When Izzy was in elementary school she came home with an approving comment from one of her teachers, that she’d been a real growth-mindset girl that week! It is lost to the mists of time what she actually did or learned, but I was reminded1 of that attitude this week and how because growth-mindset was in play for me this week!
Every week we change partners, kitchens, and instructors. There are four teaching kitchens, and this past week I was in Kitchen 2, generally considered to be the “best” I think largely because of the windows.
Instructor Francesco - small, neat goatee, lots of ink - is Italian, from Puglia, so I asked how he ended up here. Cooking jobs, cheffing at Ballymaloe House, chef lifestyle bad, got into teaching.2 He is a great instructor: extremely supportive, helpful, constructively critical, and funny as hell. He likes teaching here, and there aren’t programs like this in Italy, he noted because “in Ee-taly, we take three months just to talk about the pasta.” His brow furrows in shared irritation when told about the hoarding of equipment and ingredients, and he dashes off in search of a little extra special ingredient that will make your dish really sparkle - like a slice of buttery smoked salmon to top Ethan’s rolled omelette with tomato fondue and wild garlic pesto. Oh my god was that a heavenly mouthful.
I faced my new partner with some consternation this week, Ethan from Killarney but actually South Africa being one of the youngest youngsters, maybe 19 or 20? That age group is not known for its social skills with women DCÂ. Nor are they uniformly known for their organizational skills, and Ethan really repp’s his kind. Also, jaysus kid, get some pants that fit! He unknowingly displayed such an enormous plumber’s butt on Friday, I thought I would drop my eggs.
But after all that, he turned out a treat. Proud of his successes (I sent him pics and told him to send them to his mum), loyal (said mine was the best lemon meringue tart he’d ever had), and picked up on the fact that I had been doing a lot of the cleanup and breaking down of our station over the week, and jumped in when I was deep in the shit on Friday. I wouldn’t quite call him a dote3, but I do feel like young Ethan and I could have a pint together now.
Then there is our kitchen-mate and his pal Nico from the Bay Area, also 19, and a total goof. Nico’s partner was sick the first day in our kitchen, and since he and I were cooking the same dishes, he sort of followed along. I mean, he actually followed along - “Lisa, what do we do with the peppers? Lisa, how do you make a bouquet garni? Lisa, do the tomatoes go in now? Lisa, what are you serving it in?” This went on all week. FOR FUCKSSAKE NICO I AM NOT YOUR MOTHER READ THE RECIPE! But you know, he was sincere, and trying, and we all sat together at lunch, and I am a mom after all that and his is far away. So sláinte, Ethan and Nico!
Oh, so what did we cook this week? I made:
Mediterranean Bean Stew
A Warm Salad of Lamb Kidneys with Oyster Mushrooms
white soda scones with wild garlic and chives (bread duty today)
cranberry sauce (Ethan did a roast guinea fowl with this)
Victoria Sponge with Kumquat Compote
the Kumquat Compote4
French Onion Soup with Gruyére Toasts
Chilaquiles Rojos (Ethan made a “coffee cake” which is a four-layer cake with coffee buttercream filling and coffee glacé icing total sugar bomb)
more white soda scones this time with olives and rosemary (more bread duty)
a classic Rolled French Omelette (Ethan did his above-mentioned omelette and mushroom soup)
Lemon Meringue Tartlets
Yes, it seems that I came to Ireland to make cranberry sauce and chilaquiles.
When we cook, we have to present our dishes to our instructor, completely finished, garnished, in the appropriate dish (warmed if necessary), at a properly-set place, and with a clean station. It is a lot to get together at the end of the cooking session when chaos reigns and tea towels may flare.5 The instructor samples, assesses, comments, and then GRADES your effort. This is all recorded - along with the skills you are learning, and your daily duties - in your Black Book, which has your name on it and will be part of your overall evaluation at the end.
OK grades, since I know some of you have a keen interest in that topic. Each dish is graded 1-4, with 1 like an A and 4 like a D. One is brilliant, publishable, transporting, transcendent, you will rarely see this grade, we are told. Two is extremely good. Three is good. Four is NOT SERVABLE! It may be perfectly edible but you could not ask someone to pay for it in a restaurant.
Let it be known that there is no grade inflation at the Ballymaloe Cookery School. My first scones got a 3, nice flavor and color but too much handling so the crumb was too compact. Surprisingly I got a 2 on my Victoria Sponge, although the layers did not spring as much as they should have. Not surprisingly I also got a 2 on my cranberry sauce. Why did I, a native of the ancestral land of cranberries, where we invented Thanksgiving, and co-inheritor of the Thanksgiving cranberry-side debate on Conservative v. Radical relish, get a TWO?! Well, honestly, cranberry sauce - is it ever really transporting?6
Moving on, I presented the onion soup toasts differently than Francesco would have liked, so a well-made soup became a 2, and the chilaquiles were kind of blah and the sauce not great, so a 3. I was starting to feel a little frustrated - I wasn’t making hard things, but I wasn’t loving any of them. And, I’m tired! These are long days with so much information coming in all the time.7 I’m trying to figure out how to work out and make it to the bread shed and the fermentation shed and the barn before class starts in the morning. It’s already getting competitive - there are alpha cooks, hoarding equipment and ingredients, hogging the ovens, and monopolizing instructors.8 And while I like my housemates and many of the people here, you all are far away. So come Friday morning I am a wee bit fragile. I have chosen to make the Lemon Meringue Tartlets, and some scones, and we all have to demonstrate the rolled french omelette technique.9 Here is how the morning started:
I am in the kitchen early and already all the food processors (in which I’d hoped to make my shortcrust pastry for the tarts) are claimed. “There aren’t enough for everyone” says A Fellow Student10 brightly, and I think daggers at her and her perfectly disheveled hair.
No olives or rosemary for my olive and rosemary scones. Will it have to be wild garlic and chive again?
Our big white bowl is missing from our station, even though it was there when we left last night. This is the bowl you do all your hand-mixed doughs in, so I needed it for the shortcrust pastry since I didn’t have a food processor 🤬 you AFS.
I have measured out all my ingredients, exactingly, for all my recipes. Then I do this:
put the butter and sugar for the pastry into the scone flour that has the soda and salt in it. Have to start the pastry over.
put the meringue sugar into the lemon curd mix. Have to start over.
maybe I can save the scones11 by making them sweet (Francesco brings me some chocolate chips because he feels that anything can be saved with chocolate) but scones don’t have butter in them so . . . ??? Have to start the scones over.
Trying not to cry at this point.
But my second-go hand-made pastry turns out well, the blind bake is good, and the second-go curd is nice and thick so things are looking up. The scones take about three minutes to whip up and I find some green olives and there’s a bush that looks like rosemary just outside the kitchen so I make some very nice olive and whatever-that-bush-is scones.12 I throw the chocolate bits into the flour and soda and sugar, bind it with some buttermilk, and bake them off.13 WHY HAVE YOU ALL TAKEN ALL THE MIXERS FOR THE MERINGUE?! Francesco finds one for me and Emily to share and 11 minutes later, we have a pile of perfect meringue. Before I pipe, I nail the omelette on the first try so boo-yah now I’m cooking! I pipe, Francesco shows me how to use the blowtorch, and whoosh (almost lit on one fire) they’re done.
The verdict? Fucking amazing, says Francesco. I have a 1! I beam. And roll into the bank holiday weekend in a fog of exhaustion after some whiskey and a good natter with the housemates.
some random bits . . .
If you grow a ton of tomatoes, just toss ‘em in the freezer whole. Then in the winter you can use them to make sauces, soups, etc. Thaw or toss them in a bowl of hot water to peel, and off you go. I mean, you wouldn’t make a to-mah-to salad with them14, but they are great in everything else and it’s a heck of a lot faster than canning.
How to straighten a pig’s tail: run your finger from its head down its spine all the way to the tail and it will straighten right out. At least, this is what Instructor Richard told us. Have not yet gotten close enough to a pig to try it out.
Throw out your electric knife sharpener because it is taking years off your knife and spring for the Horl.
Good old fashioned vinegar-based mint sauce is “still relevant, as far as we’re concerned.” The Rory O’Connell stamp of approval.
The only reason to truss a bird when roasting is for the “respectability of the presentation at table.” Otherwise, just let ‘er splay all day.
The fermentation people are something else. Apparently someone in a previous session made a vegan squid salad for their final exam, from kombucha SCOBYs.
I empty out my head on a beach walk after class most days, and it is always changing so I am always photographing. Writing this also helps, so thank you for reading and stay tuned because oh my gosh so much more to report. Just look at how those ducklings have grown in just two weeks!
Actually reminded of it from a Hydrow workout this week where Aquil reminded me, over 20 minutes of erging, to utilize my growth-mindset and be curious. I am not at all curious about erging but I can be about food.
This is a standard storyline for many of the instructors here. Chef life burnout —> teaching on an organic farm.
Have I said what a dote is? It’s an Irish term for someone who’s a dear, adorable, upon whom you would dote. Oh, he’s a dote, he is, Housemate Sue might say.
Say it five times fast. You cannot.
Literally. This is why there is a fire safety lecture on the second day. Sad Frank tells us that he used to be able to actually light something on fire and let people use the fire extinguishers for practice but he’s not allowed to do that anymore. We are really missing out.
Izzy tells me that it was, in fact, in the 2013 film “Free Birds.” How you make cranberry sauce in Ireland? Exactly the same way you do at home - water, berries, sugar. But the sugar goes in at the end, after they’ve burst, so the skins don’t toughen.
I have not even mentioned Wednesday’s fascinating lecture/demo on butter and cheese-making! Or the fascinating but also slightly squirrely lecture on fermentation. Takeaway: Irish dairy is amazing, and Kombucha is actually tasty when it is freshly made and not preserved to sit in a grocery store for six months. But the bacteria people here are super-intense and basically surround themselves with bacteria all the time. They have drunk the kool-aid and it is fermented. I thought that was very funny but my non-American housemates had no idea what I was talking about.
They are like Section Kid, but on Top Chef.
Lemon curd, meringue, and at least one omelette each? Those hens should get paid overtime this week.
hereafter referred to as AFS. AFS may be different every time, but I don’t want to single people out too obviously.
We are strictly advised to not just throw out mistakes. There is always a use for it. So I have to figure out something!
It was rosemary, but I was moving fast at that point and barely smelled it.
And behold - BISCONES are born! They are kind of like American buttermilk biscuits, a little overbaked. Francesco just laughed.
And don’t make your chilaquile sauce with them not fully thawed either or you will just have a tomato slushee in your food processor.
You might even get me watching cooking shows!
Wow! I am loving following along. What an adventure!