Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

I said yesterday that the rabbit dish hadn’t been assigned to my section. I was next to AS, he of paratha folding fame, as we queued up to taste the dishes after the demo session and told him I was jealous—the rabbit dish was assigned to his section in our kitchen. They’d split the work, though, that he’d be cooking the ray, the same as me.

This morning, his partner was absent and AS tells Francesco, his teacher, that I was interested in cooking the rabbit! Benita looks a little confused when I agree, but nothing is said even though I’ve already asked her if I can add the shortbread biscuits to my order of work—this she’s happy with as she agrees they would go well with the lemon ice cream.

First things first, though, I have to start a brown yeast bread as I’m on bread duty today. I interleave this with making the ice cream (mix milk, sugar, egg yolk, lemon juice & zest and whisked egg white then put in a sorbetière to freeze) so I’m ahead of time when the bread is in the oven. This means I can joint the rabbit and put it in to marinade for an hour before the lesson in taking off the wings from a ray.

Taking the wings off is not that difficult provided you avoid the vicious spines—one of the differences between ray and skate; the other is that ray give birth to live young while skate lay eggs (mermaid’s purses)—but there’s a lot of slime so I didn’t take a picture of the detached wings.

That done, it’s time to make the shortbread biscuits. Benita has pulled me up a little here; the recipe gives imperial and metric measures but recommends following the imperial ones as the proportions of sugar, butter and flour are important. There’s a 1:2:3 ratio, though, so I have used my own gram weights, 60, 120 & 180. Benita approves of my maths, but it’s not the Ballymaloe approved approach! A key lesson for the exam… And another as the cooking needs to be precise: they are done when they are just turning brown around the edge. There’s only a very subtle difference in taste when they are slightly brown all over, but the Ballymaloe style is the Ballymaloe style..

Cutting a long story short, I cook, plate and present both the ray with vinaigrette (it was a starter dish anyway) and the rabbit with mustard and sage, but both are slightly overcooked given the juggling necessary to get them both done. A good learning experience with the rabbit, though.

I serve the ice cream on the shortbread biscuits with a quenelle of whipped cream; Benita has shown me how to do this with a single spoon after my poor attempt with two yesterday.

My cooking for the day isn’t over, though, as there’s preparation work for tomorrow’s pop up dinner in the evening after the demo session. I haven’t mentioned this much recently as we Pennywort folks have mostly kept our heads down and found teams where our contributions are appreciated. I’ve stayed with the main course team and was eventually asked to prepare a butterbean mash to be used as a bed for a slice of rolled lamb loin. That doesn’t sound too onerous, but it did require taking the skins off 4kg of soaked butterbeans! Fortunately various people chipped in but it still took well over an hour.

Along the way I also needed to step in to help bone the lamb loins earning some brownie points for technique as I haven’t yet followed the butchery course here—I’m in the final group for that next week.

And to finish, two more pictures of water kefir I’ve made this week. In both cases I thought Maria would consider the choice of flavouring a little weird but she seemed to approve.