Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

My recipes for today were a spiced apple chutney and moussaka. Looking at the amount of onion chopping and aubergine prep work, I decided last night not to add any additional recipe to tick off another task or technique. Donal, my teacher this week, considered this a wise decision but said I might have time to poach an egg (a required task before week 6).

Most of the chutney ingredients were in the pan as part of my pre-cooking time mise-en-place but peeling and chopping 4 bramley cooking apples into 0.5cm cubes took a good 20 minutes and over half an hour had gone before I had the chutney cooking away. There were also two large onions to chop—one for the chutney and one for the lamb mixture for the moussaka that I started on next. This was made with half a tin of tomatoes and 3 frozen ones. Freezing what you can when its fresh is definitely a Ballymaloe thing and tomatoes are no exception, Interestingly, to skin frozen tomatoes, you just need to put them in cold water for a minute or so; taking the skins off is then pretty easy.

With the sauce made it was on to slicing and grilling (on a grill pan) two aubergines and two courgettes. This was another time consuming task: Rachel on Tuesday and Donal today both stressed the importance of melt-in-your-mouth aubergines! All told, I was running about half-an-hour late on my schedule by the time the moussaka was in the oven and the chutney in jars.

Donal, though, reckoned three of us still had time to poach our eggs and I managed to produce what I would consider a perfect example (far too runny a yolk for J., though). Comfortingly, when I said I’d never managed to produce such a perfect poached egg before, Donal said that the freshness of the eggs is key. He doesn’t consider you can poach an egg older than 5 days after laying—and the freshest eggs on sale in a supermarket will be at least 3 days old. Maybe I’ll just have to give up on poached eggs with a chicken liver salad…

Despite having put “Photograph and Present” at the end of my order of work, I forget to photograph my presented plates, but here’s what was left of the chutney and the rest of the baked moussaka.

Another “Ballymaloe thing” I learnt during the afternoon demo is their way of filleting fish. Which is not at all how I learnt last year (nor, as one teacher commented, how you’d see it done in most restaurants). Whatever, if we have to fillet a fish in the test at the end of week 6, we’ll have to do it this way. Which is: rather than filleting the fish with the head on and then pin-boning the fillets, you cut the head off the fish and then cut the fillets off leaving the pinbones behind.

Not something I’ll have to do tomorrow; I’m down to make chicken liver pâté and a bread plait. Two minor problems: I have to start the bread off in the Bread Shed at 7:30 (which means I’ll miss the rendez-vous with my water kefir in the Fermentation HQ) and I have no idea how to fit the various kneading and proving stages into my order of work as I don’t know how long they’ll take. Indeed, Rachel’s loaf took way longer than she expected for its second proving this afternoon and was only just ready in time for the end-of-demonstration tasting.

Back at the cottage, though, it was time for yoghurt making…