a lesson in patience

today was my first day back in the kitchen after being out sick yesterday and all weekend. actually, i probably should have heeded my mom's suggestion and stayed home one more day, but it's hard to miss any school when so much is packed into a single day. you can't afford to be sick at ballymaloe.

mom dropped me off at ballymaloe at quarter to eight this morning and helped me carry my bags to the pink cottage. elisa, my roommate, greeted us but sounded awful. unfortunately, she's caught a bug as well. :( she and i chatted briefly about the weekend and the exam review that had taken place monday evening (apparently it was a 2+ hour session with some pretty ridiculous questions). i made her some tea, shared some of my herbal goodies with her and then headed off to the kitchen.

my partner this week is stephen o'brien and he is a dream! since i had missed demo monday afternoon, i didn't know what any of the dishes were supposed to look like as a final product. stephen had emailed me a list of our menu items and the ones that he wanted to make, so i was scheduled to make oeufs mimosa salad with homemade mayonnaise, tomato and basil salad with ballymaloe french dressing, mushroom and caramelized onion salad and the ballymaloe vanilla ice cream. i started out by boiling 4 eggs for the mimosa salad and making the mayonnaise. once we've made the mayonnaise by hand, and have an instructor sign off on the technique, we're allowed to use a food processor to make it later on. i was very grateful for that today! while i was adding in the oil, one of the instructors came over to ask how i was feeling and to let me know that i had missed out on making butter on monday. bummed, i asked if it was something i could do again. she smiled, disappeared for a moment and then reappeared with a bucket of cream. so, i added 'making butter' to my order of work. my mayonnaise came together beautifully and i covered it with cling film and set it under my work station, out of the way. then i was on to the ice cream. not overly complicated, just tedious. especially the part where the sugar and water boil to the 'thread' stage. it happens very quickly and if you miss it, the sugar and water begin to caramelize. i hadn't factored redoing that step of making ice cream into my order of work, but i should have. my sugar and water caramelized right before my eyes and just as my instructor came over to check on me. we decided (she advised) that i was using a burner that was too hot. she poured water into my caramel goop so we could boil the pan clean and start over. 10-15 minute set back, not the end of the world.

the second time was a success and soon i had a kenmore whipping my cream into a softly whipped state while i used a hand mixer to incorporate the thready sugar water into my whisked egg yolks and vanilla. when the sugar water and egg yolks were a thick, creamy consistency, i folded in the cream, poured the mixture into ramekins and put the lot into the freezer. ice cream, done.

i cleaned up my section and gathered the ingredients for the mushroom and caramelized onion salad. i sliced up the onions and set them aside as stephen was using our large heavy bottom saucepan at the moment. i began to slice mushrooms and thought i was doing a great job until my instructor appeared and let me know my slices were much too thick. she went out into the larder and came back over to me with a handful of button mushrooms and had me practice after she did a quick demo for me. i will get it right one of these days! i sliced up three mushrooms in front of her before she was convinced i had the hang of it and added them to the mound i would later be sauteing.

while all the mushroom slicing was going on, stephen had finished with the saucepan, washed it out and returned it to the stove for me. i know, he's great! i dropped in two tablespoons of olive oil, let the pan get hot and then added my onions. caramelizing onions at ballymaloe is an art and one that takes time. because of the few setbacks i had, my onions were started a bit late and ended up a bit rushed. i found myself trying to finish up and plate the mimosa salad while i was caramelizing the onions and sauteing the mushrooms, so i gave up on the mushrooms and focused on the salad and onions for the moment. the salad consists of hard boiled eggs, yolks removed and peeled shrimp placed in the yolk holes which are covered with a mayonnaise and egg yolk mixture and then covered with a thinned out mayonnaise dressing. delicious, right? yeah, not something i will probably ever make again.

with the mimosa salad finished and plated and the onions finally caramelized, i concentrated on sauteing my mushrooms. another challenge of cooking and not completely recovered from being sick is that i had no sense of taste or smell. definitely hard to season my salads! i did my best to cover each batch of mushrooms with salt, pepper, garlic and a bit of lemon juice but i'm not sure how accurate i was. the mushrooms had to cool after being cooked, so i transferred them to a glass bowl and set them aside. i turned to focus on the tomato and basil salad and realized that i had used every spoon in the drawer and had a nice pile of bowls and saucepans on the stove. before i could decide which pile to take to the sink first, stephen had swooped in and was on his way to wash them up. what a star! i sighed, scolded myself for not being more on top of my cleaning and started slicing tomatoes. fortunatey, the tomato and basil salad is fantastically simple and all i had to do was season and dress the tomatoes before i called the salad done. a quick check of my watch and i had to do a double take. one o'clock? really? my slowest day in the kitchen so far. ugh. i plated my mushroom and caramelized salad, added it to the collection of plates holding my other two salads, pulled a ramekin of my ice cream from the freezer and called my instructor over to taste it all.

aside from needing a bit more seasoning on the mushrooms, everything turned out well. i actually got the seasoning perfect on the tomatoes which was complete luck. while my instructor recorded my scores, i moved my salads onto serving plates so they could be eaten for lunch. there wasn't much to tidy in my section because stephen had taken care of everything, so i packed up my knives, organized my recipes and headed back to the cottage. elisa was up but still feeling awful. i told her about my slow morning, changed out of my whites and went for a short walk. my route took me down the side of the school and back behind the greenhouses. it felt good to breathe in the cold air and watch the pigs move around in their pen. i walked for twenty minutes and then headed back up to the school for demo.

darina, who is recently back from india, shared with us some indian cuisine. she started off with a ciabatta bread (i know, not indian) and then moved on to a mild madras curry with fresh spices, hot chilli sauce, a grape raita, grape and melon with mint salad, melon sorbet with lime syrup, campari and blood orange sorbet, tamarind chutney with bananas, poori, naan, chapatis, lassi, pears poached in a saffron syrup, agen stuffed prunes with rosewater cream and yoghurt and cardamom cream with pomegranate seeds perfumed with rose blossom water. gillian, one of the instructors here, was assisting darina and had a hard time doing anything 'right' by darina's standards. she does an amazing job setting up all the ingredients for the dishes darina puts together and is always thinking four or five steps of darina and anticipating her next three moves. it was hard for me to see her so under-appreciated today.

since i couldn't taste anything and was still feeling lousy, i headed straight home after demo.

my hot water bottle is full, i have a pile of blankets on my bed and my night nurse ready is to knock me out for the evening. i'm looking forward to a good sleep. :)