kaizen

today was day two of our 'business side of food' lecture with darina's sister, blathnaid bergin. we spent the first part of the morning reviewing what we discussed a few weeks ago when she first visited with us and then she talked about value added tax and kitchen management systems before we broke for coffee at 11am. when we resumed from our break, we looked at kitchen management in action and food costing. we did a few food costing exercises (my math is much better than i give myself credit for!) and watched at a gordan ramsay 'kitchen nightmares' dvd before lunch.

i was in charge of serving soup for lunch, so i quickly made for the dining room at 1pm. i ended up with the bread basket and i went around to each table, offering bread and chatting with my classmates. lunch today was corned beef and cabbage (served for the sake of all the non-irish) and loads of delicious sides. i was slightly surprised to see my tart on the dessert table next to the poached rhubarb and pear tarts. i made a point of tasting it (since i did go to all the work of saving it the day before) and it was actually quite good. so good that i had seconds. :)

the afternoon resumed at ten to two as pam was drawing names for cooking times and kitchen assignments for our exam in two weeks. i will be cooking at 8am on thursday, the 31st.

blathnaid picked up with portion control, waste management and talking about 'the business of ageing'. i was most intrigued with the whole business of ageing, what blathnaid called 'turning silver into gold'. she had attended a conference recently that looked at the group of men and women who are 50 years of age and older. she explained that they are a market that is being completely ignored and told us that there are endless business opportunities for them in the food industry. one of the things that was unsettling was that she said the 50 and older generation does not like to be looked at as 'old' and they are irritated and turned off when people refer to them as that. however, when i asked her if there was a consensus of how that group would like to be seen instead, she didn't have (in my opinion) an answer. it was interesting to hear some of my older classmates talk about experiences they have had with advertising (and how 90% of it is aimed to the 25-35 year olds) and even at ballymaloe. it was funny to hear some of the assumptions they had about ballymaloe compared to the ones some of the younger students had as well.

we wrapped up the lecture with a case study (about a past student who opened a cafe outside of dublin and had enlisted blathnaid's help) and a short evaluation of blathnaid's time with us.

as it was only 4.30pm when we got back to the pink cottage and the day was absolutely beautiful, elisa, rose, charlotte, minnie and i went for an adventure walk. we started out along the school road and then ended up in the fields. the scenery was stunning and our chat was light and fun.

i started straight into my menu and ingredients list for the final exam when we returned to our cottage a little over an hour later. i decided on starting with a salad of crozier blue cheese, pears and spiced pecans, a main of lamb tagine with medjool dates, sides of peas with coconut and coriander, cous cous with apricot and pistachio nuts, yoghurt and banana raita and ending with yoghurt and cardamom cream with pomegranate seeds flavored with rose blossom water. should be good to quite good.

i finished my order of work for the morning and minnie's just served up some french onion soup. elisa made a carrot cake for dessert, so i figure it'll be a late night tonight.