….returned to Ireland for yet more foodie escapades! On the way back from the airport I stocked up on onions, chickens, oranges, mushrooms and various other random groceries to destroy/practice my chopping, jointing, sautéing and segmenting skills because, week 6 means EXAM TIME! Elements of which are herb and salad leaf recognition, demonstrating various technical skills, assembling machines, laying and clearing a table, and how to open and pour a glass of wine! So obviously in some areas a degree of revision was required and accordingly evenings that week largely consisted of memorising the difference between mibuna and mizuna….
Cathy and Rosie swotting at the salad and herb table set up for us in the school
As you can imagine the Ballymaloe herb and salad exam extends beyond ‘iceberg’ and ‘rocket’, giving the biggest headaches were, to name a few: salad burnet, mustard leaves, epazote, beetroot leaves, rhubarb chard, rainbow chard, swiss chard, red winter kale, savoury, lovage, curly green kale, red bor kale. Many of which look fairly identical to each other. Made a super effort to get in the kitchens for about 8am so I had an extra hour to practice the techniques. Finally, at the expense of my arm, mastered the mayonnaise and various other things like omelettes and paper piping bags were practiced and practiced and practiced again. Hence on exam day I obviously got the one thing I’ve never made, damn you ‘Mummy’s Sweet White Scones’! Messing those up also has added significance of you mutilating an Allen family recipe! Went wrong as apparently ‘All dry ingredients provided for you’ does not extend to baking powder, fairly essential component in baking. So after producing some scone-pancake hybrids I progressed to chop and sweat an onion and peel almonds both of which went well. Although it somehow managed to take me over an hour to do those three things! To celebrate our exam being done and dusted we decided to treat ourselves to a night out of the kitchen and went to a tiny little restaurant in Ballycotton. Entirely unassuming from the outside, although is located right next to the harbour. The fish does indeed come straight off the boats and into the kitchen, hence I felt it was a good time to order my first EVER fish and chips! Completely delicious, hake in beer batter with homemade chips, tartar sauce and a glass of wine helped me feel marginally better! Today everyone got their results back and having gained a respectable(ish) 65% in the disastrous practical and a more impressive 100% on the herb and salad side of things, I can breathe a sigh of relief! So if the cooking isn’t going to work out for me, then I think there could definitely be a future in gardening!
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