Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

But first a picture of dawn this morning.

All I was scheduled to cook today was a Grapefruit & Grape starter salad and Chocolate Saint-Émilion, which is an almond macaroon soaked in liqueur and topped with chocolate mousse and then cream—so really, the salad, the almond macaroons and chocolate mousse. Which isn’t a lot. So I added mayonnaise (as a) we have to do it before week 6 and b) I had a couple of egg yolks left over from the macaroons) and then a lemon meringue pie. Partly as it gave me another chance to get shortcrust pastry and lining a tart tin off pat and partly as it ticks off more pre-week 6 boxes—making meringue and using a piping bag.

As on a previous occasion when I’d thrown in a tart, my new teacher this week, Debbie, wasn’t too pleased at first but I showed her the plan and that I was already reasonably advanced. Her worry was that we all needed to demonstrate jointing a chicken today. Even there, though, I was OK as I could be ready at 10am for this group session. That session was quite useful; I learnt how to identify exactly where to separate a chicken leg into the thigh and the drumstick: there’s a line of fat that indicates the joint; cut just on the drumstick side of that and you’ll have no problem. No pictures of any of this, though—too much hand washing would have to be involved!

Debbie was quite pleased with my piping work on the lemon meringue tart and my lemon curd. And also the taste of the pastry. But she spotted the evidence of all my usual problems with rolling out the pastry and lining the tin. She was pleased, though, that I got through my work plan on schedule and said we should try to schedule another attempt with her walking me through the steps later in the week.

Another problem with lemon meringue pies in this context is that they need a fair while to set after baking; even though the lemon curd I’d made was pretty thick, it still oozed out when I cut a slice even after a 25 minute rest. Make the day before was Debbie’s recommendation.

And my scheduled recipes? Good feedback on the Grapefruit and Grape salad (segmenting citrus fruit is a required technique and a task I did well) and also the Chocolate Saint-Émilion apart from my unevenly sized almond macaroons. (My excuse there is that I started off making them too large to fit in the glass for the dessert but even allowing for that she had a point!)

After the afternoon demo session we had a presentation from a local beekeeper. This was interesting, but more anecdotal rather than anything practical on how to set up as a beekeeper. Perhaps not surprising as pretty much the first thing he said was that if you want to take up beekeeping you need to follow a proper course and be mentored by an experienced beekeeper. And J. will doubtless be reassured to hear that he also said you can’t really keep bees in a suburban garden. Not a view that our one-time neighbour in Gex shared—much to the annoyance of our neighbour on the other side…