Day 18: Man cannot live on bread alone

I feel I should put my hands up and apologise for yesterday’s rant. Organic gardening makes for a long day. I can bear it, just, but little things are bound to grind. I actually really enjoyed myself yesterday. When afternoon lectures finally came to an end we went on a spot of foraging around the farm. It was actually more like a leaf and plant recognition lesson actually, but I learnt a good few things I didn’t know before.

I learnt that the flowers of garlic chives are delicious - beautifully intricate, delicate, crunchy and incredibly flavoursome. I will definitely be planting some of them if I ever have a garden. I also desperately want to fry them in tempura batter and will attempt to do so at some stage when no one is looking. I learnt that, without trying, I am learning more and more about herbs and leaves. Actually my leaf recognition could improve. Some people are sneaking about with books and have charts on the sides of their fridges, but I’d prefer to head down the greenhouse and eat my way through them instead.

This morning I was able to rise at a civilised hour. I had to write my order of work over breakfast again, which is never a good idea. I only had to make Black Eyed Beans with Mushrooms and Basmati Rice together with an Apple and Clove Jelly to be jarred up for the production line. It doesn’t sound like a lot but both dishes are pretty labour intensive.

I start by stewing the apples. Meanwhile I cook the beans that we soaked a couple of days ago. Then I get the ingredients together for the main course. This takes ages. There are tomatoes, onions and garlic to peel and chop, mushrooms to slice and spices to grind and carefully measure out. I am trying to stay really clean and tidy too, since I always seem to make the last hour more difficult by having tons of crap to clear up. There are lots of little things to remember today - like sterilising jam jars and lids and putting a plate in the fridge to test the jelly for a set. The Black Eyed Beans with Mushrooms requires a lengthy, staggered adding of ingredients: the onions until they brown, the mushrooms until they wilt and so on. This takes up a lot of my time, because I am not confident enough to just leave them without burning. But I should be. You know why?

Wanna know the best piece of kit you can buy for your kitchen? No, it’s not a knife. By all means go out and buy yourself a Tojiro Senkou chef’s knife and be just like Heston Blumenthal. But I bet if you gave him the choice he’d go for a top quality thick-bottomed saucepan and a knife from Tesco’s rather than the other way round. Things don’t burn easily in good saucepans, so you can leave them while you get on with other stuff, like practising your high speed chopping skills or carving chateau potatoes using a blunt Swiss army knife, or digging ten foot by ten foot cavities in your yard to cook a whole horse in or something.

By the time all this is done and the beans are happily simmering away, my apples are stewed and have dripped through the muslin so I can get my jelly on. I heat the sugar in the oven to minimise the time it takes to dissolve into the hot apple liquid. Then, in a staggering act of counter-productive and mind numbing stupidity, I pour it into my apple sauce before it has even begun to heat up. I put the lid on, crank the gas up and hope that this doesn’t hinder some chemical reaction way beyond my simple comprehension that is crucial to the making of jelly. You don’t need to add anything else incidentally, like a thickening agent or gelatine. The natural pectin in the apples does it all for you. Luckily, I get away with it, though my jelly has to stay on the heat a lot longer before attaining the necessary set. It has a wonderful colour, with the clove giving the glowing apple a glorious pink tinge.

Back in the real world, I team up with one of the few males in my kitchen to combinate our rice making (my new favourite word). All goes pretty swimmingly form here on in. At lunchtime I am on supervisor duty, which basically means trying to ensure that all the shit gets done and everyone else who pulled duties is chipping in. I get my hands dirty too, even doing a bit of extra curricular hoovering at one point. (That’s definitely hoovering and not hovering by the way). All in all this consumes my entire lunch break, and I eventually sit down in the demo room shy of one coffee and suddenly remembering the series of important emails and calls that required my urgent attention over lunch.

Afternoon demo is good. We make chicken liver pâté that has a heart-stopping amount of butter in it, but tastes incredible. Just don’t eat it more often than Jack Reacher changes his toothbrush. We make deceptively simple almond tarts with glazed fruit. And we make a poached cod with mornay sauce, breadcrumbs and piped mashed potatoes. I will probably just use a béchamel when I make mine. (Mornay is just béchamel with cheese added). It tastes all right though, and will offer another chance to hone my filleting skills if I get to make it on Monday.

Best of all though, we are shown how to make bread. Real, white, yeast bread that you have to knead and manipulate and let rise three times. It is wonderful to watch, almost magical really. The way the dough springs and responds and complies as it is bashed and kneaded. Then how it rises and responds when left alone. I guess it is this paradox - the way the dough responds to both action and inaction - that makes it so special.

Who thought of that? Who realised that you pummel for a while, rest it for a while, pummel it again, rest it again. It’s like the carrot and the stick, but for bread. The result is an incredibly light textured, golden-crusted loaf that I would happily eat to the exclusion of everything else if I had to. Or would I? Maybe just a couple of generous spreads of that pâté wouldn’t do me too much harm....