I wish I hadn’t eaten so much last night. I woke up around four in the morning feeling like Mr Creosote. Not only that, but somewhere between all the smoked eel, roast duck and plum puddings, some combination conspired to produce some truly weird dreams. I could have probably lived with this, but in a dainty yet viciously cruel pirouette, fate had shafted me with more bloody stock duty.
None of this boded well for the final day’s cooking. I finally come to terms with the fact that I am a moron, and bake ciabatta according to the school’s recipe. All that tweaking with flour: what a fucking idiot. I make a couple of soda breads too since they could easily come up in the exam. It’s a good job I do because the brown soda recipe has too much bread soda in it and the loaf comes out looking greener than one of the Incredible Hulk’s turds after a heavy night on the crème de menthe.
We are about half strength in the kitchen today. My partner is running a friend to the airport so I can basically do as much, or as little, as I like. I idly pass an hour or so making brandy snap biscuits, all the while pumping my poor shell of a body with the requisite amount of coffee to ensure my survival until the end of the day. Some time after eleven I make beurre blanc for the first time, before turning my attention to the scallops.
I love scallops. I have never actually extracted them from their shells before, but having slain many other, more obviously living, creatures of the deep, I don’t approach the act with too much trepidation. But something feels strangely barbaric about the whole act. The little guys hold on pretty damn tight. You have to wiggle a knife in between the two valves and cut the scallop from the flat side. This is not easy. The scallop, sensing the incursion of some superior foreign force, is pulling the shell as tightly shut as possible, clamping the blade of the knife. I wiggle and twist, trying to create room between the shells for me to cut the muscle free from the shell. The struggle is horrific. There is only ever going to be one winner, but the scallop fights bravely and fiercely. As it does so, I can’t help but feel that I am abusing my higher position in the evolutionary chain. What is worse is when during the fight, you manage to lacerate the abductor, effectively killing the creature instantly. It goes from repulsing the crude invasion of your blade to yielding instantly and swinging open like the doors of Harvey Nicks on Boxing Day. It is a hollow victory. All I can do is think of the caramelised flesh and the soft, sweet centre after a couple of minutes on the grill, and hope that the Lord forgives me.
Out of respect for the dead scallops that fought so gallantly to cling to their sheltered little lives, I go easy on the beurre blanc. I am not too sure about the dry frying either; I would like a little olive oil to smooth things along myself. But either way, with this last dish, my cooking draws to an uneventful close. It is eleven weeks since I first walked into this very same kitchen, and stood around in a circle chopping onions. A lot has happened since then.
We have a demo in the afternoon, on chicken. Nothing life changing, though we are shown how to bone a whole bird, which is interesting. The most laborious dish is the least appetising - a rich casserole roast with a thick creamy sauce. A couple of others are good - Cajun chicken and one with harissa oil are particularly tasty. The demo is relaxed and pretty good fun. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.
I am knackered, of course, and dying to go home and put my feet up, but this is not to be. One of the students, the wonderfully named Maria from Korea, has put together a demo on her native food. Being a big fan of Korean food, I am really looking forward to this. A good twenty or so of us hang around for the 6pm start. Korean food takes a lot of time, she tells us. We go through seasoning your own soy sauce, a lengthy process that produces a result vastly different from what you buy. Since it is the cornerstone of every marinade, it is an essential and delicious step.
We make beef bulgogi (marinated beef) and bibimbab, a rice dish with vegetables and meat that is the staple of Korean cuisine. The dish is balanced by colours, with every vegetable cooked and seasoned individually before being brought together for the meal. The whole ensemble is then garnished with a red chilli beef paste called Yak Gochujang, that I would eat every day for the rest of my life if I could. It was pushing 9pm before we got to taste all of this but it was just about worth the wait. It reminded me of the little Korean place I used to eat in on my own in Victoria Street in Melbourne. I think they thought I was weird.
Thirteen hours is long enough to spend in this place in one go, so we kind of had to go to the pub after that, carrying on the theme of things returning to their beginning. Tomorrow comes the last demo, before the exams take centre stage. The days they may be few, but there’s plenty enough left to fill them.
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