Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

The main recipe I had to cook today was pork belly with a ginger and seville orange marmalade glaze. Simple: prep the glaze, remove skin from pork belly, pour over the glaze and bung in the oven for 3 hours. Plenty of time after this for other things (ice cream and shortbread perhaps…) before steaming potatoes and cooking broad beans.

The problems started when the pork arrived. We were supposed to be sharing a belly of pork between two sections but the person down to do pork on the other section didn’t want to. There was a semi-good reason: she’d cut her hand last week in the butchery class. But that only affected removing the skin… Anyway, I suddenly had to make a second lot of the glaze which I hadn’t planned for. Still, the pork was in the oven at 9:20 which I figured a) was good going and b) meant it would be ready for serving at 12:30. Reader, you know what happened…

Meanwhile, I had another problem. Actually two. Laura, my teacher again today, reminded me I wasn’t supposed to be testing exam recipes during classes. As I’d sort of started on the ice cream (as I’d had nothing else to do before the pork and marmalade arrived), she let me continue but said she wouldn’t be marking it. Then, there was a shortage of ovens so I owned up to Liv (who will be my teacher on Thursday) that I wasn’t really supposed to be doing the shortbread and so couldn’t really claim an oven. Making the ice cream didn’t take long so—even with the sourdough dough I was stretching and folding—I had time to fit in something else with no shortbread to do. As I was thinking what I could do, Laura suggested pancakes, a technique I hadn’t yet ticked off in my book. Little did Laura realise that I don’t want to master pancakes as making these is J.’s speciality and I know what will happen if I return home as a trained pancake chef…

What Laura didn’t tell me until later was that I should only have made half the recipe… As she didn’t, I spent a fair while making pancakes but I wasn’t too worried as I had enough time to finish these and cook the potatoes and beans by 12:30. The pork, though, wasn’t behaving. Although Laura had twice turned up the oven temperature (despite the recipe telling you not to before the 3 hours are up), it was still nowhere near cooked—and it wouldn’t be for another hour! This meant the potatoes were slightly burnt and the beans overcooked by the time Laura tasted them. The pancakes, though, went down well—and were also appreciated by my partner for whom I served a couple before putting around a dozen on a large platter for serving in the dining room. Luckily for this blog, I remembered about a photograph before the plate was completely finished…

I also, of course, forgot to photograph the pork dish when it was finally ready after lunch. It wasn’t bad, though.

Let’s hope the consommé and Grand Marnier Soufflé I’m scheduled to cook on Thursday turn out to be better behaved. The soufflé, unfortunately, is with a crème pat base rather than a bechamel one so I won’t be sneakily practicing for my exam…