make my Caesar salad dressing while I wait. Pretty simple really; an exercise in tasting and seasoning. Mine needs more lemon juice and garlic. (I can’t work out why it has anchovies and Worcester sauce in it though, since the former is the flavour of the latter)?

By now it is pushing 11, and my tart should be going in the oven, but the fucking gooseberries still aren’t there. I can’t wait all day, so I roll out my pastry and fill the base. I give them plenty of sugar as they are extremely sharp. The pastry goes over, and I delicately slit the edges to encourage the puffing up, and scallop around the rim. I then cut dainty little leaves to decorate the top. Even if I do say so myself, it looks mighty fine. Fanny Craddock would be proud. In it goes, about an hour later than planned.

I half-heartedly knock up my Caesar salad while I go about cleaning up all my crap. At no stage today have I felt in control. My station was messy; I had loads of menial tasks like stirring custard and defrosting gooseberries that took far longer than they should have. Instead of coping with this like a professional, I sulked and moped about like a spotty little runt. Consequently my salad was poorly presented, and by the time I whipped it out from under the counter for tasting, the dressing had run off the leaves and it looked shit. Meanwhile the fucking tart had cooked on top but the bottom hadn’t been touched, since the gooseberries were shedding copious amounts of liquid. It finally came out of the oven at well gone 1pm, when I finally accepted that if it stayed in there until Christmas it still wouldn’t have browned underneath. Fortunately it still looked good, and tasted grand too. But that was scant consolation and I went outside to look for a small animal to kick.

The afternoon was fairly torturous. A slow start to demo, I still wanted to kick the cat, and the chairs were feeling particularly ill humoured. Tomorrow I am cooking Boeuf Bourgignone (the same recipe I cooked in Ballymaloe House last week on a much larger scale). It is a far superior dish if the meat is browned and marinated in the wine overnight. We can stay behind and take it to this stage tonight after demo if we wish (yeah right). When demo finally grinds to a spluttering halt, just shy of 6pm, there are no takers for this option.

Except one. Because it just isn’t the same if you don’t. And maybe I just need to rekindle that respect for the food I am making, how I go about it and how I conduct myself in the kitchen, if I am going to get my Plastic Jesus away from the hob before his beard melts. Got to get it back, JC. Got to get it back.

Days 55 & 56: Plastic Jesus

After lunch, but before demo, on Friday, we were treated to a live performance by two crazy Belgian musicians who happened to be passing through the area. One of them played the guitar the other the harmonica. They were brilliant. After the lamb butchering on Friday, I popped in to catch the end of their concert in the Grainstore at Ballymaloe. It felt like a gentle way of unwinding into the weekend without causing myself too much damage. By 4am, I was sipping a gin and tonic from an empty jam jar, and the weekend had unwound into me. (You only seem to get Cork Dry Gin round here - it’s not in the same league as Tanqueray, which is probably a good thing since it stops me making martinis with it).

Saturday morning passed me by, and I was in the kitchen in time for lunch. One of the chefs, who also happens to be a brilliant baker, showed me his method for making focaccia. Vastly different to the one we learn at the school, and with far more impressive results. I chip in during prep but leave before service starts. Partly because I am exhausted, but mainly because there are plenty of people in and I get the feeling that I may just get in the way if I stick around.

I felt properly refreshed by the time I woke up this morning. I wanted to go somewhere different today, and with the washing on, a coffee in the belly, and spurred on by the sunshine, I headed for Youghal, east of Cork, with my best buddy. We walked about the place, climbed a hill through a graveyard and traipsed along the city wall. There was a plaque by some ramparts alluding to the guy who had fortified the town. Turning round, looking out to sea from our vantage point, I was slightly taken aback. The thought of the guns going off - the smell, the smoke, the confusion. History. What my country subjected this country to. The inscription read: Just hear what the old fellows say - When trenchmen landed at Monatray one of us made them scamper away.

Back in town we pondered lunch options, and after an abortive attempt in the Rendezvous Café, wound up in Capri Bay, an ‘authentic Italian trattoria’. Of course it is. But no. It actually is. Bresaola could have had a bit less balsamic on it, but the mozzarella salad was perfect. Crisp leaves and the best Mozzarella di Buffalo I have tasted outside of Italy. My lobster linguine arrived with the lobster cracked and on the plate, and was sublime. Delicate and fresh, fishy but not fishy, if you know what I mean. Eclipsed only by the panna cotta, which just edged out my tiramisu in the dessert stakes.

After this enormous lunch I spent the rest of the day with that gluttonous fat feeling. I desperately want to sleep when I get home around half six, but settle for a quick powernap to replenish my reserves in time for the Blackbird. The usual suspects, plus the Belgians, treated us to a great evening’s music; the highlight being a rendition of Plastic Jesus that brought a smile to my face. Just got home from there now, probably had too much to drink for a Sunday, but the full stop has been drawn at the end of yet another week. If only I had a Plastic Jesus riding on the dashboard of my car, I might just about be ready for the next one…

Day 54: Multi-tasking

Time is short so I will keep this brief. One normally feels like exploding into the weekend on a Friday, but I barely have the energy.

Cooking was good again today. I made flaky pastry (like puff pastry but with less butter). This involves rolling out into a rectangle, dotting butter on your pastry, and folding into three, like a letter. You turn it 90º, roll again fold again and return to the fridge. You do this four times, each time adding another 2oz of butter. By the time you are finished, your pastry has 729 layers within it. Neat huh? It sounds like a right pain in the ass to make but I found it strangely cathartic. The key to pastry is temperature - everything has to be cold. If it is, it can be quite enjoyable. Or maybe there's just something wrong with me.

In between rolling pastry I make confiture d'onions (very French theme today). It's not hard but it does involve slicing a pound and a half of onions. Short of buying onion goggles (I recently saw a pair for €20 - can you imagine breaking them out in the kitchen?), the best way to avoid the tears is to fight fire with fire, or acid with acid in this case, and sprinkle them with vinegar. I also have a batch of crepes to make. Not a problem there either, though it is quite time consuming. I take over a cheese souffle that my partner doesn't have time to make, and intersperse stages of this with the crepe making, onion jam reducing and pastry rolling. I like testing myself with a few things on the go - the pressure focuses your mind. You don't just stand there stirring a pan looking out of the window, or spend half an hour chopping an onion ( I watched one girl spend an hour slicing onions for confiture a couple of weeks ago). You don't have time. You have to leave things, and know when to come back to them. It is more like being in a proper kitchen.

There is one minor hiccup when a ring is on under the souffle mixture, which I wasn't aware of. I thought I was leaving it in the pan to cool, but was in fact welding it to the metal. Luckily Rosie spotted it while I was rolling pastry. In such situations, you can usually just decant and carry on. I had to add a little more milk to compensate for the evaporation but it didn't make the slightest difference to the dish. Another minute or so might have been interesting though.

Everything works out in the end. The jam is good (I used grenadine instead of creme de cassis just to be different), the pastry will be tested on Monday, the souffle was great, and will definitely get rolled out again as people always assume it is harder to pull off that it actually is, and the pancakes are pancakes, but when I smear nutella and chopped roasted hazelnuts in them and throw in a bit of my vanilla ice cream they improve dramatically.

After demo I popped into the kitchen to be shown how to prepare a rack of lamb. I am really enjoying the butchery side of things and want to learn more. The more you watch, the more you get to understand what it is you are looking for and trying to achieve each time. All these things; butchery, baking, patisserie - there is something magical and enchanting about them. Learning their secrets is intoxicating. In four weeks, the learning stops. I need to find another way to feed the addiction.