Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Despite my misgivings yesterday I made the wet caramel as a base for the crème caramels fairly quickly. And indeed the custard filling. They seemed to want to take an age in the oven but that wasn’t much of a problem apart from the need to keep hassling my partner when I needed to look in the oven. I probably took the dry caramel a little too brown but once it had cooled down a little it wasn’t too hard to make some interesting shapes—drizzling the hot caramel into cold water produced a nice sugar crown, for example, and I managed to produce a “cage” using a ladle as a mould. The teacher this week also showed me how to make shapes using her fingers. It seems she has asbestos tipped fingers, though, as I found the caramel far too hot!

I was pretty pleased with the end result (looks and taste!) and it seems someone else must have liked it too as it was given a nice little presentation stand in the array of deserts.

I was also pretty pleased with my sweetbread salad…

… but my laid out presentation apparently isn’t the approved house style. Things are supposed to be “hidden” as a surprise to the diner. I’m not sure how much I’m going to let this influence my future presentation choices, though, so I may get into some trouble.

Still, my sweetbread cooking was considered acceptable which I guess is the main point. Not that I’m going to have much chance to keep up the skills post-Ballymaloe as J. is pretty insistent I’d be cooking for myself it sweetbreads were on the menu in Gex or Valréas.

Tomorrow we’re cooking omelettes. Basic French ones are pretty much as I make them but the presentation is neater. We all have to make one of these and I’m also down to make a cheese soufflé omelette for which the Ballymaloe recipe is, thankfully, vastly simpler than the Gastronomicom one. There’s a tomato salad to do as well but even with that I seem to have time to spare so I’ve added a white soda bread to my recipe list. Even then I reckon I have spare time so I’ve also added a chocolate and hazelnut tart as my pastry preparation and tart-tin lining needs work. I’ll see tomorrow whether a) teacher thinks I’m being over-ambitions and b) whether I end up frazzled at lunch time!