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Leiths: Foundation Term, Week 4

24th October 201525th October 20152 Comments

Let this week go down in history as the week that I actually seasoned some things correctly. On Monday, I made cauliflower cheese, and the seasoning was pronounced acceptable.

Let us all take a moment to consider this achievement.

Let’s bask in the glow of a correctly seasoned cauliflower cheese.

Done?

Good.

The ride continued when, on Tuesday, I produced well-seasoned spinach and chicken in tomato sauce. Then, on Wednesday and Thursday, well-seasoned fish. Want to know the secret? Loads of salt. Seriously. You season something as you normally would. Then add more salt. Add more salt. Think that’s enough? Ha. Fool. Add more salt. Now you’re good.

Another first, though less triumphant: this week I got my first burn. Not my first burn ever, obviously, but my first at Leiths. I took a tray from a 200 degree oven using oven gloves that had a hole in them. I didn’t realise they had a hole in them until the whole pain and burning flesh bit. Ow ow ow. Aren’t burns annoying? You sort of forget how inconvenient they are until you get one and then you remember the stinging. Oh, the stinging. On the plus side, that was on the Monday morning that we made roast beef as a table of four, and everything went surprisingly swimmingly. We had so much to do that morning that we thought we’d be stymied from the off, but we worked efficiently as a group and hit the service time perfectly. Also, best lunch ever.

Continuing down First Lane, we had our first real and proper exam this week: the WSET Level 1. Now, luckily we weren’t examined on our wine tasting skills, because as I have mentioned before, I am a bit, um, terrible at tasting wine like a professional. It tastes of booze, damnit, now bring me the bottle and stop asking questions. Instead, we had a 45 minute multiple choice question paper. Luckily they don’t tell us the results until just before Christmas, so I’ve got ages before I have to find out how badly I’ve done.

On Wednesday, we filleted sole. Tip: do not wield a very sharp filleting knife if your hands are shaking. Luckily we got to have another go at filleting on some beautiful plaice on Thursday and I managed to avoid completely cocking it up. We also made delicious meringues of joy (technical term for you there). You know, I thought I wasn’t that mad on meringues – I mean, I’ll eat them, I’m not crazy, it’s dessert – but when Hannah made them in the dem last week they were so good that I changed my mind, and luckily mine went well too. Perhaps I have just been doing them wrong for years. Anyway, I am a meringue convert.

We also had a cake dem with Sue, which was amazing because, well, cake dem. Scones, fruit cake, Swiss roll, ginger cake, yoghurt cake, Victoria sandwich… this was right after the meringues as well, so I floated home on a cloud of sugar. That’s a lie, obviously: it poured rain that day and I slogged back to the station to cram onto a train as always. But that’s a less romantic image.

This week, we also made Christmas cakes. In October. We’re going to lovingly feed and nurture them with alcohol for the next few weeks until we get to decorate and, hopefully, eat them. I must admit that traditional fruit cake is not usually my favourite, but when we tried some in Sue’s cake dem it was actually delicious. I am quite happy with how my little cake came out and am really looking forward to tasting it. In a few weeks. We’re all about the delayed gratification.

I went into the week thinking that Friday would be a lovely day, as we were starting with a slow-cooking meat dem and finishing by making lots of cake. Unfortunately, I reckoned without my comically brilliant ability to injure myself in ridiculous ways. I got up at 5.30am as usual, got into the shower, leaned down to pick something up, and my back went. I’ve been having issues with my back since an accident way back in July (I was trying roller derby and the universe always warns me off organised sports by making terrible things happen to me), but this is the first time I have had the experience of my back going from fine to completely not fine in one second for no apparent reason. I was literally paralysed, couldn’t move my legs, and thought I was going to black out from the pain. Poor James was sleeping, as normal people generally are at 5.45am, and was roused by me hysterically shouting for him in panic. He had to carry me out of the shower and lay me on the bed and together we slowly worked to get my legs moving again. Romance isn’t dead, people.

At this point, I was crying with pain, prostrate on my back, and half-paralysed, but bullish and determined to make it into school because I am a massive idiot. I took many painkillers and put on a heat pack and practised walking slowly around the bedroom until I felt less like collapsing. Of course, this all took such a long time that I missed my train, and I knew there was no way I’d be able to ride a bike for 4.5 miles at the other end of the journey anyway, so I decided to drive from Oxford to London. It was after I’d been stuck in solid, unmoving, accident traffic on the M40 for half an hour, still in agony and starving because I’d not had the chance to have breakfast, that I started to think that perhaps I should have admitted defeat and stayed in bed.

It was all worth it in the end though, because Heli did the slow cooking dem for us, and the food was pure, delicious comfort. Cottage pie, lamb daube, carbonnade of beef, oxtail stew, and loads of mashed potato. I sat in the dem room and slowly calmed down, aided by occasional injections of slow cooked meat and carbs. Then I limped through an afternoon of baking. My Victoria sandwich was one of the messiest cakes I have ever made, but I was happy with my Swiss roll, and even happier that I got to gently medicate myself with sugar all afternoon.

On Monday we begin Week 5, the completion of which will mark the halfway point of the first term. Somehow it’s nearly November, the leaves are going, I’m back in wool tights and knee-high boots, and the fact that there are Christmas things in the shops doesn’t seem utterly ridiculous.

I bought some Calvados to feed my Christmas cake. That’ll work, right?

Leiths: Foundation Term, Week 3

13th October 201516th October 20154 Comments

It’s been a funny old week. When we started at Leiths, we were told that by the end of the third week we’d be so exhausted that we’d basically be dragging ourselves around on our knees, begging for mercy and occasionally weakly lifting ourselves up to the stoves to attempt to make a white sauce before falling asleep. This is probably why Leiths went fairly easy on us this week – because they fear our collective complete collapse. We don’t get anything as lavish as a half term, but we do have a three day weekend, which is why I am writing this at 10am on a Friday morning in my PJs, having just eaten cheese on toast for breakfast and experiencing that odd feeling of unsettling freedom. You know, when you’re consciously aware that you’re allowed to be at home and barely moving, but you’re so used to rushing around all the time that your subconscious is quietly panicking and going ‘Come on, get your act together, woman! Up and at ’em! Go and do something! Anything!’. So I occasionally leap up and walk purposefully into the kitchen, turn around in a circle, realise there’s nothing I have to be doing in there, wash up a mug or something as a token effort, and then go and sit back down again.

Oddly enough, though, I’ve not been as tired as I’d expected to be. With the epic commute, the long days, cooking for hours on end, and trying to absorb huge amounts of new information, I thought I’d be sobbing quietly in a corner by now. But I’ve been surprised at what my body and my mind can handle. It might be because I am so used to being stupidly busy and working very hard, or it might be because it’s only been three weeks and I’m going to have my real crash in week five or something. Instead, what I’ve found tough is going back into an educational environment. Being observed, criticised, and tested, puts me on edge and basically makes me a rubbish cook. I mean, that’s my excuse, anyway. Perhaps I am simply just a rubbish cook.

You would think that sixteen nervous people flambéing Crepes Suzette in one kitchen would be a recipe for disaster and hair-aflame, but no, it was simply how we ended Monday. We’d started it with a wine lecture – tasting included, naturally – so having covered both drinking alcohol and setting it on fire, I went into the week feeling prepared for pretty much anything. I mean, frankly, what other life skills does one need? We were also informed that our wine exam would be, um, next week. This seems terrifyingly soon to me, but hey. I’m sure they know what they are doing. I will be able to confirm or deny this by the end of next Tuesday.

The wine lectures have been really interesting and it’s been great to branch out into a new area of the course, but I have to say, I’ve found it quite tricky. The theory has been fine, but I’m not very good at the tasting. I usually choose wine at the supermarket based on a) whether or not I can afford it and b) how nice the bottle looks. Seriously. So my wine-palate is not what you would call refined. Tasting wine is part of the lecture process (first thing on a Monday morning, which takes a bit of mental adjustment), and one of the first things to do is check the ‘nose’ of the wine to see what you can smell. People were offering answers such as ‘black cherry’, ‘leather’, and ‘oak’, but to be brutally honest, all I can ever smell is ‘wine’, and if I said I could smell anything else I would be lying. Still, it does sound quite impressive to throw out ‘herbaceous notes! Hmm… possibly mint?’, so sometimes I join in for fun. I particularly enjoyed the session on matching food with wine, during which we were presented with little taster plates of food to try with different wines to see the effect they had on each other.

DSC_0991-1024x1016 — Green apple + Sauvignon Blanc = very bad idea. Who knew?

On Tuesday morning, we had a fish dem. Now, I love fish and wouldn’t mind eating it for breakfast (which I essentially did that day), so I was a very happy culinary student, although I think sole meunière at 9.30am may have been a bit much for some people. Michael laid out a great display of various types of fish – I think fish are beautiful – and I considered stealing that turbot which is probably worth more than my laptop, but ultimately decided against it due to the impracticality of hiding stolen fish in a locker room. And my impeccable moral code, obviously. We even got to end the dem with delicious plaice goujons (posh fish fingers), freshly fried and dipped in home-made tartare sauce, before heading off to, er, eat more lunch.

DSC_0976-1024x455 — Yes, all I do all day every day is eat. What of it?

This week also saw our first foray into bread-making. We made rosemary focaccia. We actually made it twice, as you can see from the picture, to make sure we had the method forever imprinted into our dough-weary heads. The 17.49 from Paddington that day was suffused with the smell of freshly baked bread, and as no one knew my rucksack was full of focaccia I think it may have caused some confusion. I distinctly heard one girl say to her friend ‘Am I going mad, or does it smell like bread to you?’ Stranger, you are not mad. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you so. You would have thought I was weird.

On Wednesday afternoon we made fish pie, which all went a bit wrong for me. I’ve made fish pie dozens of times, and I’ve noticed so far that somehow it’s the stuff I make all the time which I screw up, and the stuff I’ve never made before that I somehow manage to fluke my way through. We’d been given a specific service time to test our organisational skills, and were told that we’d lose points for being late. I took this all very seriously and worked as quickly as I could, only to find myself on course to finish about 45 minutes before the specified service time. Because I’m an idiot, I hadn’t initially understood that we weren’t allowed to serve early either, so at this point I had to come to a squealing halt and leave my pie sitting on the side for a while to kill some time.

I’ve also been told I am under-seasoning my food so far, so on fish pie day I went absolutely wild with the seasoning. I then tasted it and thought ‘Oh god, this is incredibly salty, I have massively over-seasoned’. The problem is that you can’t really reverse over-seasoning, but I thought ‘Ah well, at least I won’t be under this time!’. Of course, as I am sure you can guess, when my pie was tasted it was pronounced under-seasoned. Essentially, I think I must have a really bad palate, and I can’t tell when something is correctly seasoned, so that’s definitely something I have to work on. I was also really disappointed to have messed up the piping of my mash on to my pie in my haste to get finished – before I realised we couldn’t be early – because I do a lot of piping (as you can probably see from all the cupcake and birthday cake recipes on this blog), so I really should know what I am doing by now. All in all, a disappointing day.

Finally, Thursday began with a beautiful meringue dem from a fellow Hannah. (Side note: usually, there are a dozen other Hannahs wherever I go – in every class or group I’ve ever been in, in every job I’ve had – but I am the only Leiths student in our group this year called Hannah! I can just put my first name on everything without my surname initial! The Lauras and Emilys of my generation will also understand the delight of this). We got to taste an insane amount of meringue nest, pavlova, meringue roulade, and lemon meringue pie. They then cleverly gave us a test while we were completely hopped up on sugar. I think I refrained from simply scrawling ‘MORE MERINGUE please feed me delicious meringue forever’ across my test paper, but cannot be sure.

The day came to an end with my inexpert gutting and cooking of that beautiful mackerel up there. I think this week has been the toughest for me so far, but I have still learned loads and, although it’s slow and halting, I feel like I might have gradually started to make some progress.

Also, I can cycle all the way up the stupid hill on my commute now without feeling like my lungs are going to explode. So that’s good.

Leiths: Foundation Term, Week 2

10th October 201510th October 2015Leave a comment

So, the first week at a new school doesn’t really count, yes? I mean, you have to get through all the introductions and talks about where to find things, and you don’t know anyone, and you spend most of the time too scared and confused to take things in properly (please tell me that isn’t just me?), so it’s only in Week 2 when you can really expect to get a proper sense of your new routine. That’s what I told myself, anyway, to excuse the fact that during the first week I was so overwhelmed that I struggled to cook things I have been making for years without fuss or incident.

Week 2 was our first full week, and our group got to cook in the mornings, which was a massive relief for me as it means we leave school on time after dems at the end of the day and I get to catch a train which gets me home for 7.15pm instead of 8pm: believe me, when you have to go to bed at 10pm to get up at 5.30am, those extra 45 minutes make a world of difference. The morning trains are shockingly inconsistent. I wrote half of this on one that was delayed for 25 minutes and sat stock still near Radley for ages for no apparent reason, meaning that when I got to London I had to race to get to school, into my whites, and to the kitchen on time. But it’s all good. Really. Every time I get stressed or feel tired, I remind myself what I am getting to do and that I could still be at my old desk job, and then everything feels a bit better.

The only slight drawback to the brand new dawn of Week 2 is that this week it has decided to start raining. A lot. Last week was unseasonably, ridiculously beautiful, but now we’re settling into a standard rainy English October. Believe me, you can get properly wet on a 4.5 mile cycle through London. Soaked quite literally to the skin, through waterproofs. Monday was a bit of a dark day that saw me, dripping rainwater and smelling like a dog that’s swum through a river, crouched on the corridor floor of the train back to Oxford because there were no seats left.

DSC_0942-221x300 — Trains are so soul-draining that apparently a really quite extensive bar service has become necessary.

Anyway, enough moaning. Let’s get on to the good stuff. The food.

Every week we will be cooking in a different table group of four, and we also rotate between three kitchens, so it really was all change on Monday. We had a different class teacher every single day for the first week and most of the second. So what with new people, new kitchens, and new teachers, it really feels like we’re getting to experience lots of different ways of working at the start of the course, which I am sure will stand us in good stead later.

I looked at the schedule for this week initially and thought ‘Ha, they don’t really expect us to make all that? In one session? When last week we struggled to get two salads done in three hours? Haaaa.’ Well, they did expect us to make all that. And it’s been great. Mostly. Our table of four has been working well together this week and it actually feels like we’ve been super-speedy. Well, in comparison to last week, anyway, which isn’t saying a great deal.

On Monday the dishes we made included a gorgeous sweet potato, chilli, and lime soup. Now, I know my bowl below doesn’t look so gorgeous, but that’s because I keep forgetting to take photos of my food before it’s tasted and so by the time I remembered all the crème fraiche which I had artfully drizzled on the top had been stirred in. But I doggedly decided to take a picture of it looking rubbish anyway to prove I had actually cooked something. See? I made a thing!

DSC_0922-300x300 — Messy bowl of yummy soup. I definitely did not serve it like this.

Below is my avocado, mozzarella, and tomato salad, which, er, I actually did serve like that. Too many olives, not enough centre height, oversized portion, too much dressing, clumsy and thick slices… I really need to work on my presentation. I can already tell that it’s going to be something I’m going to struggle with. I am not naturally dainty and precise: I am cackhanded, clumsy, and prone to panicking. I only realise how tense I have been in the school kitchens when it comes to plating up and my hands are literally shaking. This is why I could never be a TV chef (yes, that, and a thousand other reasons, I hear you cry).

DSC_0931-247x300 — At least it tasted nice. It was my lunch.

On Wednesday our pastry was examined for the third time in two weeks. I may have had a slight ‘incident’ with this pastry that saw it somehow fly out of my hands and onto the floor. I still have no idea how this happened. But, in response to my panicked whisperings of ‘Oh f***, oh f***, oh f***’, our teacher that day shouted ‘Two second rule, it’s fine, pick it up and carry on!’, so carry on I did. I mean, it did get baked at 200C for ages afterwards so I hope that killed any floor bacteria. I ate quite a lot of it and I’m still alive. Anyway, flinging pastry onto the floor seems to be a great new technique, because this was my most successful attempt at pastry by far. My little quiche was the best thing I have yet made, and you have no idea how good it felt to get positive feedback. So I shall consider chucking future attempts at pastry onto the floor with gusto and confidence.

DSC_0940-300x201 — Leek, bacon, and parmesan quiche. Yes, I forgot to take a photo of it before service. Again.

On Thursday, it was chicken. Much chicken. Many chickens. Chicken everywhere. We each fully jointed two chickens at the start of class (just, you know, gently easing us in), and I was once again reminded of one of my key discoveries at Leiths, which is this: yes, you may have been doing something for many years, but you’ve probably been doing it wrong. Okay, I’m exaggerating – not wrong, per se, but certainly not the Leiths way. I have jointed chickens before, but in a slightly haphazard ‘Ah, that’ll probably be alright. Where did I put my glass of wine?’ manner, which doesn’t really pass muster at culinary school. I mean, the Leiths way is very efficient and precise and I am glad I know it, but bloody hell, it was tricky at first. Lots of ‘cut here, definitely not here, rotate, disclocate, turn over, use this joint…’. I’m not good at IKEA shelves either.

DSC_0943-300x234 — The reasons it looks like there is a lot of chicken on this plate is that there is a lot of chicken on this plate. It’s an entire jointed chicken.

Finally, on Friday, we each made a French omelette and a full roast pork lunch with all the trimmings as a table. The less said about my omelette, the better. Seriously, I’m not talking about it. The pork was a triumph, though, and made for a very delicious lunch indeed. We worked well as a team and completed the task with a minimal amount of fuss and panic. If you’d have told me at the start of last week that we’d have progressed so much in such a short space of time I would have had my doubts. But look!

DSC_0951-300x156 — Pork, roast potatoes, parsnips, and apple and sage sauce. There were also green beans and carrot batons but service was very quick and I didn’t have time to faff around getting them in shot.

Of course, it’s not all about me messing everything up in the kitchen. Oh no. We also get to see how it should be done properly.

We started the week on a dem high, with a session on vegetables from Heli and David. I mean, look at the spread at the top of the page. Beautiful, no? It was like being in an artisan greengrocer. A very informative and interactive artisan greengrocer. They made us countless recipes (as in, I literally can’t count – maybe ten?) and I feel like we only just scratched the surface of the subject. We also had a dem on sauces on Tuesday with Mike which began with the vital building blocks of making a roux and ended with us feasting (as much as you can feat on bitesize portions, anyway) on macaroni cheese, spaghetti carbonara, and chilli crab linguini, and a great chicken dem on Wednesday with the amazing Belinda – who was stunningly calm in the face of making seven or eight chicken dishes in a single afternoon.

Then, on Thursday, Ansobe taught us about the importance of organisation and multitasking by literally making three roast dinners with all the trimmings all at once, without having a panic attack (that last bit is where I would fall down). There was moist roast chicken, succulent roast pork, tender roast beef, and some perfectly cooked pigs in blankets, amongst other things. This was also, somehow, the first time I tried bread sauce, and it was glorious. I haven’t been avoiding it up until now, it just hasn’t come up in my life. I always thought it sounded a bit odd. Sauce made of… bread? That can’t be right, surely? Well, I was wrong. It was so right. I am sorry that I ever doubted bread sauce.

I think that by Friday the teachers sensed that we were reaching overload and needed a fairly kind afternoon dem, so Phil, working solo, demonstrated an array of delicious baked goods, including white bread, soda bread, foccacia, cookies, and brownies. There was a polite (ish) scrum at the end when he called us all up to the front for samples, and everything tasted wonderful.

So here I am on a Friday afternoon at the end of my second week of culinary school. I am typing this from an absolutely packed train, delicious brownies in my tummy and a lot of frozen chicken in my backpack, with two glorious free days stretching like a gentle river ahead of me. Of course, all I’m going to be doing all weekend is cooking. But at least no one will be marking me, and I can sing loudly and tunelessly to myself in my very own kitchen.

Leiths: Foundation Term, Week 1

3rd October 20153rd October 20155 Comments

As the time to start at Leiths drew nearer, I was oddly terrified. Uncharacteristically terrified. I have many, many unhelpful qualities, but I am not usually a really nervy person. I didn’t feel particularly scared before my university interviews, or final exams, or any job interviews I’ve had. But the night before I began at Leiths, I was so nervous that I couldn’t sleep properly, and on the morning of my first day I felt so sick I could barely manage breakfast. I mentioned to James how odd this was, and he said ‘Well, it’s because it’s something that’s really important to you, isn’t it?’

Well, yes. That would probably be it.

On the first day we were actually allowed in the kitchen the teachers brought us right back to basics, which was undoubtedly a good idea because I suddenly felt like I didn’t even know how to chop an onion properly, let alone actually, you know, make some edible food. We were all dressed up in our full chef whites for the first time (I fell at the first hurdle by being completely unable to tie my neckerchief until a teacher took pity on me and did it for me) and all nervously unveiled our brand new knives and equipment sets and got to work. I have never concentrated so hard on cutting up a carrot in my life.

Although our class teacher warned us that we would all cut and burn ourselves at some point, no one sustained any injuries on our first outing with our very sharp and shiny fancy new professional knives. I was feeling quite pleased with myself until I got home and managed to slice my thumb open on a yoghurt pot (no, I don’t know how either) and bled all over everything and straight through a plaster. Being apparently unable to open a yoghurt pot without sustaining injury doesn’t bode particularly well for my future culinary career.

By the second day we still hadn’t progressed to actual ‘cooking’, but we did get to bust out the Magimixes and make hummus and arrange crudités around it in an artistic fashion. I was praised for my careful radish preparation – it’s funny how at culinary school the smallest compliments seem like achievements akin to completing a charity skydive or being promoted to CEO. Of course, by the time we got to the next day and were doing arranged fruit salads my presentation was clumsy, so easy come, easy go.

We ended the week on Friday with making pastry twice and using one set for biscuits and one for treacle tart, which I haven’t got a picture of because I had to sling it in Tupperware and madly rush to the station with it to make my train, and it got a bit bashed in my backpack. The bashing didn’t make it any less yummy though – I can testify to this as I am currently eating it for breakfast.

We also started getting to see some proper demonstrations this week. I am slightly hesitant to call them ‘dems’ outside of Leiths, because I don’t want to go all ‘insider speak’ on you all (there’s enough of that nonsense at Oxford), but, after all, it’s a fairly comprehensible abbreviation and I am too lazy to type it out in full for the next year, so dems it is. Anyway, our first dem was on eggs, and it was fascinating. Our teacher, Sue, made six or seven different egg-based dishes over the course of the morning and they were all delicious. I didn’t realise quite how much there was to know about eggs, but it all got a bit ‘Maths-y’ at one point, with talk of percentages of yolk and white composition and so on. We also had an amazing pastry dem with Claire, which meant my ‘pre-lunch’ that day consisted of samples of fantastic asparagus tart, quiche lorraine, plum pie, and treacle tart (covering all the bases), and a dem on stocks and soups wherein our teacher Ansobe calmly managed to serve three soups at the same time to a room of nearly fifty people at once and impressed us all into hero worship.

There is so, so much to learn. So much. I thought I knew a bit about food, but it turns out that I really don’t, and that’s okay. As we have to learn to do everything in a very specific way, I actually think that even the people who have had a lot of food industry experience (i.e. not me) are not too far ahead of everyone else, because the techniques they’re used to aren’t exactly the same as the ones required by Leiths. I mean, where else would you cut butter into flour for pastry with two cutlery knives?

Let’s end with some thoughts on the first serious commute I’ve ever done in my life, shall we?

DSC_09272-764x1024 — The platform is empty because all the sensible people are in bed.

Lessons from commuting:

Leave spare time. My 6.55am train has been delayed three out of the five times I have taken it thusfar. Twice by only ten minutes or so (which still isn’t super-fun when it means ten extra minutes sitting on a chilly station platform in the dark), but once by 45 minutes. I have built slack into my schedule accordingly, but I wish I could get some kind of train weather forecast so that I knew which days I may as well have a lie in and rock up late.
On the train from Oxford to Paddington, and indeed on the train from Paddington to Oxford, if I sit on the left-hand side of the carriage then I get to see the sunrise on the way in and the sunset on the way back. I mean, this should give you an idea of the kind of hours I’m doing, which is a bit depressing. But it’s still pretty.
Trains are cold. My morning train is freezing. I have no idea why, since it’s nearly October, but they seem to be air conditioning it. I genuinely need an extra layer just for the train.
I stick out like a duckling in a bevy of swans. My morning train is about 80% business men in suits, and there are also some business women in suits. And then there’s me, pale-faced and wild-haired at 6.45am, with an air of confusion and a massive rucksack.
First Great Western (or Great Western Rail as they are now apparently called, I can’t keep up), say they have WiFi on their trains, but I can’t figure out how to make it work, and I have tried fairly hard. Anyone who knows how to access this magical commodity will be a new goddess in my eyes, because I am chewing through my phone’s data allowance like a piece of chocolate fudge cake (for me that equals very fast, you see?) and it’s not going to last.
When cycling four miles through central London in rush hour traffic, it’s the tourists you have to watch out for. I haven’t had any issues with buses, taxis, or lorries (er, yet), but tourists will just blithely wander out into the middle of the road and look at you in befuddlement as you shriek and swerve to the side to avoid ploughing them down.
There are 32 sets of traffic lights on my route from Paddington to Leiths, and that’s not counting zebra crossings.

Week 2 is looming on the horizon, and I am going to go and have a very significant nap.

Wait, you want to see a photo of me in the painfully stylish headgear? Oh go on then.

Leiths: The Beginning

27th September 20155 Comments

Tomorrow, I am going back to school.

After I finished my university degree, I said to anyone and everyone that I was done. No more studying for me! No more exams! No more reading lists! No more downing glasses of white wine to try to bully my beleaguered brain into coming up with the goods for writing a 3,000 word essay in two hours (totally works, by the way). I was going to have free time to truly call my own and not feel guilty for not studying in every spare minute. I was going to read what I wanted, when I wanted. I was going to say goodbye to revision forever.

It’s only been two years, and I’ve broken my solemn resolution.

12047497_10206445480269073_1263300322_n — This lovely tree is just outside our flat, and when the leaves start to turn it always reminds me that autumn and new beginnings are on their way.

In fairness, I’ve broken it for – in my eyes – the best thing ever. I will be doing the Leiths Diploma in Food and Wine over the course of the next academic year and, all being well, I will graduate in July 2016. I’ve been longing to do this diploma for years – literally, years – and have spent many wistful hours poring over the website, reading blogs, and wishing that I could be there learning to properly fillet fish and make consommé and do puff pastry from scratch and all the things that I haven’t quite gotten around to doing as a home cook. I cannot wait to be surrounded by people who are as boring about food as I am, and we can all be boring together in the same way and thus be the exact opposite of boring.

I mean, I’m terrified, of course. Excited, definitely, but out-of-my-mind nervous too. I’m scared that I will be rubbish, and that everyone else will have much more experience than I do and I won’t be able to keep up. I’m scared of cooking in an entirely new environment – usually, I’ll be bopping around my kitchen with earphones in, taking breaks to flop around and read or watch some TV, with no one watching me or criticising my lack of technique. I’m scared of changing the entire structure of my life to accommodate travelling into London every weekday for a 9-5 studying session at the school. But I am only going to get this opportunity once, and I fully intend to make the most of it.

12047541_10206445479989066_651722554_n-2 — An event at the gorgeous Bush Hall earlier in the week, celebrating Leiths’ 40th birthday.

I will be commuting from Oxford daily. That might sound mad, but we live here and are happy here, and I can’t afford to rent in London. It means getting up at 5.30am, a ten minute cycle to the train station, an hour on the train to Paddington, and then a twenty five minute cycle on the other end to get to the school. Then I do it all in reverse and get home at around 8pm. It’s two hours door-to-door, which means that I will spending four hours commuting every day and cycling ten miles. And that’s on top of being on my feet and cooking for hours at Leiths, rather than just vegging out in an office job, slumped over a desk and trying to set up an IV for effective delivery of biscuits into my bloodstream.

Whenever people hear that I will be doing this commute, the response is usually a sharp intake of breath and a look of shocked horror, followed by a commiseration: ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ I know these people all mean well (and god, believe me, I think ‘poor me’ too), but the fact that almost everyone else thinks that this will be an unachievable nightmare is actually not massively helpful. I need to be positive and delude myself. I have two friends who have commuting experience who promise me that it will be absolutely fine, and as someone who has never commuted for more than fifteen minutes before, I cling to their reassurances like a kitten to its mother. It will be fine. It will be fine.

Of course, the last time I cycled in London I got knocked off my bike. But I’ll wear a helmet now.

12042167_10206445479429052_1136087163_n-21-169x300 — Triumphant after having completed a test commute last week without even coming close to dying once, sexy helmet and all.

So, that’s what I will be up to for the next year. Forgive me, friends, for dropping off the social radar entirely and not hosting any more dinner parties, but I will be too busy cooking to cook. I am hoping to blog the Leiths experience – partly because I want to remember it and partly because as a prospective student I liked reading other people’s blogs and I want to pay it forward – but I don’t know how feasible this will be in terms of battling through crushing exhaustion. If I get any time to myself to cook, then I will try to keep writing the occasional recipe post, and I want to limp along to the end of the bake along if I possibly can. Also, we do get the classic school holidays! So, if I am not sleeping or doing work experience, then I will try to keep this little blog alive then.

Bonne chance, mes amis. May your autumns be fruitful.

Food Memories

20th June 201510th August 20153 Comments

The first thing I can clearly remember eating is home-made raspberry sorbet. I was three years old. We lived in an apartment block in Siberia and frozen foods were popular because you could leave them outside on your balcony to chill. I remember my grandmother coming over from England and my mother baking her a birthday cake; I remember the dancing light of the candles catching shadows on her smile-lit face in the tiny, darkened kitchen. Once, my brother and I snatched some cut green peppers from a chopping board, not realising that they were hot. The sudden, intense pain horrified and confused me; we downed glass after glass of water, crying, then stuffed our mouths with soft white bread.

We moved to England, and spent a few months living with that same grandmother. She taught me to make pastry. I stood at the table in the dining room, because I was too small to reach the counter in the kitchen, rubbing butter into flour. We made apple pies. As a treat, she’d give me Rich Tea biscuits, smeared with butter and jam. I couldn’t say ‘Maltesers’, so I called them ‘mouldy cheesers’, and begged for them from her special box kept on a high shelf. I discovered sausage rolls from packets. She taught me how to make a proper cup of tea, telling me to push the tea bag hard against the side of the cup with the back of a spoon to get all the flavour out. On Friday, we’d walk together to the little row of shops across the way, and buy fish and chips. I’d run around outside on the concrete parade for the interminably long time it took for our order to be ready, and then she’d let me sneak a chip, blistering hot and sharp with vinegar, before I raced back to the house. Later, when we moved to London, she would come and visit and bring us eggs at Easter, or cardboard stocking-shapes covered is plastic and housing different types of chocolate bars at Christmas. Crunchies were my favourite, and she’d find them for me specially. She died suddenly and unexpectedly when I was ten. Rich Tea biscuits still make me feel sad.

In London, I went to primary school. We ate potato smilies, turkey twizzlers, and baked beans from brightly coloured plastic trays partitioned into different sections. At break time we had milk and Nice biscuits, or sometimes Bourbons or Custard Creams on special Fridays. I went to children’s birthday parties and ate Party Rings and cocktail sausages and drank Fanta. At home, I loved Heinz chocolate pudding from a can, microwaved, with its glossy chocolate sauce. My mother once cut her hand badly opening a can of it for my brother and I, and I still remember the shock of the sudden blood on the chocolate. I loved ravioli in tomato sauce from a tin from Lidl. My friends and I would go down to the corner shop – alone, which felt so grown up – and spend our pocket money on sweets and chocolates for midnight feasts at sleepovers. We’d lay all the food out on the floor before eating it: Skittles; Dairy Milk Fruit and Nut; chocolate buttons. I discovered ice cream floats.

I became a teenager. At school, there was a vending machine, and we stopped at it most mornings to buy Twixes and packets of pickled onion Monster Munch. At break time, they served chocolate croissants – warm, doughy, and undercooked – and I loved them immoderately. My best friend and I started to cook for ourselves. We’d come home together after school and make Smush, which began as failed omelettes – scrambled eggs with peas and courgettes and cheese. She was a vegetarian. We’d make pesto pasta and cut apples into slices and dip them into Nutella, honey, peanut butter. We’d put veggie burgers in the oven for dinner, eat grapes from the freezer, scoff boxes of seashell-shaped pralines. My mother made spinach and lentil pie, and it became my favourite dish: I’d beg her for it every night, but my brother didn’t like it. We’d argue over whether to have apple pie – my choice – or crumble – my brother’s. My mother and I loved fish. I started to do the weekly food shop with my father, first at Lidl and then at Sainsburys. I began to develop food obsessions. I fell in love with dark jewelled pomegranate seeds, buying them by the pre-hulled pack, until my father told me they were too expensive and I started to buy the whole fruits, sitting at the kitchen table and ripping the seeds from the flesh with ruby juice running down my wrists. I wanted nothing else as much for weeks, until the obsession waned and I started on roule cheese instead. From my father, I inherited a taste for red grapefruit juice and bitter marmalade, canned sardines and crispy bacon sandwiches. From my mother, dark chocolate, whole fish and Thai flavourings: chilli; ginger; coriander.

I went to university. I lived in a student house and began to really cook entirely for myself and others for the first time. I made Christmas dinner for seventeen people, plates of turkey crammed on the lopsided laps of a jumble of students ornamenting our living room and hallway. We’d host pancake brunches, and I’d stand by the stove ladling and flipping for an hour. I made the mistake of trusting a rickety old gas oven for baking a torte: the mixture swelled and exploded, coating the inside of the oven and baking into charcoal. I got my own flat with a real kitchen and began to host dinner parties, dishing out lasagne and garlic bread, roast chickens with all the trimmings, chocolate fudge cake and lemon meringue pie. I took pride in making everything from scratch. I tried hummus and avocados for the first time: somehow, I had never come across them before. I taught myself to make meringues; friends of mine endured many failed experimental macarons. I started to buy cookbooks.

I graduated. Food was my constant. I became comfortable in the kitchen; happiest when feeding others. I became a hostess, had endless dinner parties, forced unwilling people to come over all the time. I experimented, sometimes failing, pushing myself: pan-fried scallops with roasted cauliflower purée, pancetta, and chive oil; home-made ravioli; beef Wellington. I taught myself to cook fish properly; learned what mirepoix actually is; read recipe books like novels. Cookery programmes left me awed and jealous and desperate. I had failures and disasters and simple, happy triumphs.

VyL-hZtpYg3Fd4dV7wX4QxsshR9PK7M8tPbzPwjWDL8 — I cannot be the only person who does this.

I quit my job, and enrolled at culinary school, like a massive idiot. What could possibly go wrong?