Everything here smells like yeast or cow poo.
Or dead ass, in the case of Pennywort cottage a couple of weeks ago. A housemate left a pot of lamb stock on the stove overnight and it burned to a crisp and woke us all up at 3:30 with the stench of first, steak, and then, something far worse. Jennifer, who coined the term dead ass, is not sure what that actually smells like but probably burnt lamb stock. It took a week of open windows, candles, and cooking to get rid of most of it.
But who among us hasn’t done something like leaving her hybrid car running for three hours in the parking area so no blame, no shame.
Fields turning over or gardens being maintained or just cows generally - I’m not sure where exactly the cow poo smell comes from but it is no eau de Montrose, that powerful acrid wave of concentrated manure from cows on the move that greets one disembarking from a plane in Montrose, Colorado. Here in rural Cork, it is not surprisingly gentler, almost floral, and just part of the landscape that peaks up the experience every now and then, like lemon juice might do to a dish.
As for the yeast, well it is everywhere and doing everything. It inhabits some of our ferments, is the magic in our bread, and if you were paying attention during my last letter also important for the whiskey. I’m still unclear on the relationship between yeasts and probiotics but I am clear that they do good things for you and that the less artificial stuff you add to your food, the better you feel.
Having lived and eaten here for 8 weeks now, mostly organic, including an increasing amount of probiotically-rich things like water kefir and the occasional shot of raw milk in my tea, I am feeling quite healthy. Unlike many of the younger students, I have taken no sick days, but then theirs are mostly attributable to the ingestion of other kinds of ferments. It is entirely possible that I even would have lost weight here except that I am trying to eat as much butter as possible before I have to leave it all behind and go back to Kerrygold from the Basket.1
Emotionally however, things are still a bit mercurial. I start each day off like the Swedish Chef burbling into the kitchen because you know me and the morning and who isn’t energized by some rooster wandering around and randomly cock-a-doodle-doo-ing?2 But some days that just evaporates like wash in a pot still and I’m left with Eeyore. I tell myself I’m just focusing on my cooking but the spiral starts with something like oh geez I lost my puff pastry through my own fault of not hearing the directions and boy I really screwed that up and nobody else did and mist threatens as I wander aimlessly between walk-in, freezer, and work station hoping that it will somehow miraculously show up. Then I can’t find the ingredients I need or everyone has taken the good stuff and I start late and Simon is man-spreading all over the station next to me and I so envy the easy banter everyone else has with each other and wonder if there is a little rain cloud over my head.
Swedish Chef or Eeyore? Cosmetician or Four-Star General?3 Honestly, would you expect anything different from a Gemini?
My partner this week was the very nice Adrian from Dublin who is a lawyer and has spent lots of time in the States and I was really looking forward to cooking with him. Adrian is just here to learn how to cook, he won’t take the exam, and as a result, he is worry-free and so easy to spend time with. Except that he had a mediation to deal with on Monday and Tuesday and then it stretched into Thursday and Friday so in fact I never did have a partner this week although we had lovely chats every afternoon about the cooks. So I was kind of out there on my own at the end of the island just cooking and sometimes I like that remove but after a while it just feels alone and dumb and I need to Cher myself back to the world.
No partner meant that I just cooked what I wanted from our list every day so here’s what Eeyore and the SC made this week:
steak and kidney pie with Keri’s puff pastry because of the aforementioned puff pastry crisis. KK on top in honor of Keri because that’s her catering company Keri’s Kitchen and also because she lost her mother-in-law unexpectedly last week and that’s a lot to handle even if just a three hour drive away.
an oddly dull hard boiled egg and chorizo and harissa salad but I practiced my mayo so I guess that was something?
What a weird collection of dishes, and that was just Monday. Mood not improved by this.
baked off a sourdough which is always a highlight
crème to be brûléed at a later date
a roasted veg curry that was fine with all that fine connotes
a billion paratha that each had to be fried individually4 and then I’m not sure were even served at lunch.
sun and sourdough, a partially eaten veg curry and one of those damn paratha, crèmes awaiting their brûlée
Another bizarro pairing. Mood nadir reached at end of frying the goddam paratha and it is just Tuesday.
madras lamb curry very nice but oh my god so heavy with all that cream and to have to go sit through a demo after that required many toothpicks for my eyelids.
srikhand, which is a dripped yogurt affair,5 with sugar, saffron, and cardamom. Good but sooo sweet.
poached apricots that were so over-poached they lost their skins but I did nab some of the poaching liquid as that has definite cocktail possibilities
and I brûléed the pants off that crème and then ate it for lunch it was that good.
the curry which looks a lot like the previous one but was better, the finished srikhand, the crème finally brûléed, yogurt dripping for labneh, those apricots,
Nothing like wielding a blowtorch to clear the cobwebs, it is the Cher of kitchen tools. Also, Thursday afternoon’s demo was the entire reason I came to Ballymaloe: the beautiful wild salmon, shellfish, some butter sauces, magnificent. So on Friday I made
hot oysters with beurre blanc and cucumber julienne
poached salmon with hollandaise
warm buttered cucumbers with fennel and who knew you should cook a cucumber? Well not all the time but in this case, absolutely
gingerbread that I couldn’t stop eating the batter it is that good and I don’t even like gingerbread. Also I got to get the black treacle out of this gas can which was quite a workout.
teacher Pam blanches some bladderwrack for the garnish, the oyster with bb, the salmon with hollandaise and cukes, the gingerbreads, the treacle can
So by Friday lunch the Swedish Chef is back baby and I am feeling pretty chuffed because I absolutely crushed the beurre blanc6 AND the hollandaise7 AND the salmon and as for those oysters, well, I will make them for anyone who asks when I get home because they were an absolute revelation.
Also this week . . .
During Wednesday morning demo, vast bowls of gooseberries are brought in and we students all sat around topping and tailing them while Rachel made various kind of boring vegetarian things like chick pea stew and spanakopita. The room is filled with the gentle pong of berries falling into the metal bowls which is extremely soothing.
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We had wine class outside in the weird spaceship amphitheater because it was an absolute bluebird day and many of the pale Irish people got sunburns.
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Charcuterie class, an extracurricular like butchery, is an exercise in being a grownup as we try hard to not acknowledge the obvious sexual innuendos that just bubble up when you are making sausage with grinders and extruders and casings. There are a lot of raised eyebrows and suppressed chortles and then outright giggling as people say things like just can you wet my tube please and push it hard and so on. We made a chorizo that will hang to cure for the next couple of weeks, and some garlic-fennel-pork sausage and Tiffin rolls the excess into some puff pastry so we all get a super fancy sausage roll for dinner that night.
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Charcuterie hilarity aside, some folks reached a breaking point this week, no surprise as there is just a lot of energy - good and bad - around next week’s popup dinner, the receipt of midterm grades,8 and of course now the final exam looms over everything because menus for the practical are due in a week. It’s gonna be like Cher put the donkey and the chef in a blender and keeps hitting the pulse button.
So fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.
Which is absolutely fine Irish butter, many folks here use it at home, but I mean, it didn’t just get made this morning from Jersey cream, now did it?
oh my gosh you guys I haven’t told you about the rooster rumor! There have been a lot fewer of the fancy chickens in the Palais des Poulet in recent weeks and I wondered if this was to do with bird flu or something but then I heard that the handsome rooster pecked 25 chickens to death IN ONE NIGHT! Now this may be entirely untrue, maybe he attacked one or none or maybe it was a fox or something. So I don’t know why that murderous bastard is still around but he is decorative, I’ll give him that.
Year and years ago trying to figure out what to do with my life I did a Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, you know, the one where you answer all the questions and it tells you if you are an Introversion Sensing Feeling Judging person or whatever. Anyway I found myself have a hard time deciding between answers and the person administering it suggested that I do it twice, just to see how it ended up. So I did and I can’t remember the personality types but I do remember that there were lists of suggested careers for each one and one of my results suggested caring-type jobs like pastor, teacher, cosmetician while the other list had boss jobs like CEO, four-star general, and the like. Apparently I am still living with this split personality.
Not really, more like 16 which was what the recipe made but still that is a lot when you have to roll them each out individually. You’re doing the Lord’s work there Lisa, quipped Cian from across the island.
Yogurt dripped overnight or even just a few hours, through a piece of muslin, becomes labneh, an almost cheese.
which hilariously auto corrects to beurre bland which it absolutely was not
and these are both emulsion sauces which require endless whisking so also my right arm felt like it might fall off
I manage to mix up red mizuna and green mustard on the ID part and Pam read me ALL the constructive criticisms that the technical examiners had on my various techniques but apparently I ended up with 88 on the ID part and 98 on the technical so I get to stay.
i thought the cawing crows were a problem but it's that handsome ted bundy the rooster terrorizing the countryside. thoughts and prayers, darlin'
That poached salmon with hollandaise looks absolutely DIVINE. Melty-good.