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.