Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

My recipe list for this morning—kassler, cumberland sauce, potato salad and carrot & cumin salad—looked daunting at first sight (late yesterday morning), but the demo yesterday showed that I wouldn’t need to do much for the kassler, just roast it in the oven for an hour or so. However, I also had my sourdough to stretch and fold during much of the morning so I thought I’d be reasonably busy.

And I was. But somehow, everything came together and I was presenting my plate of food at about 11:20, much to Julia’s delight.

Julia was delighted not just because I’d finished early, but also with the various elements I’d produced. For me, though, the Ballymaloe potato salad isn’t as good as Felicity’s Perfect one. Both recipes flavour the still warm potatoes with a vinaigrette dressing but whilst this is a simple vinaigrette for Felicity with herbiness added with the mayonnaise, Ballymaloe take the opposite tack: the dressing is more flavoured and the mayonnaise simple. The other problem is that Irish potatoes are floury and I, like Felicity, think you need waxy potatoes in a potato salad.

I’m not sure that I’ll be finished as quickly on Thursday as I have a rather complicated ice-cream-based dessert to put together as well as cooking lentils and caramelised apples to go with duck breast. But there’s not much advantage to finishing early on Thursday as I’ll have to help clean the kitchen after we’ve all done. Finishing early today meant that I could finally get round to my ironing…

And having my ironing out of the way meant I had more time for homework. We’re all discussing our ideas for our final practical exam. Finding a menu that we want to cook (and eat!), that uses recipes from the Ballymaloe repertoire and that can be cooked in three hours (not forgetting that we’ll have a bread to cook as well) isn’t easy. Lots of menus were being pruned down this evening… Tomorrow will be decisive: we have to hand in our menus—and a definitive list of all the ingredients and equipment we will need—on Thursday morning.