What's In A Loaf

When I tell anyone about Ballymaloe and what I've been doing for the first half of 2016, it doesn't take long before I'm asked what my favorite thing to cook is. It's a fair question, but hard to answer. I usually side step by giving a widely encompassing answer - "bread". I don't repeat myself in the kitchen very often, but bread of some form is always a staple. One week it might be pita or focaccia; lately, I've been losing sleep (literally - I pulled a batch out of the fridge to finish proofing at 4:30 this morning) over perfecting croissants, but there's always bread. What follows is the method and a little back story behind the staple version of my staple food - my weekly sourdough loaf. Following along at home is encouraged.

Spoilers

I didn't work at The Herbfarm long by any measure - just a weekend, but I learned a lot while I was there. The biggest take away is the bread recipe I've been playing with at home ever since.

The bread they serve there is a seedy rye loaf baked in the wood-fired oven behind the kitchen. I haven't figured out how to build a wood oven into my third floor condo yet, but I've been having lots of fun trying to work some of their ingredients into my at home techniques. I change my recipe a little each week, but it all starts with feeding my starter and soaking flax seeds. I've written about sourdough starter a bit in the past -it's a 1:1 combination of flour and water which houses wild yeast. I usually feed mine with equal parts rye and bread flour. Flax seeds are something I hadn't really used before Herbfarm. The bread guy there showed me that they soak whole flax seeds in water before folding it into their dough mixture. Ground flax gets used a lot in vegan baked products as an egg replacer - when soaked, the flax and water makes a sort of gel that acts as a binder. I'm no vegan, but the flax soaker in my sourdough performs a similar function - it adds moisture and tenderness to the crumb, almost as if it were a dough enriched with egg or fat. It also binds the dough together more tightly than just water, resulting in a slightly denser crumb - this is not a loaf of bread with golf ball sized holes in the cross section.


8:00AM Day 1

• Feed starter
• 25 g bread flour
• 25g rye flour
• 50g water
• Soak flax
• 35g toasted flax seeds
• 35g water

Once fed, the starter can hang out in a covered container on the counter top to do its yeast-thing. I usually give it about 8 hours, but you'll know it's ready for mixing when it looks bubbly and deflates a little when you tap the side of the container.

4:00PM  Day 1

• Mix and autolyse
• 100g starter
• 70g flax soaker
• 215g water
• 250g bread flour
• 50g rye flour
• 30 minute rest

Autolyse is a fancy word for leaving your flour-water goop alone for a while. By mixing the starter, flour, and water together until just combined, then letting it rest, you allow time for the flour to absorb your water and for gluten formation to begin. It also lets the yeast start to do its thing before you finish your dough by adding salt. Salt is important for the flavor of your loaf, but it inhibits yeast activity. Giving your bread a chance to hydrate and rest before final mixing and kneading will help ensure a more even texture in your bread once baked, and make your life until then much easier.

4:30PM  Day 1

• Final Mix
• 8g salt
• 35g toasted millet
• 30g rye flakes
• 30 minute rest

After a short autolyse, its time to mix in your salt - usually about 2.5% the weight of the flour in your dough (this is called a bakers percentage - most bread recipes have ingredient lists given in percentages relative to flour weight to make things easy to scale). The mix-ins are where you get to have a bit of fun. Lately my sister has got me on kind of a millet kick. The rye flakes I think add a bit more texture to the bread and give some surprise extra rye-y bites. I've also tried sesame, sunflower, pumpkin, and hemp seeds. I'd keep the total weight of your additions (including the flax above) at or below 30% of your flour weight, but within those bounds, go nuts. At this point I mix everything into my dough by hand. Stand mixers are not known to be gentle machines, and they'll break up all your seeds. The dough will probably be sticky icky at this point, but that's a good thing. Just run your hand under the tap for a second and do your mixing quickly while it's wet - dough won't stick too badly to a wet hand. Usually I mix everything by closing my hand over the dough and squishing it in between my fist a few times. It feels pretty cool and gets the job done. Once everything looks evenly mixed, take a break for a while and let your dough relax, it'll become more malleable with a little time.

Everyone in the pool

5:00-7:30PM  Day 1

• Stretch & fold
• 6 sets
• 30 minute rest after each

I don't do any traditional kneading for this bread. I don't machine knead because I want to keep all the seeds and whole grains in tact, and the dough is too wet to hand knead with any real success. Instead, a combination of time and stretching does all the gluten development. Stretching and folding is exactly what it sounds like. At 30 minute intervals, I'll reach into my dough-bowl, grab the bottom of the dough, stretch it out as far as I can, and fold it over itself. Repeat this 6-8 times a set, turning the bowl 1/4 turn after each fold. You can feel the dough tighten up as you continue to fold it, eventually it should feel like it will hold its shape indefinitely. The added benefit of this long stretch and fold process is that it gives more time for enzymes in the flour to break down the starches, developing a deeper, more complex flavor than you'd find in a quicker breads. None of these steps take a lot of time individually, but this is a loaf of bread that does need some babysitting.

7:30-9:00PM  Day 1

• Bench rest

The easiest part! After 6 sets of folds, cover your dough with some plastic wrap and let it hang out. It probably won't double in size after an hour and a half, but it should swell noticeably, and spring back when poked. 90 minutes is basically the minimum time I bench rest, I've gone 3+ hours on cold days when the yeast might be especially sluggish.

9:00PM  Day 1

• Shaping

The last step for day one is shaping. There are a lot of ways to shape bread, but I like to do a series of small, gentle folds on an un-floured work surface. Un-floured is important because the dough will stick a little, and you can use that friction to spin your dough into a tight boule after the folds.

Once shaped, the boule goes into a banneton dusted with rice flour (which, for some reason, dough never sticks to, it's seriously magic). This gets covered and put into the fridge for 12 hours. I find that my bread shows signs of over-proofing after 24 hours in the fridge, so somewhere between 12 and 16 is my sweet spot.

8:00AM Day 2

• Preheating

I bake my bread in a cast iron dutch oven. The cast iron holds heat well when the dough is transferred into it, and the tight fitting lid traps steam during the first part of baking, helping develop the bread's crust. I also bake my bread really hot - the cast iron goes into the oven and I preheat to 500F for an hour. It'll take a minute or two to drop your bread into the oven and the long preheat helps minimize heat loss.

9:00AM Day 2

• Scoring and baking

When you put bread dough into a hot oven, you get a thing called "oven spring". All the water in the dough starts to expand as it turns to steam, and the yeast goes all hyper-active before it burns out, rapidly developing a lot of gas which translates into all those beautiful little holes in the crumb of your bread. But the dough can't contain all that gas, it has to go somewhere. Scoring gives you a way of directing that gas out of the loaf in a decorative pattern. You don't have to score a loaf, but if you skip it the crust on your bread will look cracked and fractured as steam breaks through the weakest points on the surface.

Once the bread is in the oven, I turn down the heat to 450F and bake, with the lid on the dutch oven, for 25 minutes. Once that time is up, the lid comes off and you can bask in the glory of the oven spring.

With the lid off, the heat goes down again to 425F, and I bake for 30-35 more minutes, until the loaf feels light and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.

After nearly an hour in 400+ degree heat, your loaf probably deserves a rest. There's still a lot of hot air trapped in that gluten web, and if you cut into it too soon, your bread may collapse. I usually try to rest a loaf for at least an hour before taking a look (and, more importantly, a taste):

Habits of Moderately Effective Cooks

Since returning home from Ballymaloe and Nopi, I've been (unsurprisingly) spending a lot of time in my kitchen. I've been spending time in other kitchens too, with a brief stage at The Herbfarm and shadowing a private chef on a job. There's a lot that goes on in commercial kitchens that I can't easily replicate at home, but I've developed some new habits that don't require a walk in fridge, speed rack, or dish pit. Maybe those of you who cook at home can use some of them, too.

• Tasting made easy

"Season to taste" might be the most prolific phrase in cook books and recipes, and for good reason. It turns out you can't season to taste if you don't, you know, taste your food. Tasting isn't a one time offer, either. Cooking can (should) be an iterative process, wherein you adjust and adapt your food based on how it tastes in the moment. To this end, I now keep a container of spoons out next to my stove top, always at a moments reach. These serve not only as a tasting vessel, but a reminder to myself as well, to check in with my food and see how it's getting on.

• You're going to need a bigger bowl

Whether dressing a salad, whisking egg whites, mixing dough, or anything of the sort, use the biggest bowl you've got. No, bigger than that one. You can be much more efficient at tossing or whipping ingredients around when you aren't worried about them spilling out onto your counter. I have a lot of mixing bowls in my kitchen, and it's rare these days that I use anything but the largest.

• Easy access

All pantry ingredients are not created equal. If there is a single thing that I've done in my kitchen to improve my cooking, it's keeping salt in a large-mouth container on the counter. No fussing with a shaker that may or may not be clogged, no rummaging through drawers or cupboards while something was burning on the stove, no being forgotten out of sight and mind. Salt is one of those things that I just keep around, somewhere where I can easily grab a pinch or a cup.

• More towels, fewer mitts

I don't think I saw a single oven mitt at Nopi or The Herbfarm. They're kind of fussy to put on and take off in an environment where you really don't want to waste seconds, and if you happen to wear a hole in one without noticing, you're going to have a bad time. Kitchen towels, on the other hand, are everywhere. At any given time there are at least three on my counter. One for wiping things down, one or two for grabbing hot pans or oven dishes, and another for drying dishes from the sink. Fold a dry towel in half, then in half again, and you can pull a dutch oven out of a 500 degree oven just as well as with any oven mitt out there.

• Whistle Wash up while you work

Kitchen porters are pretty much the greatest people in the world. They're manning the dish pit cleaning up the (huge) mess the cooks are making before, during, and after service. Without them, restaurant kitchens would be overflowing with dirty pots, pans, plates, and cutlery after the first course. You probably don't have a KP in a dish pit at your house. I sure don't, but that doesn't excuse a filthy work space. There's a lot of down time in cooking. While you're waiting for that pot of water to boil or roast to come out of the oven, there's no reason not to wash some dishes or load the dish washer. I think a lot of people are put off cooking at home just because they don't like doing a mountain of dishes after a meal. So, don't do that. Next time you throw a pot or mixing bowl in the sink, if there's nothing else to do, just give it a wash and be done with it. You'll be glad you did after you've eaten and all the mess you made during prep is already taken care of.

• Prep for days

These are destined for risotto or pasta ...in a few days.

Long, slow cooking can coax some really beautiful flavor out of some ingredients, but who has the time? Some things simply don't need to be fresh, so why make them fresh when you're busy enough as it is? In a restaurant, you have maybe 15 minutes from when an order comes in to sending a plate to the pass. It takes a lot longer than 15 minutes to assemble a complex dish. Days longer. I never really appreciated how much of a dish you can make ahead, or how far ahead 'ahead' was, until I saw it in action. The best way I can explain this is by example. I recently made a recipe from the Nopi cookbook (which wasn't on the menu while I was there) for Pistachio and Pine Nut-Crusted Halibut with Arugula and Parsley Vichyssoise. (Really delicious by the way, would recommend). When it came time to serve, I had the everything on plates in about 8 minutes. It took a lot longer than 8 minutes to make the dish. The nut-crust and vichyssoise I had made the day before, they both keep fine in the fridge over night. A few hours before dinner, I portioned the fish into individual servings and laid them out on a sheet tray which I stuck in the fridge until it was time to eat. The only real work to be done come dinner was throwing the fish in the oven, then dressing the plates. I think a lot of seemingly intimidating recipes can be approached this way. Break your dishes down into components and you'll find that many can be handled hours or days in advance. Do lots of small tasks at a more leisurely pace, and you can get some pretty impressive results with little blood, sweat, or tears.

• Little black book

I take lots of notes in the kitchen now. Part of this is because I'm more actively trying to develop recipes of my own, but even if you are cooking word for word from your favorite cook book, I think you should take notes. Did you forget something in the oven and cook it 3 minutes too long? Over or under season your sauce? Think you need to double the garlic next time? Write it down. I always used to think I'd remember what I did and what I wanted to change next time I made a dish. I never remembered what I did or what I wanted to change. Plus, taking recipe notes is fun. I write jokes and stories to future-me in the margins of my recipes. Things that make me smile and want to revisit (or avoid at all costs) recipes. This is all supposed to be fun anyway, right?

That Happened

I'm tired. In the past few weeks, my internship at Nopi has come and gone, and my time in London with it. London was great, I can't wait to visit again. Nopi was terrifying, educational, grueling, overwhelming, fun, and a million other things all at once. It is easily the most stressed and awkward I have ever been in a kitchen. It was also an opportunity to make some of my favorite food in the world with some really great people. On reflection I don't really know why it was so stressful. I certainly should be able to chop vegetables and put things into a food processor at this point. But while the processes might have been familiar, the scale, environment, time pressure, and ramifications of the work I was doing were all so far beyond my comfort zone. This wasn't puttering around in my kitchen prepping dinner for friends. There weren't instructors watching over my shoulder as I cooked a 'serves 6-8' sized recipe for Ballymaloe student lunch. This was full on, needed for a 60 cover (on a really slow day) lunch service for paying customers, work. It also turns out, for me, just standing on your feet for eight or nine hours a day is surprisingly tiring regardless of what you're doing.

I'm really happy I got the chance to be in the kitchen at Nopi. Would I be happy doing restaurant service full time after being there? Honestly, I don't know. I'm sure at this point I could do it. I just don't know if I want to do it. I wasn't even on the line at Nopi and I was stressed. Facing a busy Saturday night over one of their grills or fryers or pulling a double lunch and dinner service there still sounds kind of terrifying.

The quick recap of my past two weeks, as best I can remember:
~24 liters aubergine dip
~20 liters avocado dip
~4 liters spring onion dip
~12 liters jerusalem artichoke puree
~6 liters tomato concasse
~20 octopuses
~20 kgs pulled venison
~200 cracked eggs
~50 kgs courgette fritters
~20 sheet trays bruleed squash
~10 kgs pistachio sambal
~150 skinned blood oranges
~many, many trimmed/chopped/diced/sliced/blanched vegetables

Burrata with blood oranges,
aubergine with tamarind yogurt,
sweet potato with aubergine dip.
I made (some of) those.
Photo credit: Kate Gordon

Twice cooked baby chicken,
courgette fritters with cardamom yogurt,
octopus with jerusalem artichoke puree,
truffled polenta chips.
Made some of those, too.
Photo credit: Kate Gordon

However I may feel about my time at Nopi, I have to say that their staff is incredible. They were all super helpful, understanding, and fun to be around. It's all serious business when service is in full swing, but the mornings when things were quiet and everyone was chill will stick in my mind for a while to come. Some of my favorite moments in the kitchen were when the chefs were giving me spoonfuls of some of their sauces or ingredients or just grabbing unusual items out of the pantry for me to taste, explaining how it was made and how it gets used. There's obvious passion there for everything on the menu. It may be easy to forget when you're elbow deep in a sink full of raw octopus, but the food at Nopi is beautiful and the people who make it really give a shit that it turns out that way. Huge thanks to Angelo and Scully for letting me into their kitchen, and all the chefs on the line for fighting the good fight.

So what's next? Vacation to start with. I'm in the Netherlands for a few days, looking at tulips and canals and bicycles. I think trips to France and Italy are in order, then maybe for the first time this year I'll end up back in the USA. For now I'm not planning anything out more than a few days in advance, just chilling and seeing the sights. I really miss all my friends (yes, even you) from back home, Ireland, and London alike. I miss my house, my gym, my local farmers market, my video games, and the comforts of all of those things. But I would be remissed if I didn't take a little time to be a foodie in Europe after coming all this way. Okay, e-hug over. See you later, friends.

        

  

And Then There Were None

Ballymaloe Week 12

Today, Thursday March 24th, was my last afternoon in the Ballymaloe kitchens. I'd like to say it was my best day in them as well, but the air was much too serious for me to have really enjoyed myself. I believe that happy people make happy food, and by the end of it, my menu today felt a little strained and thin. Or maybe that's just me projecting how I felt when I gave my 15 minute warning to the tasters and dressed my last plates.

That's not to say anything terrible happened. I ran about an hour late, which on all accounts is on time for us students. My pasta was overcooked. I was a pretty mean portioning the walnuts in my salad. But if those are the worst things on the day, it could certainly have gone worse. Written exams are tomorrow morning on topics ranging from business and fire safety to menu planning to cuts of meat. Honestly, I'd be more than happy to do another practical exam in lieu of the writtens, but c'est la vie.

After twelve weeks at Ballymaloe: Apple, celery and walnut salad, rabbit with mustard and sage leaves and pappardelle verde, carrot cake, and white bread.

What Was And What Will Be

Ballymaloe Weeks 9 - 10

This will probably be my last post before the end of my time at Ballymaloe. Exams are looming and there's lots to do to distract myself from actually studying HACCP and wine notes and the like. My time cooking the past few weeks hasn't been particularly noteworthy. Still making bread every day. I've added macaroons to my daily list, too. I have fun making them and they're notoriously finicky; I've made them seven times in the past two weeks I think, and only been happy with the results once. I suspect It'll take a lot longer than three weeks to really nail them down, but every little bit helps. Maybe I've just grown more comfortable in the kitchens here for the past few weeks, or maybe as the course draws to a close I've just stopped caring about doing something I'm not supposed to, but I wish I had realized earlier in the course that I can basically cook whatever I want as long as I get my assigned work done. The most fun I've had has been the random little macaroons, breads, tray bakes and the like that I do without assignment. If I had started doing those little extras earlier in the course, I can't imagine how much more I would have been able to do in my short time here. C'est la vie.

Speaking of exams, our menus were due for our final practical this week. I wrote about what I had in mind for my menu not long ago. Then I changed my mind. Many times. I'll probably change it again tomorrow, but at this point the commitment has been made. I'm calling my menu "you are what you eat eats", a meal of rabbit and the things rabbits eat:
Apple, celery, and walnut salad // Rabbit with mustard and sage leaves and pappardelle verde // Carrot cake.



The kitchen may have been unremarkable the past few weeks, but life at home has been anything but. Last weekend some of my housemates planned a weekend trip to Kinsale; a small tourist town on the coast about an hour southwest of Ballymaloe. For lack of anything better to do, I invited myself along with them, and we were joined by a fourth from the house. Kate and Fi, who originally planned the trip, had made reservations at a little bed and breakfast in town that was booked full for the weekend. Tess and I, having joined the party late, booked rooms at another b'n'b that I thought looked like it would be close to where the others were staying. Hilariously, the two ended up being directly next door to one another. After checking in to our respective rooms, Tess and I dropped by next door where the owner treated us to tea and cake, then Kate and Fi came over and were shown around where we were staying. The rooms were great, the hospitality was pretty mind blowing, and the price was probably three or four times less than you'd pay for similar rooms in a big hotel. My first impression of Kinsale was, to say the least, positive.

With rooms sorted, we took a walk around town. I think we all had our Ballymaloe goggles on; everything that wasn't farmland and greenhouses was terribly charming, but I really enjoyed Kinsale. We did some shopping and I bought a lot less than I wanted and a lot more than I needed, then we had some drinks and went out to dinner. 

Dinner was at the Black Pig, a wine bar that did charcuterie, cheese plates, antipastos and the like for its food menu. The wine, I'm told, was very good, and I was really impressed by the menu. It's a pretty brilliant set up that they've managed to get away with. Only one dish on the menu is hot, everything else is pretty much just slicing up meat, unwrapping cheeses, and un-jarring olives to order. What makes it all work is the quality of the ingredients. The hot dish (which we all ended up having), was a chorizo and pea risotto. If you're only going to cook one thing at a restaurant, it had better be good. This risotto was good. Carnaroli rice, local chorizo from a very good farm, and a stock made from the trimmings and bones of Jamon Iberico. Still thinking about that one. We closed down the Black Pig, and at around 12:30 (well after all the other tables had been cleared and cleaned), they started playing "homeward bound" on the sound system and we took the hint. 

Jamon Iberico, not the worst

Trouble Makers

Shortly after getting home that Sunday afternoon, what had already been a very nice weekend got even better. After an inquiring email a few weeks ago to the London based chef, author, and restaurateur Ottonelghi, I was offered a short internship at Nopi in London. I'll be there for the first two weeks of April, a week after the course here is over. I'm a bit of an Ottolenghi fanboy, so to get my first real restaurant work experience in one of his restaurants, even just for a few weeks, is exciting to say the least. Fi and Kate from the house will be working at Ottolenghi restaurants in London after the course, too, and another girl from Ballymaloe will be at Nopi right after me. It seems like we're basically just relocating Mrs. Walsh's cottage from Shanagarry to London. I can't wait, but first I've got to go cook a rabbit

Looking Forward

Ballymaloe Week 8

    

These photos were taken two days and about one mile apart. It is beautiful here in (this part of) Ireland, but I do wish it would make up it's mind a bit.

As week eight draws to a close, final exams are slowly but surely becoming a topic of conversation. We have a bunch of written exams on things like herb and leaf recognition, HACCP, and wine. The real fun, though, is our practical exam. We'll each have three hours to make a three course balanced meal based on recipes we've made over the course. The menu is up to us, but it has to have some kind of theme, using ingredients we'll be able to get in season (so, early spring in this case). Our menus need to be submitted by the end of week ten to give the school time to gather all our ingredients, and presumably for us to get some practice in. That still leaves two weeks of recipes to come, but with 80% of our cooking done and dusted, it's probably time to start planning. I have two themes and three potential menus that I've been thinking about. The first theme is Green, White, and Orange. This is a play on the Irish flag, with starter main and dessert spanning it's colors:

• Asparagus tart // chicken with tarragon, roasted parsnips // carrot cake. 

I like the range of techniques this menu covers - I'd get to make shortcrust pastry for the tart, do some chicken butchery, poaching, and sauce making for the main, and get all artsy with my cake decoration. I like all the dishes on this menu, too, but I think it would make for a very heavy early spring time meal.

The second theme, and the one I'm more into at the moment, is flavors from the Silk Road. This is really the food I'm most passionate about, but I think it might be slightly less technical to put together. I have two potential menus for this theme, depending on if I want to focus more on fish prep and cookery, or vegetables and meat:

• Crab cakes with saffron mayonnaise // fish curry, rice, Moroccan carrot salad // cinnamon meringues with poached plums.
• Crudites with pita bread, hummus, beetroot puree, and pesto // spiced chicken with almonds, rice pilaf, Moroccan carrot salad // cinnamon meringues with poached plums.

I think right now I'm leaning toward the latter option. I love making pita bread, and I also love the idea of serving a starter of raw vegetables - they go through all the trouble of growing such great produce on the farms here, why fuss with it any more than you have to? I'm also really, really bad with fish, so cutting up a chicken for the main would save me lots of time and stress on the day of.

The Mrs. Walsh's Cottage crew, and friends.

I think I've mentioned Ballymaloe House in the past; it's the hotel and (formerly Michelin starred) restaurant that Myrtle Allen started in the 1960's which led to the founding of the cookery school. One of the possible extra-curricular things we can do as students is to go to the kitchen of Ballymaloe House to watch a service and maybe help out with some prep or whatever needs to be done (without getting too much in the way). I went last Wednesday night, and in between peeling a bag of potatoes and straining some beef stock for consomme, I was basically just a fly on the wall watching the chefs handle orders and do their work. I wish I had gotten to do more actual work when I was there, but it was fun just to go watch service, and a little re-affirming that I didn't feel at all out of my depth trying to keep up. Anyway, this weekend Kate from our cottage made reservations for all of us to have dinner at the restaraunt. Ballymaloe House cuisine is described as "modern Irish", but this is not a place to come looking for Parmesan foams or beetroot jellies. To call anything they do modern any more is a bit of a stretch. Black-and-white uniformed waitresses served us our five course meal from a menu that, on it's cover, informed us that cell phones were not allowed at any table in the restaurant. I had a (familiar sounding) beef consomme starter, followed by an apple, goat's cheese, and hazelnut salad. For a main I had local cod with Jerusalem artichoke puree, chard, and shrimps. The fourth course is an (oh so modern) cheese trolley featuring local cow and goat's milk cheeses, followed by a dessert trolley which, that night, featured carrageen moss pudding, chocolate hazelnut tart, butterscotch and banana meringue roulade, lemon posset, saffron poached pears, and coffee ice cream with Irish coffee sauce. Petit fours of fudge, dates, and honeycomb were served with tea and coffee to round out the meal.

I guess I'd be a little put off if I came to the Ballymaloe Cookery School and didn't get any recipes from the Ballymaloe restaurant, but to be honest initially I was kind of underwhelmed by the menu just from how much of it we've made these past 8 weeks. Some of our selections were straight-from-week-seven sirloin steak with bearnaise sauce, tofu coconut curry that ended up being a much blander version of something we had this Wednesday in an all-vegetarian demo, tangerine sorbet starter we made week five or six, and salads which could have been from one of our lunches and day of the week. I particularly remember the dessert trolley and petit fours because the carrageen pudding, chocolate tart, poached pears, fudge, and candied peel stuffed dates have all previously come out of our student kitchens. On reflection, though, I'm really encouraged by how much I recognized and even have made from our dinner. There we were, in one of Ireland's most prominent and respected restaurants, and at any given time any one of us could have or already has made (in some cases superior, in my opinion) versions of half of what was on the table.

Really, at the end of the night, it's great company that makes a great meal. And after eight weeks under the same roof, I think it's pretty cool that we can all go out together and enjoy ourselves.