Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

On my order of work for today were spring rolls with a sweet & sour dipping sauce, bananas & lime syrup and biscuits for cheese (as part of my “help with cheese” duty for the day.). During the morning assembly there was a hint we could make a biga as preparation for making ciabatta tomorrow. As my order of work had some free slots, I figured I’d assume I’d have time for making the ciabatta tomorrow, so added in the biga making. Then Fran created more space in my order of work as he told me there was no need to make cheese biscuits, there were plenty in the tin.

Somehow, though, all that spare time disappeared…

Preparing the sweet & sour sauce wasn’t that complicated, nor was making some syrup, flavouring it with lime juice & zest and slicing in the bananas. Preparing the filling for the spring rolls took a while—prawns (the BCS ones, so really langoustines) needed to be shelled and chopped and I also had to chop chinese leaves and some mushrooms—but I seemed to be on schedule. I did, though, have to help set out the cheese board, part of my duty that wasn’t cancelled; that task ate up some of my spare time as we had to go into the gardens to look for some decorations for the cheese board.

Rolling the spring rolls also took longer than I’d planned; fiddly at first but not too difficult once you get used to it. I guess I should have taken a picture of the rolls at this stage, but it’s easy to forget this in the flow of preparation. I did, though, take a picture of my pâté de campagne from Tuesday after it had been extracted from the terrine. Actually, that was another step that took longer than expected—and it needed help from Fran with a blowtorch (I´d suggested placing the terrine in a bath of warm water; his solution was more direct!)

It tasted pretty good, even if you can´t quite see the chessboard pattern of ham and chicken livers in the cut slice.

After that I had to wait to deep-fry my spring rolls; there was just one deep-fat fryer in operation and quite a few of us needing to use it; two fryers would probably have been better given the spring rolls needed around 10 minutes and some people were frying theirs in two batches.

Anyway, I got there in the end.

Fran was pretty happy although we both agreed we preferred the mangoes in lime syrup to the banana option!

There was some excitement at the beginning of the demo session in the afternoon when Garry carried in a beef kidney encased in its suet.

There really is a lot of suet (which Garry whizzed in a chilled food-processor bowl and put in an oven at 100°C to render); the unwrapped beef kidney is much smaller.

I don’t think people scheduled to make steak and kidney pie tomorrow will have to start from a suet-wrapped kidney. The person tasked with making beef & oxtail stew, though, will have to butcher down this oxtail: