Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Last night, being optimistic, I added Lemon Drizzle Squares to my order of work and tacked on Glazed Carrots with a question mark. Both would enable me to tick off key “things to do” in the first six weeks. The Lemon Drizzle Squares fitted in pretty well with using the oven for croutini (note that “u”!) and you only need a few minutes to whizz up the ingredients before baking. For the carrots, I just planned to see how things went.

On reaching Kitchen 3 at 6:45, though, a couple of bread experts were already on hand—all the bread work was going to be done there rather than in the bread shed. They were keen for me to get my bread going—even though we weren’t due in the bread shed until 7:30—so were a bit confused when I was weighing self-raising flour. I stuck to my order of service, though, but still managed to have my dough having an initial rest by 7:15. This meant I was kneading it by 7:30 with a slightly different technique than usual (and also trying to remember Donal’s advice from yesterday on how to stand to and bend from the hips rather than stooping over). This meant my bread was resting for the initial proving by 8am which meant I had time to look after my water kefir after all.

As I hadn’t planned on going to the Fermentation HQ I hadn’t taken anything for the second fermentation but I’d seen previously that there was some black tea on a shelf in the back and I asked Maria about this. She was more in favour of Jasmine or green tea or with adding ginger to the black. I said, though, I wanted to try with black tea first and then add other flavours later. Controlled experiments, folks… So, here’s a future black tea water kefir:

As I had to wait a little while for my (unnecessarily apologetic) partner, I had some time to talk to Maria about carrying on with the fermentation at home and ended up with some dormant grains and instructions on how to revive them!

As it was still only 8:20, I figured I had enough time to scrub, peel and chop carrots so added these to my mise-en-place before the 8:45 assembly.

At 9:05, though, the plan met the enemy! I might have mentioned that our hob only has four burners and one of these isn’t working. My partner, though, was making a fish pie and would need the three working burners (and, to be honest, most of the space on the hob) at the end of the morning. So rather than being a possible-thing-to-do-if-I-have-time, the carrots became the priority. And I thought I was doing OK when I had them cooked by 9:30 with the Lemon Drizzle Squares baking in the oven (with a minor delay as I’d, ahem, chosen a wrongly sized tray).

I hadn’t counted, though, on Ballymaloe style. Which is for carrots to have no resistance to the bite. Mine were al dente and, even if Donal quite liked the taste, I had to cook them further. So I had to concentrate on these for an unplanned 15 minutes when I was planning to knock back my dough and shape a loaf, a plait and rolls. Fortunately, the dough is reasonably forgiving so this wasn’t time critical. But drizzling my baked squares definitely was!

Anyway, I ended up with the Lemon Drizzle squares resting and the dough undergoing its second proving so could turn to preparing the chicken livers. During which I had a lesson from the friendly, softly spoken but fierce Finola on how to properly crush garlic with a knife.

Now, remember that “u”? I was supposed to be making croutini to go with the pâté. These are very, very thin slices of baguette that you dry in the oven. Donal judged my slices to be too thick, however, so I ended up making crostini where the thicker slices are brushed with olive oil and baked. Just as these arrived, the fish for the fish pie arrived.

As we all had to have a go at taking a fillet of one of these, we were given 10 minutes to finish up what we were doing—which for me meant preparing my bread for the oven and starting the baking. My oven wasn’t up to temperature though! Fortunately, someone else making bread had an oven up to temperature but wasn’t ready to bake so we could switch.

I don’t have any pictures of the filleting, but I did OK—and well enough at skinning the fillet that I was asked to skin a fillet Donal had cut off. And talking of Donal, he, when justifying the Ballymaloe style, asked how many people had tweezers for pin-boning at home. I guess his point was made when I was the only one of our group of six to raise my hand. More interestingly, he explained that as bottom feeders, hake are vulnerable to parasitic worms. Sure enough, each of our fillets had a few which we had to take out. Not really a problem with cooked hake (they were tiny), but there’s a reason hake sushi is not a thing (although the flesh isn’t really suitable either).

With the fish filleted, it was time to take out my bread. And it passed muster!

That done, all that remained was to whizz the butter into the chicken liver pâté and prepare everything for presentation.

Then lunch and afternoon demos when we learn our kitchen assignments and partners for the next week. I’m back in Kitchen 2 and RN, my new partner and I easily agreed on our recipes and on how to share the expected task of chicken jointing—even anticipating a suggestion from Rachel—so all bodes well.

There’s been some discussion about what to do on Friday night in the cottage. JB wanted to organise a “repas canadien” style meal where everybody brings something but three residents are away and I insist I’m not interested in eating anything in evenings after a copious lunch. So she organises a “snacks canadien” drinks and wine party. But most attendees (of which I am not one!) produce something incredible. JB herself creates wonderful canapes with goats cheese, chimichurri and asparagus and another eager conspirator in the neighbouring cottage puts quark and smoked salmon on crisps as well as bringing a tablecloth and umpteen floral decorations.

Then someone arrives with albondigas, someone else with sausages and hummus… I tell JB I’ll curse her if I suffer from indigestion but it really was a good idea. One of the more interesting contributions takes a leaf (literally!) from Rory’s foraging class on Wednesday, with sedum leaves taken from the gardens as the base for the canapés.

At least I contributed a good bottle of rosé…