Well, the weekend has come and gone - nice to be home for a while but have become a bit of a food bore! Sue says she is now refusing to do any cooking as "the expert" will find fault! Not true. My sons came for Sunday lunch and on entering the kitchen greeted me with "How's Ramsay doing?", I told them that I couldn't cook like him but I could swear like him. and as Llantwit Major AFC football match was cancelled I had to catch up with Wattsie in the Plough to discuss some club business. Those regular blog followers will know that Wattsie is partly responsible for pointing me in this direction so when he greeted me "You've put some weight on in a week", I told him, in no uncertain terms, the reason why I appeared slightly bigger than my normal silf like self, was probably due to the amount of butter and cream that went into the food that I'd been eating not an increase in lager consumption! Another testament to the expanding waistline was when I tried to get my golfing Scotttish friend Gregor's, kilt on! Sue and I have been invited to a Burns night and I have been asked to do the speech to the Immortal Memory, so I wanted to look the part. Now given that Gregor is the size of a large hobbit, I was confident that I would be able to fit into his kilt - alas it was not to be, not only would it not wrap round my girth twice, it wouldn't even manage one and a half times, so I borrowed the jacket and the tie, I'll worry about the bottom half of my outfit nearer the day!
So back down the motorway early this morning ready for a long day in the kitchen with Darren, the head honcho and Luke. Today was all about beef! So after a brief recap of what had happened last week we were launched into the world of beef. The different cuts, diifferent ways of cooking the cuts and how long to hang the beef. I can't see Sue being too pleased having half a cow hanging around in the shed, come to think of it, most of the dogs in Llantwit would be round baying for me to undo the padlock! So we started the process of making our own corned beef using 5kg of brisket, this is going to take 3 days; we prepared a beef stew using braising steak from the forequarter of the animal and we prepared a fillet steak ready for our supper! In between all this we had to make a tart case from our sweet pastry that had been made on Friday - my second attempt wasn't too bad!
Pea and ham soup for lunch with minted creme fraiche which we also had to prepare and Darren demonstrated how to make a treacle tart and a lemon tart that would serve 16 people. Today has been more focussed on how a commercial enterprise would operate so any would be employers reading this, if there's a job that requires someone to cut the mirepoix of vegetables for the stock, I could be your man - if it's a pastry chef you want, I know a couple of people in the group who are good at it! Dinner was going to take some bringing togehter - griddled fillet steak, bearnaise sauce, fat chips, baked field mushrooms and roasted vine tomatoes follwed by a slice of lemon tart! The heat was being turned up, timing was going to be everything. Now when it comes to timing a 9 iron from 120 yards into a green that resembles an upturned wok, I may have a fighting chance - when it comes to making sure that the 9 fat chips come out of the deep fat fryer in time for the medium rare steak to rest long enough so that it is cooked prefectly (after all you are knockin' this out for £22 a head!) and at the right time for the bearnaise sauce not to have gone too thick - my chances of success are hugely reduced. But, I must be getting better - without it being a spectacular disaster, I coped and out came a rather presentable supper.
The lemon tart pudding was very tasty, I 'm sure it would have tatsed even more lemony if we'd used New Zealand lemons though! And so the end of a long day! The banter level has increased a notch - South Africans now making jokes about English cricket -whatever next, Germans telling us how to cook food?!
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