Most mornings I have been awake before the alarm, but it caught me on the hop today. I hate it when that happens. And it is certainly not good for a Monday. In my previous life, I never had a Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, routine, so weekends didn’t really mean that much to me. Consequently, Mondays never felt that bad and Fridays never felt that good. I am beginning to appreciate all those things now. And Mondays are hard here.
Now correct me if I am wrong, but don’t most Mondays go something like this: roll into the office half an hour late, have a cup of tea. Maybe read a few emails, flick through the paper. Do a few laps of the building chatting about the weekend. Waste your weak coffee machine chat on the hot chick who is way out of your league. Have another brew. Start thinking about lunch. Mondays here go like this: roll into the school before 9am. Start cooking for three hours solid with no break. Eat lunch, if you’re lucky enough not to have duties. Sit in uncomfortable chairs for between three and four hours being bombarded with information. Go home.
The key word is solid. Cooking for three hours solid. You can’t just go for a stroll or take a fag break. (Thank God I gave up smoking two years ago or I’d never get through it). You can’t pretend to go for a dump, clamp a toilet roll between your knees and have an impromptu nap (you know who you are). It is three hours minimum. Standing up. Three hours of fat trimming, flour weighing, tomato peeling, garlic crushing, onion chopping, meat basting, gravy making, bone sawing, pastry rolling, bread kneading, oven hopping, pan thrashing insanity and there is no respite whatsoever.
Today was surprisingly calm and collected all things considered. I am in a new kitchen this week and it feels roomier, lighter and better ventilated than the last one. The advantage of moving around like this is that you get to work with new people and get to know them better too. (Good for me, bad for them). Today I am cooking Roast Lamb with spuds and carrots. That isn’t what it says on the recipe sheet but that is what I am cooking.
I start by removing the aitchbone from the leg of lamb (I don’t remember what I ended up dreaming about last night but it wasn’t this). I use my specialist boning knife, which has a sturdy, narrow blade that curves round under the handle. I like it. The problem is I don’t really know what I’m looking for as I scrape it around the bone. I am reminded of the Peter Cook quote about the blind man looking for the black cat in a dark room, that isn’t there. Fortunately for me, it is there, and so I find it. Next time will be more straightforward. Then I get the hacksaw out and divide the joint into two halves for my partner and I. There is something incredibly satisfying about looking at a piece of meat and knowing that you have had a hand in its butchering.
I make holes in the skin and plug them with sticks of garlic and sprigs of rosemary. (Some of the others are following a recipe using crushed coriander seeds that I am a bit dubious about but am proved wrong later). The whole preparation phase takes ages, and it is 10am before my joint goes in the oven and I start clearing up. I’m on lemonade duty again so knock up some syrup and get prepping the spuds and carrots.
It all goes pretty swimmingly. The gravy wasn’t great. I was told to put two pints of chicken stock in and I did, but I should have used about half that and seasoned it better. The spuds were good but it’s hardly the first time and the glazed carrots were passable but will improve next time. It is a good recipe, but just needs a little getting used to. The lamb is very good.
By the time lunch comes around I have already eaten the equivalent of about two roast dinners. A third comes and goes and I avail myself of some summer berries in the hope that the natural sugar high will carry me through the afternoon. Through the three to four hours of unspeakably painful chairs that would probably be more comfortable upside down, assembly type whispering, unbearable stillness of air and tiny glasses that hold half shots of water.
The demo is pretty dry today, so it is a real struggle. We are shown how to cook shrimps, shepherd’s pie, moussaka, a couple of average looking puddings, and mashed potato that, frankly, is just wrong. In between all this I manage to get told off for talking and chow my way through a few tonnes of boiled sweets. Tomorrow I’ll try matchsticks in the eyes.
A bracing walk along the cliffs at Ballycotton after school helps restore a little normality, but with the sun setting at half seven we didn’t get too far before having to turn back. As for tonight, it has to be an early one I think. The phrase ‘school-night’ hasn’t meant a lot to me for a good few years but it is beginning to resonate pretty forcefully now. I hope it will do so enough to beat the alarm clock in the morning.
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