But first - a lobster, half a beetroot and some ratatouille
Friday was our lobster and ratatouille practical. For some reason, people seem to dislike beetroot, sometimes before they've even tried it. I was guilty of this particular dislike until a few years ago. I had always been put off by the color and the fact that beetroot seems to stain everything it touches so I'm not sure what possessed me to try it that nameless day sometime in the distant past, but try it I did. It was love at first bite. It has a firm, but soft texture if that's possible, similar to eating a skillfully cooked turnip but much sweeter.
So the dish was a pan fried lobster, but only at the last minute. We had to (mostly) cook it in the shell so that we could remove the shell first, to use to make something almost like a bisque - cooking off the shells and making a bouillon, then clarifying it with beets and egg whites. Somehow getting the lobster out of its shell was a lot harder than I remember and this one had a ton of eggs. It was actually kind of disgusting because they got everywhere and I kept having to clean my board, knives and work surface. Plus I accidentally cut through the meat on one of the claws and completely mashed the other one. Sebastian (yes, I know it's a boy's name) got some of her own back when one of her knuckles twisted in my hand while I was deshelling her - so there is a puncture on my left thumb and a slice on my right thumb (no idea how I got it).
I have yet to have a practical class in Cuisine where I haven't boiled something over - on Friday, it was the court bouillon to cook the lobster. The clarification was quite nice although I had to discard some egg white part way through because it looked like there was too much egg. Not enough sauce left to make an emulsion foam at the end, but the dish finished on time and the beetroot consomme was surprisingly good. The ratatouille was pretty yummy, but we ran out of olive oil so I thought it was missing something. I tried it at home after adding a little olive oil and it made a huge difference - part of the reason why I don't cook with extra virgin olive oil unless I am looking for the flavor. It also took a little while longer than I would have liked to cut all the vegetables because I had to spend so much time trimming. It's easier to get even cuts if you cut off the top and the bottom of the bell peppers and since none of the veggies had flat sides, you had to trim off and discard quite a bit. Chef EB didn't say anything about them but I bet if I hadn't gotten them pretty similar sized, he would have noticed and said something. As it was, he could tell I hadn't added the basil chiffonade at the right time.
Lobster was followed by a trek down to the pub, a fine after-class tradition which is not quite as regular as back when we were in Marylebone Lane. A definite must though, after a Friday class.
Minor rejoicing
And finally, the biometric scan for my finger works! I've forgotten, but one of the gates works to let me in and a different one (and those ones only) work to let me out when I scan my finger. Suffice it to say that the working finger is not the middle one. And it finally worked at the cafe so my prediction that the scanner will never work during my time at LCB will not stay true. The new ID card is a different story and I'm still not sure that I will learn everyone's name in my group before the exams. We're still working on remembering who's actually in the group.
Practicing...and bloody pigeons
Saturday was a practice session with JE. We met at Borough Market because we needed some ingredients (pigeons, baby onions, a few other bits and pieces). And of course, we both got a delicious toasted cheese sandwich. JE was actually going to get something else, but a look at the steam rising in the air from a bitten corner of the sandwich and a tiny little bite convinced her that she wanted one of her own. I remember ages ago when LM and I went to get one, we shared it and I thought it was so delicious that I could eat a whole one by myself. Well, no, as it turns out. I got most of the way through but the cheese was so rich (and I'm pretty sure there were lashings of butter on it) that I was defeated before I got to the end.
Spent part of the time practicing turning turnips. I remembered that I wasted a little time during the mock exam doing extra ones (obviously losing some time there) but reminded myself that there would only be a couple of backups during the actual exam so some time should get picked up there, as well as the vegetable cooking.
I hate pigeon - the meat actually smells kind of vile. After we thought it was cooked, I poked the meat when we roasted the crown and one felt pretty close to medium while the other one still felt really rare. When I carved my pigeons, the parts that felt medium were medium, but the part close to the bone was still not cooked and even though it didn't bleed (much) when I carved it, blood got in the sauce when I put the sauce on the plate. I'm not sure how I'll get the whole pigeon crown to medium at this stage because it looks like if the part by the bone is cooked, the rest of the breast might be overdone. It's not quite as serious to be slightly under with the pigeon as it is with chicken (they want the pigeon medium, chicken has to be cooked through) but it can't be good if I can't roast the stupid thing.
We did manage to get the braising liquid from the lettuce sufficiently reduced to get a glaze and plate most of 2 plates. No second lettuce and we skipped the chicken mousse because it's a component which is hard to mess up once you learn the tricks of the trade. However, not particularly happy with the result of our practice and have to remind myself that conditions at home are very different from te ones at school. For one thing, I'm not sure anyone has 7 pots at home and we spent part of our 4 hours washing up. We did mark time for when we expected to be doing other elements during the exam (i.e. the chicken mousse for the lettuce, the poached eggs, spinach and Hollandaise sauce) but all in all it didn't turn out too badly, other than the pigeon which is still causing me problems. Perhaps a longer sear - I'll have to ask the chef because the whole bleeding on the plate thing doesn't work for me. The picture on the right above looks like one of those find the difference games they have for you when you're a child, the purpose being that the plates presented during the exam ought to be identical. JE was unhappy with the sauce but I thought it was pretty good, taking into account we used the wrong stock (we didn't have veal and I haven't been able to find it) and the wrong wine (we didn't want to open a nice bottle of red wine and we had only gotten white wine from when we did the Hollandaise earlier in the week.
Made the tartlet but not the eggs, spinach or the Hollandaise. For one thing, we ran out of pots and pans - they were all in use for the various components of the pigeon dish. For another, JE had a little trouble with her dough and we don't know why. And the moulds we used yesterday were a bit bigger than the ones we use for the exam so this was actually meant for practice lining and baking the tartlets anyway. Not necessarily perfect (we don't know why the potatoes tasted better the last time we did them) but we learned quite a bit so it was definitely not a wasted day.
Dinner
There's this restaurant on Regent Street that I've passed by quite a few times and each time it seemed like one I would like to try. Luckily one of my friends here had heard from someone that it was good so he booked 4 of us in. It had interactive tables so we all had fun playing with it - it's pretty much like having a video screen of a computer screen on your table via projector and you can order food, drinks, ask for service, there's a Chef Cam which I thought was really cool (a bit blurry but watching the kitchen was kind of fun), each pair sitting across from each other played Battleship, you can flag down a waiter and change the decor on your table, to name just a few highlights. I was going to take photos but the boys pooh-poohed the idea. Well, they said boys don't take photos and I didn't want to embarrass them. Food on the whole was good but my miso fish wasn't - couldn't taste the miso if there was any (really - but there was plenty of Thai sweet red chili sauce) and it was dry and super overcooked, so a little disappointing. The fun factor pretty much made up for it though and we had a lot of laughs discussing whether it was a good idea or a bad one for a first date - consensus being it could be either one, depending on the date.
The restaurant had been described as a "funky Asian fusion" place so I put on pretty shoes to go out. They were fine when I first put them on, but have come to the conclusion that they are more of the "sit there and look pretty" variety than "run down the street in high heels" kind. We stopped by a bar on the way home, saw some wild gyrating in the direction of a hen's night (bachelorette party, for those of us not from the UK or Australia), then walked home. By the time we got home, my feet were hurting. Maybe it's just being out of practice walking in heels, but I suspect not. I did think that perhaps this was the Little Mermaid's problem (the Hans Christian Andersen version, not the Disney one - where the price for being human was the loss of her voice and feeling like she was walking on knives while she followed her heart to her Prince and her death) - I bet she was wearing pretty but uncomfortable shoes.
Next on the agenda - writing out my recipes for the Patisserie exam runs this week and working on the portfolio. I wanted to go to ballet this morning but am not sure whether my feet have forgiven me for subjecting them to high heels for an entire evening after weeks of sneakers, soft boots and kitchen shoes.
So until next time may your endeavors be more successful than our adventures have been thus far.
I spent Sunday afternoon experimenting with tuiles, puree and plating. If there was ever a time that drove home how unartistic I am, today was it. There was also the scientific curiosity which made me see if I could marble blackberry puree with white chocolate for a tempered decoration. I know that a small amount of water (or other liquid) can make chocolate seize. I just wasn't sure what the quantities were. So the unscientific part of me didn't measure, but it doesn't matter. The puree on chocolate was an unmitigated disaster - if the chocolate stayed tempered, you couldn't see the purple. If you could see the coulis, it took the chocolate out of temper in a spectacularly disastrous fashion that I would be ashamed to present to the chefs at the Patisserie finals. What to do, what to do? I was still dithering as I fell asleep last night...plate design depends on so many factors (like, what if I accidentally overcook my coulis? It turns out blackberries do have pectin so cooking it too long or cooling it too much will make it lumpy because it does something or other to the water. I'd tell you more but that would require going into permutations and I'm still finishing the portfolio which just makes me want to curl up and eat Snickers bars.) You'd think with all the chocolate, sugar, butter, milk and cream around, I'd have no problems making myself something sweet in the absence of any Snickers bars, but no - you'd be wrong. Making any sweets would require cooking and I am pretty much through except for the exams. As for the Snickers bar...well, I already ate it so another one would be massively naughty. And I only had one so actually...
Anyway - the tuiles. A slightly more successful attempt at the lattice but I am beginning to give up on it. Part of it is that the equipment at home is a little bit different - like I don't have a blast chiller or a fridge large enough to accommodate the baking tray once I've spread the diamonds on the silmat, before I pipe the connecting batter. The rest of it was that I was experimenting with the piping but since I didn't use a proper piping bag, the batter melted and I ended up with a closed lattice instead of an open one.
Praticing the plating took a lot of plates. I think for some of them I tried a couple of designs on the plate. All I have to say is thank goodness for dishwashers! This is what the sink looked like after I had cleaned up any and all mess from the preparation and cooking part. It's a good thing no one needed the kitchen because I had things everywhere (plating area, photography area, rubbish area, etc. etc.) I got really lucky with accomodation in that the kitchen is actually usable for most of the practice things.
