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.
No comments:
Post a Comment