Forgotten skills

Darina has just released a new cookbook called Forgotten Skills of Cooking which includes within its covers recipes for how to make jam, bread, butter, cheese and yoghurt among other things. Conceptually the idea of the book is that there are a number of skills that used to be common that have been lost now - to the extent that many of us can not imagine any of the things I listed above coming from anywhere except your supermarket. I would have counted myself amongst that number until I came here, but at the school all of these techniques are taught and students are encouraged to give them all a try.

Breads are made by students in the school every day, many experiment with producing differnt cheeses over the twelve weeks, my friend Hannah is making yoghurt as part of the meal she is producing for her exam in a couple of weeks and so many jams and chutneys are made during the course that it would take a Herculean effort for us to eat them all in the cottages.

As I have mentioned, in my role there is a lot of watching and instructing, and not a great deal of cooking unless I am making birthday cakes or cooking for the Ballymaloe market stall at the Midleton Farmer's Market which means I have been a bit slow off the mark at trying out some of these techniques myself. It was over five weeks before I first tried my hand at jam, turning 1.3 kilograms of fresh autumn raspberries picked off the Ballymaloe vines into a product to be sold.

Berries on the simmer and lids sterilising

The process is gorgeous and really so easy although I have to confess feeling slightly guilty about all of those lovely raspberries being turned into mush -

Ahem...equal quantities of sugar goes in!

and the enormous amount of sugar that goes in! *gulp* ah well at least you know it is made by your own hand, and it does taste delicious!

Delicious! Ready to eat.

Raspberry jam is one thing - I had supervised endless batches of jam being made by the time I did it and was confident it would be fine - but baking bread is whole other world altogether. The secret of turning out good bread is complex, the weather has to be taken into account, it is about feel and instinct, knowledge of the right note of hollowness when the base is tapped after baking; bread making cannot really be taught straight from a recipe it requires practice and a guiding hand from someone who knows what they are doing!

My last weekend here in Ireland and I decided on a cold Sunday that I should take advantage of my free time and proximity to friends who have made many loaves of Ballymaloe bread at this point to finally bite the bullet and try baking a loaf of bread by myself.

Ballymaloe White Yeast Bread seemed a good basic place to start, everyone tells me how robust the recipe is (code for, hard to muck it up!). My dough started out too wet but it is a cold day, so not ideal for breadmaking and I know at this point it will take a lot more work than the recipe says to get it to the next stage.

Sticky and wet dough at the beginning of kneading

The recipe says that you knead the bread for 10 minutes but in reality I kept it up for almost 50 minutes! That's my work out for the day...I remembered from my day baking with Susana that it was important not to freak out if your dough starts out wet. Most people add more flour but this throws out the ratio of ingredients and can ruin your end product. Instead you have to be patient and settle in for a decent stint of kneading; as you work the dough and develop the gluten in the flour the stickiness will disappear and it will become smooth and satiny, it is just a matter of time.

Not my best angle, but hey! Baking ain't glam.

Although I have to confess I had my moments when I wondered if it would ever come together! Then finally...the coveted 'gluten window' appeared to hold.



You test how developed the gluten in your dough is by taking a small section of it and pulling it apart as I have above. At the beginning it will tear and will not hold, but once the glutens are changing, the elasticity allows you to pull it apart and see the translucence - time to rest the bread (and your sore arms!) In due time it rose (after I left it on a radiator), I knocked it back and kneaded again for a few minutes and then....time for shaping!

I called in reinforcements for this one, my friends Hannah and Gail who are students on the course and have made bread a few times over the past couple of months.

Hannah and I rolling balls of dough to make the loaf

The recipe essentially makes enough for two loaves of bread, or rolls and a loaf so I decided to have some fun and try my hand at shaping some rolls and whip up a loaf for breakfast this week.

All shaped up and ready to rise for the second time

All of the shapes above can be made in larger versions as a whole loaf of bread as well.

Fresh out of the oven and cooling...

They rose beautifully and taking advantage of the true privilege of having two ovens I baked them both at the same time. Oooh I was jumping around like a little kid when they came out of the oven and looked like Real bread!! And smelt good!!

Ta da! Happy baker showing off the days work.

I took it over to the girl's house and had the all important taste test - ending with a thumbs up for flavour and texture : ) and we devoured most of the rolls with a delicious jerusalem artichoke soup that Jeanann had made. Battling with the disadvantage of a freezing cold Irish day outside my breadmaking certainly took forever but the thrill of eating bread I'd made myself....can't beat it, and I am completely excited to try out new types of bread. I definitely am not going back to eating commercially produced bread anytime soon!

Day in the life of....

...me at Ballymaloe! I realised that my documentation of my time actually working in the Cookery school has been a bit thin on the ground so I have been taking my camera into the school more often. This Monday was a gorgeous sunny (COLD!) day after the rain, winds and flooding of the weekend.

The chicken shed for one third of the Ballymaloe flock

This particular day I was working in Kitchen 2, a bustling kitchen with 18 students, three teachers and one little Aussie floating around. My work is undefined in many ways, I am there to help the students with their cooking and support the teachers throughout the morning and this can take a myriad of forms - whether it is emptying the hen buckets by feeding the chickens, racing through the school searching for ingredients, 'borrowing' equipment from the other kitchens, giving opinions on how cooked a loaf of bread is, or how thick one should slice bananas - no two days are the same and the largest part of my role is chatting with the students which suits me just fine!

Believe it or not, this is the beginning of the process for making puff pastry. Yes it really has that much butter in it!

Many times I find myself in the kitchen advising the students on recipes that I have never cooked before or seen demonstrated - it makes me wonder what it is I offer to them? I speak with some confidence of generally being a good cook and knowing how to follow a recipe (a skill some of the students definitely did not have when they first came here!) and...ahem...fudge the rest of it!

Beginning of a caramelised banana upside down cake

Dana with the finished product!

I am also often the go-to girl for the teachers when it comes to birthday cake making. I may have mentioned that everyone, students and staff, gets a birthday cake and with a spare set of hands around they have been getting more fun cakes recently rather than the simple meringue roulades.

My Victoria sponges cooling straight out of the oven

Ta da! The glammed up sponges turned into delicious birthday cakes

Birthday cake duty always keeps me happy - it gives me the chance to actually cook something for a change instead of just helping other people with their cooking. Sometimes in the kitchens with the students you are just itching to get in there and make the dish yourself - just because it looks like fun! So the cakes are a way to stretch my cooking muscles again and try my hand at cake decorating - Ballymaloe style.

Elaine's white yeast bread rolls

The bread is the one thing I am still waiting to conquer...the students make incredible (sometimes awful - one student put 10 ounces of sugar into his bread today instead of 1 ounce!) bread every day and I am still waiting to make my first loaf! I have one and a half weeks to make it happen....

My lunch on gourmet burger day - mine was with guacamole and french fried onion rings

The lovely end to the morning is sitting down for the three course lunch of whatever the students cooked that morning. The plate in the photo above was one of the best - soft fresh hamburger buns made that morning, organic beef burgers with lovely toppings, hand rolled pork sausages with bramley apple sauce - I ate so much I didn't make it to dessert!!

It ain't all pretty

Well the autumn colours seen from the cookery school windows on a crisp sunny morning may be lovely, but in the kitchens the students are not shying away from getting their hands mucky in the name of education and good food. Two of my favourites from last week....

Flo, having decapitated a fish and discovered that when they have not been neatly gutted by the fisherman they make an awful mess.



Aisling, proudly displaying the enormous beef shin bone she had just stripped all the meat off for an Italian beef stew. That's right, meat doesn't always come in nice little cling filmed packets in the supermarket!

Taste of the East

...Eastern Europe that is. Lara - a Canadian friend here at Ballymaloe who is from a Ukrainian family, decided to whip us up some Ukrainian comfort food on a cold Irish Sunday night. So international!

The result was this plate of deliciousness in front of her in the photo above. She made potato pirogis - they are like dense little dough pockets of potato, served with sour cream, crispy bacon, a smoky garlic sausage, mustard and baked beans! Mouth watering and mmm perfect for this cold weather.

A presto Parma

How do you say goodbye to a city that has hosted one of the most incredible years of your life? If you are me, you don't say goodbye - arriverderci, you say see you soon - a presto. And...to make sure that you will be back soon, you leave half of your remaining worldly possessions with some lovely friends to ensure that you have to go back for them!

I was disappointed to spend my last week in Parma (for 2009) in bed with this hideous flu, but thankfully was well enough to at least get out of bed and get dressed the day we left. It was the best 'get well' present I could have wished for when I opened the blinds that Wednesday morning and saw this gloriousness outside:

It had been gloomy grey and rain all week so it was such a joy to have the last morning basking in sunshine. I always think Parma puts on her best coat when the sun is out - the colours of the buildings are radiant and everything in the world seems possible. Ant and I were out in the sun wheeling boxes of my Masters papers around on the back of his bike from post office to post office, dispatching them safely out of the country to their next stop in England. After finishing our last chores we had time for one more Parma food moment that had been on the 'must do' list all year.

We stopped in at Pepen for lunch, a bustling panini shop tucked down an impossibly small borgo just off Strada Republica. I had wanted to try it ever since hearing that its speciality was cavalo crudo - a panino of raw horse meat - which apparently walked out the door, it was so popular! In the embryonic stages of recovery from the flu, raw horse meat was just beyond my taste buds that day, but as we stood mesmerised amongst the other punters, watching the speedily fluid motions of the men working behind the counter, Ant and I found the answer to our 'what do we choose' dilemma effortlessly - the classic 'I'll have one of that delicious one you are making there.'

Our panini being made - that is the drizzle of hot sauce

The gastronomic delight turned out to be a huge smear of butter in the middle, followed by melanzane polpetti (eggplant meatballs literally), rare beef, grilled zucchini, cheese for Ant's and a solid drizzle of piccante sauce.

Luckily remembered to pause between mouthfuls and take a photo!

They were warm when we left the shop and I had the unenviable task of carrying them as we walked to the Duomo piazza to eat in the sun - it took will power to resist taking a sneaky bite on the way!

Ant pronounced it promptly the best thing he had eaten in Parma.

Sunshine AND a delish panino - there is hope after the flu after all!

Luckily for him he had a girlfriend recovering from the flu who had barely been eating all week, and he got to eat the half of mine I couldn't finish!

It seemed very appropriate to still be having exciting food moments literally hours before leaving Parma, given how defined my year has been by sensational food.

Ant and I on the tarmac, about to board the plane to London.

And then it was over. We walked onto the tarmac together at Parma airport, one year and one day after we had arrived. I took a moment to suck in the cold autumn air and think about how far I had come in this past year, how enriched I was by the language, food, knowledge, culture and people I had experienced, the tears, stresses, happiness, laughter and hope - I have been truly blessed.

The big G

So the thesis was written and successfully defended. I had done my final joust with the nonsensical Italian marking system and come up trumps (I think!) all that remained was the big G - Graduation.

We all scrambled to catch that 10.15am bus to Colorno for the very last time, some a little worse for wear than others after excesses the night before. I had an ominous tickle in my throat that for the time being I was ignoring....we buzzed around at Uni excitedly, collecting our translation headsets - this was a big difference to my UNSW graduation! Most of the ceremony was in Italian so we had simultaneous English translation the whole time - it looked like a UN convention full of delegates with headsets. Everyone connected to the University spoke, culminating in the big man Carlo Petrini making some inspirational remarks. My favourite comment of his was 'In times of crisis people who want to make change find the greatest oportunities.'

Katie and Kate showed off their linguistic talents and read out limericks they had written about each of us before we settled in for the main event - handing out the Masters. There was plenty of handshaking and cheering and that was it! Randomly despite having been told all year that we were doing a Masters in Food Culture and Communication we ended up being awarded a Masters in Food Culture: Communicating Quality Products, which was the original name of our degree. Ah who knows??

The graduates! Prize for spotting Carlo Petrini amongst us.



Meghan, Sarah and I brandishing our diplomas

It was all very exciting and the only spanner in the works was that little tickle in the throat, which by lunch time had morphed into malaise. Mid afternoon it could not be ignored, I had the flu. I hobbled along to the after party that night and sampled my classmates delicious wares for the last time whilst consuming litres of water. I was glad I made it for a few hours at least because it was the last time I saw many of my friends - I spent the next three days in bed with a huge fever! Ugh, out for the count for the next ten days more or less with immense amounts of sleeping....definitely not what I had had in mind for my last week in Italia.

Finalmente!

This is a celebratory breakfast for one.

This particular meal was a quiet moment of happiness for me the morning after I handed in my Masters thesis. It really wasn't until I woke up on the Saturday morning that the full import of the achievment from the day before hit me - the weekend was mine to enjoy, I had handed in the last piece of written work that tied up my big year in Italy.

Now, it is only a few scant days until I fly to Italy to 'defend my thesis', followed by a dinner with staff, students and 'your man' Carlo Petrini, and then Friday - we graduate!!!

This post is a milestone of its own in fact - the big 100! Who could believe that I had that much to say? ; )

And what was my breakfast? An improvised version of huevos rancheros, using a leftover bean burrito filling, topped up with some tinned tomatoes, an egg cracked into the middle and gently cooked, served on crisped up tortillas. Delish.