#88 - Final practical class

Seen and heard
So I got asked if my duck was spam.  Um, no.  Although I can see from the photo how it might be mistaken for spam, seeing as how perfectly it was cooked, rested and sliced.  Well, I'm going to tell myself that instead of it being understandable because there's still fat under the skin.  Also seen, which was really disturbing:  leather hotpants with sheer pantyhose.  Really? I mean, c'mon, be considerate of people's eyes even if you are a fashion victim and don't care how you look!  Those shorts would have been short on my 4 year old niece.  And given the cold weather, I've seen far too many (super) short skirts and cankles.  You may wonder what cankles are - they are, apparently, when the leg fails to taper from the calf to the ankle and makes the abrupt transition from calf to ankle - hence the name.  I didn't use to notice them much until someone mentioned them the other day. Suddenly it seems I see an awful lot of them.  Or perhaps I'm just obsessed with legs since I started going to ballet again.


A confession
I've been having chocolate cravings, which is highly unusual.  If my parents read that last sentence, I'm sure they're going to wonder if they wandered onto the wrong blog.  Anyway - the danger of having food ingredients around and doing Patisserie is that you have - yes, you guessed it - chocolate!  The other night was disgusting enough when I ate the white chocolate straight out of the bowl, but tonight has been even more classy - eating my dark couverture chocolate chips by the handful.  Mind you, these are the ones we have to temper for truffles so I could always try to convince you it's all about quality control, but really, who are we fooling?


Sleeping in

Preparing for the last practical - and
having a Croque Cordon Bleu at the Cafe

The morning started perfectly.  I had already taken my written exam so after my alarm went off this morning, I went back to sleep instead of hitting snooze.  Or maybe I hit snooze once before I went back to sleep.  Whatever - the point is, I got to sleep until the luxurious time of 9am or so.  Then I finished printing out and making last little tweaks to the Cuisine portfolio.  I think it  due at 5pm and I had it printed out and ready to go at about noon - so energizing.  And then at some point my get up and go got up and went - without me.  If it hadn't been for the fact that I had to turn in the portfolio, there's a chance that I might not have gone to the practical, even though I hate missing class.  However...


Queue de lotte poele, encornets farci avec risotto avec langoustines et coriandre - Pan fried monkfish tail, squid stuffed with langoustine and coriander risotto)
Tonight was our last practical class.  Ever.   So off I toddled, clean uniform and portfolio in my bag, ready to take on the stupid monkfish.  I am not a fan of monkfish - the fish itself is nice - white, kind of firm, not fishy at all.  But skinning the thing - ugh - it has a layer of slimy skin that comes off easily but underneath it is a layer of silver skin that you also have to take off.  If you don't take it off, it either turns gray or makes the fish curl up.  Or both.  There's a way that you can kind of skin off the silver skin the way you take the skin off a fillet of fish, but it still leaves bits and pieces on.  Not to mention, if you accidentally cut through the silver skin on the fillet like I did on my first fillet, you have to do it the long and annoying way.


FYI, coriander and cilantro are the same thing, just different languages (I forget which is what).  We didn't have coriander so I ended up chopping up some dill for the risotto - it could probably have used a bit more dill but still tasted pretty good.

So it was supposed to be a fast and easy practical except the monkfish's silver skin was annoying me.  Then we had to brunoise some carrot, celery and onion.  Which is fine except I didn't think the celery through and I got a very nice, fine julienne which I then couldn't use for my brunoise - which I needed for my risotto.  Finally got a good risotto!  It was a little dry looking on the plate but apparently it tasted good and it was cooked the way chef wanted it.  A little too much flour on my monkfish and squid (I patted it off, I did!) but the sauce was good - langoustine-y, saffron-y and buttery (but my sauce split at the end because my plate was too hot).  I got a very encouraging comment - Chef JB told me to cook like this during the exam and I would be fine.


It was also a fun time because no one was taking it seriously.  There was a lot of laughing as we made fun of each other and some of the students who usually don't talk ended up participating as they channeled different chefs from the school.


After class...
My classmates and I went to the pub in the courtyard after class.  Knowing that I wasn't going home soon and that the food wouldn't be nice later, I gave it to one of the guys at the front desk.  By the time I got home, it was too late to buy groceries at Waitrose so I went to Tesco instead.  It's true what they say about not doing grocery shopping when you're hungry - I caught myself looking at things I normally wouldn't - Doritos and Pringles especially.  Managed to stifle those urges but I ended up buying a packet of mac 'n cheese, then some baby salad leaves, baby beetroots and tomatoes to make a salad with goat's cheese I had in the fridge.  Only thing is, I got home and remembered that I still had 2-minute ramen noodles in the cupboard which have to be eaten before I leave London.  Well 2-minute noodles aren't that nutritious and I really wanted some vegetables.  Luckily I had lugged home my knife kit so julienning some veggies took very little time.  I wanted some protein, so a scrambled egg later and having drained the noodles, I put everything together and got this.  I'm not sure if it's blasphemous to the cooking gods, if they exist, for me to put my skills  to fancying up instant noodles.  Whatever - it tasted good and I probably got my day's serving of vegetables in the dinner.


It's too soon after dinner but I am too sleepy to be able to stay up much longer.  Until next time, may you have unbroken and satisfying sleep.

#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!