Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

No more pictures of dawn, it’s too early for even me now. But here’s a picture of the sunrise this morning.

I had a bunch of assigned recipes today—pot roast chicken, gooseberry & elderflower tart and steamed new potatoes—as it meant my partner could tick off a bunch of the techniques we’re supposed to do in the first six weeks. Her assigned recipe was globe artichokes with hollandaise (so she could tick the hollandaise box), but she added in scrambled and poached eggs. Despite the relatively heavy recipe load there wasn’t going to be much I could prepare early which was just as well as I was on salad duty today.

Being on salad duty means you turn up at the greenhouse at 7:30 and harvest whatever salads are ready, so today that was ordinary & red cos, red oakleaf, rocket, sorrel, salad burnet, tat soi and pak choi—with me being given another primer on how to tell those two apart. We also collected flowers from rocket, red & green mizuna and chives. And we got driven around in one of the electric buggies.

That wasn’t quite all as back at the school we had to rinse and wash everything and also prepare a dressing. Fortunately that latter task was assigned to A, also on salad duty today.

After assembly I made a batch of sweet shortcrust pastry which, for once, was too wet rather than too dry! Whilst that was chilling I took the wishbone from the chicken, browned it in the le creuset casserole, covered it with marjoram butter and bunged it in the oven (with a cartouche, definitely necessary as the chicken was a little too big for the casserole).

With the chicken in the oven, it was time to start work on the gooseberry pie. That took longer than I expected as I had to top and tail 700g of gooseberries! It must be over 50 years since I’ve done that and it took much longer than I’d expected. That done, though, I rolled out the shortcrust dough to serve as a base for the piled up gooseberries, sugar and elderflower petals and the rolled out some of the puff pastry I’d made yesterday for the topping and decorations.

With the chicken and pie in the oven it was time to scrub 1kg of new potatoes—small ones, so another task that took longer than expected—and whip some cream flavoured with elderflower cordial.

That done, the chicken was ready to be carved into six portions, each to have dark meat, white meat and a bone. Fair’s fair, after all. With the carved chicken resting in a warm oven under damp greaseproof paper, it was time to cook the potatoes, degrease the sauce from the casserole, add cream and thicken with roux (there’s loads ready made in the fridges, fortunately, so you don’t need to make some each time, just grate a bit in). And time to serve…

Francesco, my teacher today, was pretty happy with most of this. His main worry was the sealing of the lid to the gooseberry tart which is why the cooked one has a scalloped edge. He also reckoned that was more decorative, but I’m not convinced. We both agreed that this sort of pie was never going to win any medals for “best looking pie in show”, however!

After the afternoon demo session (burgers, sticky toffee pudding, mussels), it was time to turn over my spiced beef then back to the cottage and a bike ride. The weather is what apparently counts as hot here, but it’s only in the mid-20’s, a far cry from the 39°C for J in Valréas…