#34 - Panic, panic and more panic...

Exams for Intermediate are fast approaching and once again people are starting to sleep less, be a bit more grumpy and buckle down for reviewing and practice.

There have been tears, downcast moods after comments and a happy dance...tears from slicing shallots (practice for the salmon exam dish), downcast moods (overcooked monkfish and dry pork in the stuffed squid) and a happy dance for the St Jacques (scallops) Parisienne - although I can't really take credit for that.  But back to the beginning, for those of you who want the details.  Everyone else can stop here - there's nothing left except a couple of photos.

Due to the Riots
It felt very odd not to have cooked for the first couple of days of the week.  We are usually in the kitchen 5 days a week - occasionally 4, but those weeks have a day with two practical classes.  I just checked next week though...a couple of days where we aren't cooking - that will still feel decidedly odd.

Anyway, they have promised a make-up class for the one that was cancelled last week - truffles.  Which is also good because it involves tempering chocolate, which we might have to do for the exam if we are unlucky enough to get the Sabrina in Patisserie - the one where people tend to fail for going over time...

The riots may have started as a protest against the shooting last week (?) but the looting and violence seem to have extended far beyond that.  Newspaper articles were written encompassing the government/PM being out of touch, disenfranchised youth and a host of other problems.  I only wonder if the message to the government was lost in the tumult of police being deployed, shops emptying and closing early while people pretty much went home and stayed there.

After the rioting
So back to cooking...on Wednesday it was a monkfish stew and a stuffed squid - including cleaning it, taking off the skin, etc. etc.  You know how it is - they like to give us the whole animal - you can always buy it already prepared, but at least this way we know what's been done to it.

I finally get what they were saying about the transition from Basic to Intermediate being quite difficult - we are now occasionally preparing two dishes and they each have several components.  Both the squid and the monkfish were new to me in terms of preparation.

Wednesday
The squid feels really slippery and slimy after you get the skin and all the other bits you don't want off of it.  And of course in my attempts to be organized and have things set aside for later, I accidentally threw out my prepared tentacles and squid wings.  Luckily one of the guys in class had prepped an extra squid so he gave me one set of tentacles and wings, which I could plate with the rest.

The monkfish is an ugly fish.  They only gave us the tail because you buy the thing by weight and the head is almost as heavy as the body and is about the same size from what I can recall during the bouillabaise demo.  The skin peels off pretty easily - no issues.  The silver membrane between the skin and the flesh of the fish is really tough and you have to trim it very carefully because it also looks really ugly, as Chef SD pointed out on my plate.  How lucky - it's a bit harder to see in this photo, but I have to admit that it was not an attractive plate.

There was also a ton of garlic in the recipe - I have to admit I cheated and only used about a quarter of what I was supposed to.  Good comment:  the sauce benefitted from less garlic (the one positive thing about my dish).  They always try to end on a positive note - I think it's so we won't get discouraged when pretty much everything else on the plate is junk.

Then we had to run to our next class.  Patisserie kept right on with its schedule so we were due to temper chocolate and make a centrepiece with it.

I had photocopied the pocket from my bag and got this.  In case you can't read it, the boy is saying, "Let's talk."  The girl replies, "Let's not.  I'm eating."  I have been accused of being that girl, but let me just say right now - I can eat and have a conversation at the same time.

As you can see, the border is a bit lumpy and uneven.  Chef N told me it was because I was stubborn and hadn't listened to him about my chocolate being too cold.  It's entirely possible - I remember having the conversation, but I can't remember if it was for the border or something else.  And the piping for the blanket is crooked and the decorations were a bit much (the dirt under my coconut tree just looks like a mistake instead of a dirt patch - maybe I should have done Pigpen from Charlie Brown)...by the by, the base is also chocolate - a white chocolate disc poured and cut over painted cocoa butter...

I think this one is close to 750g (or 1.5 lbs?) of chocolate - which I left with the nice guys at the Turkish restaurant which is on the way home from class.  I wanted to stop there to pick up dinner anyway since I didn't feel like cooking any more after 9pm and I had given my dishes from class to a friend as I had no desire to eat either one.

Thursday was trout - filleted, braised and served with vegetables.  There was time built in for practicing our turning of mushrooms - Chef DM said to think of it as peeling the mushroom with...style?  panache?  something along those lines.  Anyway - my mushrooms were undercooked and the sauce was too thick.  It seems the sauces are always either too thick or too thin.  Part of the difficulty is that adding cream changes the consistency and we have to re-adjust the seasoning. 

So under the trout is a bed of green beans which you can just see, and between the two is a layer of spatzle.  They're kind of like mini deformed dumplings or gnocci, if gnocci were made of dough.  We had to press the spatzle batter through the holes in a colander to get the right size - I ended up pulling my sleeves down because the heat radiating from the stove while I was pressing dough was too hot without the protection of the sleeves.  So the things that were good - cooking and cleaning the fish, the green beans and the flavor of the sauce. The things that were not good: not enough salt and pepper in the green beans, spatzle and mushrooms which were also undercooked, plus the too-thick sauce.

You may wonder, how do you know if the mushrooms are cooked?  Apparently when they are soft.  Maybe if you can cut through them with a spoon?  Mine were quite resistant to being cut with a plastic spoon.  Or you could squeeze it - but I'm not sure what that's supposed to feel like since mine were wrong.

TGIF
There was a collective sigh of resignation last night - the week was almost over and we had class scheduled from 6pm.  We needed to make two dishes - it didn't sound that hard and it didn't seem like it would take that long:  make the dough for the tartelette, make the mushrooms while the dough is resting, prepare the scallops for the scallop dish while the potatoes are boiling away, then make the preparations for the hollandaise sauce, poach eggs and hold for later, then finish the scallops.  Right - but it took us the whole time to do it and we worked in teams for most of it.  The things we really had to concentrate on were in the tartlette:  the pastry, the mushrooms (which we've been doing since Basic), the hollandaise and the poached eggs because they (or a variation of them) are all currently part of the Superior Cuisine final exam, which happens to be 4 hours long.

Will need to continue working on the Hollandaise (not enough butter) and poaching eggs.

I'm not quite sure what happened to my egg dish after I presented it.  I was a tiny bit delayed because I broke one of my poached eggs as I was taking it out of the water from reheating and had to do another one - not as pretty, but apparently cooked correctly - which is to say, I wouldn't eat it that way.  All this time at cooking school and I still like my eggs well done, red meat medium well and my salmon either completely raw or completely cooked.

For the moment, it is back to studying and practicing...maybe later - right now it's time for coffee and a lazy morning.

As much as I love seafood, I'm not a huge fan of how the smell tends to linger. I'm not sure if it's still on my hands or in my head, from smelling it in the kitchen - all I know is that I have been washing my hands a lot to get the smell off and there will be more of the same as I practice my salmon paupiettes.

So until next time...may your fish come to you prepared!

#30 - Um, where did the time go?

Somehow the first week has gone by in a complete blur.  Then the second week...I'm not sure where the time went, but here is a quick recap:
The end of June had Pithivier (right) and Mille-Feuille cake (left), both made with the Evil Puff Pastry from Hot Monday (aka the first day of Intermediate) - and I was so tired by the end of the day that I got the two mixed up on their labels when I put the photos up on Facebook.

Then we had three practicals for Cuisine - a (too salty!) pumpkin soup and Flemish style beef stew with braised endives on Wednesday, a Dover (?) sole with seafood and cream sauce on Thursday and a braised salmon fillet roulade with sole and scallop mousse, turned mushrooms and broccoli on Friday.  The salmon dish, by the way, is one of our potential exam dishes for cuisine this term.

Braised endive with
Beurre Meuniere

Pumpkin Soup

Braised fillet of Sole
with seafood sauce

Salmon stuffed with
scallop and sole mousse,
mushroom cream sauce
and steamed broccoli

Carbonnade of Beef

FYI, it was 39 degrees in the kitchen on Thursday and on Friday it was 40 degrees.

Saturday was a lovely day of nothing, ending with a delicious meal (Lebanese?) in Islington.  I don't think I've been there before, so it was a nice little adventure.  Then came Sunday and the highlight of my week - a cruise down the Thames followed by a pub lunch and a long walk in the English countryside.

I was invited by a friend of my eldest brother (from their university days).  There was  some unfortunate miscommunication at Paddington station involving my asking for the next train to my stop, the lady (it appears) not knowing and telling me that the trains only run once an hour to that stop (they don't) and my arrival much later than originally planned.

Anyway, I arrived and we took the canal boat from Abingdon to...I've forgotten the name of the little town.  During the trip we went through a couple of locks and I got to steer for a little while.  I gave back the rudder when we approached the first lock, mainly because it required steering in a straight(ish) line and my steering had the boat basically waggling along down the river.

We saw lots of swans, coots which look like ducks a little, ducks and gulls with black heads.  There was a cricket game going on - it wasn't over when we came back 5 hours later - and we passed by little village churches, under various bridges and past fields of wheat and barley.  The wheat has already started to turn golden but the barley is still somewhat green.  In the meantime, I had Sting's Fields of Gold running through my head.  Until we arrived at the second lock, anyway.

KTQ hopped out of the boat to push buttons to open the sluice gates or the lock gates to adjust the levels of water so that we could get into it, T had the rudder and one of the big ropes and I got to play deckhand and loop the rope around one of the things on the side of the lock while they lowered the water.

We made pretty good time and stopped by the bridge of this tiny little village where I didn't even know which direction was the town center.  We had lunch by a pub which had delicious looking food.  I couldn't go past the traditional roast beef (very traditional beef!), Yorkshire pudding and some vegetables.  I feel bad I couldn't finish the potatoes but we had a lot of walking to do and we were starting to feel tired from all the food.

Then came week 2
There was baking - lots and lots of baking.  We did various buns, pastries, more fish and for the first time, quail.  Quail is a lot harder to carve once it's cooked because it's so small and you don't want to mess it up - bones aren't nice for anyone.  I'm so happy that there are more vegetables on the menus this term.  I'm not sure if it's because we have to work faster or if it's more advanced stuff, but depending on the day, we sometimes make a starter and a main in our cuisine classes.  It will take too long to write about all the food, but here are the pictures:
Patisserie

Hot cross buns



Brioche




Croissants and Danois

Cuisine
I couldn't find my camera to take photos of the roast pork filet with prunes that we did the day before the quail so I don't have any photos for that one, unfortunately.  They are starting to do desserts in our cuisine classes as well, hence the souffle.


Braised trout wrapped in lettuce
and braised lettuce



Vanilla Souffle











Roast quail with glazed
veggies, potato rosti and jus

Selle sur cher with glazed
beetroot, grape and poppyseed
vinaigrette








Also, finally made it to the British Museum on Saturday morning.  There are just as many tourists as I feared there might be, but I did get to see things I haven't seen before.  Last time it was most of Ancient Egypt (the ground floor part) and part of Assyria.  This time it was some of Ancient Egypt, then on to Ancient Greece and Rome with a wander through the Celtic region and Britain during the Iron Age.  It's amazing how so things have survived, virtually intact, for a few thousand years.  Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of eeling through hordes of people who stop in the middle of a sidewalk to check their maps.  You tend to run into them if you're walking quickly and then they give you a dirty look and you just have to smile sweetly and apologize.

Yesterday was bread day...I officially have bad boulangerie hands.  The dough for the rye (pain de siegle) kept sticking to my hands.


Baguette viennoise, pain de siegle and focaccia


No cooking today, but tomorrow it will be back to two classes in the kitchen.  Wish us luck - we start going over our exam cakes next week.
So until next time, may the tourists not be with you.

#24 - In which people have started to panic...

I see that my last post was almost a week ago.  It's a good thing my computer and phone keep track of what day it is - I have lost track of days and had to check with people 3 times yesterday that what day it was (Tuesday, the day that follows Monday, which was the day immediately before).  Also - thanks to those of you who have gently prodded me to get my act together and update.

Apologies as these become a bit more sporadic as a cooking frenzy takes over the next 2 weeks of my life - there will be more tarts, cakes and eclairs than I will ever want to look at again - except we will need to do them, but with much greater refinement and complexity as we progress up the levels.  I found out what the Superior Patisserie students have to do as their Practical exam last night - they have 6 hours of cooking and it incorporates everything they have learned from basic on through to where they are now - I recognized elements from our week 2 in Patisserie. 

Last week

So - recap since last post:  we had a wine technical class last Wednesday (18 May).  I tasted all 6 wines and predictably didn't like any of them.  They all made my mouth feel puckered up inside (apparently that was caused by the tannins).  I also accidentally swallowed some wine (the first Chardonnay we tried).  It's a good thing that class was scheduled for our last class that day, it would not have been good to go into a kitchen and have to cook after that.

We also had our patisserie classes - getting on to slightly more advanced cakes now.  Thursday night was the Chocolate Almond Sponge cake (aka Sachertorte) with a marzipan rose.  The masking at the end was a bit problematic on the sides of the cake, but it looks pretty from the top and according to reports, it tasted good.  I had a tiny taste from when I cut the cake into halves/quarters and gave it away to various people - I liked it, but the crumb was more than enough.

Then on Friday night we did our last potential exam dish - the Genoise Spongecake with buttercream frosting and raspberry jam.  We had to make our own jam (piece of cake!) and apparently the frosting that Michael, my partner, and I made was really good, so I feel a little more confident about trying the whole thing at home on my own.  The problem with doing things in pairs in class for something like this is that when it comes to the exam, we will have to do all the components on our own:  the batter, the jam, the soaking syrup, the frosting, cut, trim, fill, then assemble it all and complete it with piping.  I only remembered when I had to pipe the chocolate on top of the frosting piping Chef G's comment that it is easier to pipe smaller patterns because any uneveness is not quite as apparent.  Whoops.  This cake also went to other people who would be able to eat it.

We had a cuisine practical on Saturday  morning at 8am - more chicken butchery - taking apart all the pieces and skinning it.  It was Supreme of Chicken (i.e. chicken breast) stuffed with chicken mousse and herbes de Provence, poached and served with a Tomato Butter sauce (mine was too thick - more a coulis) and courgette spaghetti- zucchini sliced on a mandolin and sauteed with some garlic and butter.

Life actually
I even made it to a movie - maybe 4 weeks ago?  I'm not sure...it was the most recent Scream movie.  I should not go to those - as silly and stupid as it was, it still scared me.  Total movies seen in London:  2.  Total cultural experiences:  1 ballet (Covent Garden), 1 concert (Southbank) and...do visits to markets count?  No museums yet.  They are still on my list but are always lower on the list of priorities as the kitchen and related things take over my life.

There is a lot of ground to cover and I realize that I have forgotten to include much in the way of social life.  There hasn't been one as such, but I have managed to catch the odd dinner with friends who are not LCB related (MA, who is in town from Hawaii for work for the next 3 months or so) and JB, who is currently posted to Rome during the week (also for work), SO who has the cutest little daughter (they live in Oxford) and my dear PC who was in town over the long weekend in April.

There have been a couple of trips to Kua'Aina burger in Carnaby Street - yesterday I made a mental note of the days when they serve the Lion Vanilla Macadamia nut coffee and now have forgotten them in the exhausted haze which has dogged the last few days.  Most of my other friends are from LCB, a couple of whom have had little parties, as they had to move after the course started.  Unfortunately I didn't take many photos of the one from the week (two weeks?) before,  but here are photos from Saturday:

Recognize any of the food?

Our hosts - Pedro & Angela

 

 

I think most of the people there were from those who are enrolled to do the grand diplome.  Apparently some of the people in the other group are a bit more comptetitive - they have more people who have industry experience, whereas my group doesn't seem to have reached that stage.  Yet.  Who knows - tempers have been known to run hot in the kitchen when ingredients go missing.

The girlfriends/husbands/etc. who also came may have been a bit overwhelmed with the shop talk, but that only came later.  We were all concious of wanting to talk anything except food for the first little while.  We have spent all these weeks together, but as most conversations revolve around organizing some fun time or discussing class, people are still getting to know each other.  I am sure that lifelong friendships will be forged during the next few months, but I am equally sure that lifelong antipathy may develop as well.  There is no way that we can all spend so much time together and not get on each other's nerves and given the strong personalities and wide age ranges involved, I am sure that cliques are already starting to form.

In the meantime, the girlfriends/husbands/etc. are finally understanding what their respective other halves are talking about when it comes to a bad day or things that went wrong.  They said they can put it into context - and they have good naturedly tried to support their tired, grumpy and hungry chefs when they get home.  ("Look honey - I just spent the last 2.5 making this and this is what went wrong and...just try a bite!")  Apparently they have also started to go to the gym, if they haven't already, and those who do exercise, have to do more.

And this week...fish and seafood

8am Monday - butchering a whole Lemon Sole, including gutting, filleting and skinning...rolled with a mushroom duxelles - the one on which I cut my finger somewhere in week 3 and poached in a fish fumet (fish broth) which we had to make from the bones.  We are all hurrying more in the kitchen now and can't believe there was a time when it took us 2 1/2 hours to cut up some vegetables and make a salad with dressing.  Now we are stressing out that it took 20 minutes to take apart the stupid chicken instead of 10.

A whole fish resulted in 4 little pieces of fish (you only plate 3 because it looks better on the plate) with a piped mashed potato border and the sauce...

Yesterday morning we got to do it again, this time with a rainbow trout.  Luckily I already knew how to gut a fish, but it wasn't done in demo and they didn't mention it so I was a little unprepared to have to gut the thing at 8:15 in the morning (well, we had to scale it first).  The butchery went pretty smoothly, but after class we all got together in our little huddles and had our own little debrief.  It appears which chef you have in the kitchen also determines how you season your food.  Oh - and my hollandaise sauce split.  Whatever the reason, I'm sure we'll have to do something like it again at some stage.  So - the trout a la meuniere, which I'm sure my dad would have loved but for the very burned butter...this is what the dish looks like just before I take it to the chef for feedback.

This is what my workstation looks like in the aftermath of the flurry of plating (no time to clean!) and things haphazardly pushed wherever - after feedback.  Ugh - first time I overcooked my fish!

Tonight we have to kill a crab (yes, it has to come to us alive) and make a stuffed crab in its own shell and a dish of mussels (moules mariniere).  That is one that many of us are looking forward to, although there is one unfortunate student who is allergic to certain shellfish, mussels being one of them.  He is in the other group, so I am guessing someone will go to class prepared with a baguette and stick a bottle of white wine in the fridge for after!  Some people are not enthused with the idea of putting a live crab in boiling water - we can't freeze it because our fridges aren't cold enough (especially as they will have been opened and closed so many times during the preceding 9 hours) and we can't use our knives to kill it because we need the shell intact for the presentation.

It is a late start today - 12pm - for which I am grateful.  Some of the girls and I got together after class yesterday to practice turning our vegetables.  The ideal is a football shape (for Americans and Australians) - an oval with points on both ends and 7 even facets.  Right now the chefs are willing to settle for however many facets as long as we don't waste a lot of potato and they are all about the same size.  And now - our practice has been documented...

 






There has been a little consternation from all of us as some of the ingredients we need to practice for patisserie are not available in normal places.  No fondant in the supermarket and the plain flour doesn't indicate whether it is strong flour or soft flour - I suppose I will find out when I try to make my pastry for the lemon meringue tart.  Also - no one sells butter in anything more than 250g (8 ozs).  I bought 12 blocks last night and had to lug them home - each thing that we have to practice uses ridiculous amounts of butter and as pretty as they are to look at, I am not sure I will be able to eat many of these things ever again.

Back to life...
As for life in London - it is, despite my many hours at the school or at home, trying to organize my mind for the following day, still delightful.  We have lunch or drinks out in the sun if there is a break between classes.  The days are still lenthening, so there is light past 9pm - which is perfect for the nights when we don't finish class until then, generally Thursday and Friday nights (and tonight).  The mornings are still cold - some may say brisk, but those are the ones who like the cold more than I do.  They require a warm jacket and a brisk walk to school.

There is a lot of construction going on in London as it prepares for the 2012 Olympics.  Tube stations are being upgraded, new train line/s being put in, streets having things done to them and sounds of construction going from morning until...well, I'm not sure when they stop since I usually get home later.  Everyone generally wants to wind down from the day at the pub and I think that when the school moves to Bloomsbury Square in January, the local businesses will really notice the difference.  You can tell when there's a break between classes because the streets and cafes are suddenly awash with white jackets emblazoned with the blue LCB crest paired with crocs and houndstooth checked pants.  Starbucks gets a lot of people coming in, desperate for a coffee to keep them awake for the 3 hour lecture coming up (or in progress) after they have already had up to 6 hours of class.

Now I must once again gear up to go to class.  A demo for 2.5 hours - this is the target time for our demo chefs, but classes have been known to run over the allocated 3 hours, which can cause a bit of a scramble for the next class - then a break (nap and review of notes) before being back and ready to go in the kitchen at 6pm.

So until next time, happy resting!