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Leiths: Foundation Term, Week 9

29th November 201529th November 20155 Comments

I came into this week feeling oddly buoyant and energised, the exhaustion of the last couple of weeks behind me. There was no logical reason for this, since I did a non-stop eight hour shift at Taste of London on the weekend on top of everything else, so I can only assume that I am like one of those hypothermia victims who think that they are really hot so they get confused and take all their clothes off just before they die of cold.

Monday was pheasant plucking and drawing day. Again, no reason for me to be particularly happy about this – lots of people were rather dreading it – but having grown up in a house furnished with a ridiculous amount of taxidermy by an eccentric artist, the dead pheasants didn’t bother me at all. I’ve also got a fairly high threshold for things that people seem to find disgusting, so I was perfectly happy to pluck the pheasant bare-handed and (ready?) draw out its entrails by cutting a hole in the vent to enter the body’s cavity and hooking my fingers around its organs to extract them. We were then roasting our pheasant and preparing traditional game accompaniments to keep it company, which in this case consisted of game chips, fried crumb, savoy cabbage with pancetta, and gravy. We worked in pairs: my partner, Laura, and I were an excellent team and breezed through everything. We were one of the first teams to finish, and when we served our food the comments were positive, so all in all, a happy afternoon. Not for the pheasants though.

DSC_1172-1024x634 — My phone camera is still broken, obviously, so apologies to those fond of things being in focus. We live in an imperfect and blurry world.

On Tuesday we were fed so much that I started to suspect Leiths is secretly out to permanently incapacitate us all. It was awesome. We started the day with a gift cooking dem delivered by Ansobe and Jane, by the end of which the weakest amongst the herd were saying things like ‘I cannot handle any more sugar’, and ‘I’m so full, I can’t taste any more.’ You’ll be pleased (and unsurprised) to hear that I did my bit by tasting all the food – oatcakes, relish, chutney, cheese, pate, cranberry bars, chocolate salami, mince meat biscuits, honeycomb, ice cream with salted caramel sauce, biscotti… I don’t want to brag, but I’m just really dedicated, you know? By the way, everyone who knows me is getting hand-made food-related Christmas gifts this year, because I am at culinary school and I have no income.

12283201_10153431302414263_306384301_n — See how the photo isn’t blurry and rubbish? Will took it on his phone.

The afternoon was another lovely session, during which we got a sugar top up, just in case we were flagging after the morning’s diabetes-inducing fun. We made coffee éclairs and covered our Christmas cakes in fondant icing. The Christmas cake project is an ongoing one – more on that in a moment – but the little éclairs were a bit trickier than I was expecting them to be. Éclairs are one of those things I have made for years, only to get to Leiths and be told I have been making them wrong, and I haven’t quite gotten my head around the proper method yet. Still, éclairs are éclairs, and I ate three. To check the technique was definitely wrong on the whole batch. It was.

On Wednesday, we got to cook as teams of four to make an feast of Indian food for our lunches. We made chana dal, lamb rogan josh, methi poori, alu gobi, cucumber raita, and date chutney, and ate until we could physically eat no more, before going down for our Christmas dem with Phil and Sue in the afternoon and tasting a full Christmas dinner. Somehow, you just end up making room.

IMG-20151129-WA0000-1024x576 — This time, the picture comes to you courtesy of Richard – although this isn’t our group’s food, we all made the same things.

Thursday saw our last kitchen session of the term, which meant the last session with the students who are only at Leiths for the Foundation term. After spending nine weeks getting to know everyone in our class, it’s very sad to say goodbye to three out of the sixteen, and it’s going to seem odd to have three brand new students taking their places next term. Even though it was still technically November, we were listening to Christmas songs and eating Quality Street (for me, Quality Street are one of the true signs that Christmas is coming – I traditionally sit on my parents’ living room floor, tip a huge tub of Quality Street onto the rug, and put them in rainbow order, but I think I would get judged pretty hard for doing that in the school kitchens) and so it was all suitably festive.

Now, I like to bake, but I am not an artist in any sense at all, so while most people sculpted elaborate nativity scenes from fondant and piped intricate designs in a rainbow of colours, I simply baked some snowman-shaped macarons at home, popped them on my cake on top of some coconut snow, piped Merry Christmas on it in a wonky fashion, and called it a day. It took me about fifteen minutes out of our allotted two hours, and I spent the rest of the time wandering around hassling everyone else and eating all the chocolate. At the end of the day, we had a canapé party and got to sample amazing treats cooked by the teachers and mosey around to have a look at everyone else’s Christmas cake creations.

DSC_1176-1024x602 — A small sample of some of the incredible cakes made by my fellow students.

DSC_1181-1024x322 — This is but a small snapshot of a truly impressive spread that lasted for about twelve minutes before we devoured every last morsel.

Finally, Friday morning saw us all trooping into school nervously to sit our theory exam. Many people have been incredulous and/or confused when I have mentioned that we have to sit theory exams as well as being assessed practically. I don’t think they believe me when I explain that there is a fair amount of technique and science behind classical cooking training – they look at me very sceptically as if I say ‘I am sure really all you are doing is floating about and icing buns all day’ – but I promise there is a lot of base knowledge to cover. We could be asked about why a pastry has become tough, the technique for making a perfect choux, temperature conversions from Celsius to Fahrenheit, locations of specific cuts of beef on a cow, the ratios of egg to oil in mayonnaise, and about a thousand other things. After it was over I ate a whole jumbo bag of Maltesers and then went to the pub with everyone else at 11.30am, which should give you an indication of the stress levels.

We also found out what we’ll be cooking for our practical exams next week. My assessment slot is on Wednesday, so while you’re all going about your business, please think of me getting up at 5am to drive to London and be critically examined on my pastry making and chicken jointing skills, while trying not to set anyone on fire or accidentally stab myself with a boning knife. It’s not all about swanning about and eating canapés. Unfortunately.

Leiths: Foundation Term, Week 8

22nd November 201522nd November 20154 Comments

The eagle-eyed amongst you might notice that every picture in this post is slightly blurred, as if I have applied some of sort ‘hazy glow’ Instagram filter to them. Do not be alarmed – you are not drunk. Or perhaps you are reading this on your phone at 11pm in a pub, in which case, do please continue. This week my phone camera has been somehow wounded, and as I’m hardly going to lug my proper camera to school on top of all the other nonsense I have to tote about every day, I have no other means of taking pictures. I thought irritatingly blurry pictures were probably preferable to no pictures at all. The main issue is that I can’t fix the camera and I’m not due a phone upgrade until the beginning of 2017, so I think I am going to have to get used to the drunken Instagram vibe.

This week started off pretty rough and slowly limped into being better. We had our mock practical exam on Monday, and I was feeling alright about it. I’d practised the dishes over the weekend and I had a solid timeplan, and basically wanted to get through the morning and put it behind me. Mock exam meant mock exam conditions, so no talking to your fellow students, which feels very odd after eight weeks of working while Jack sings nineties pop hits and we all discuss whether or not our chicken is cooked through. The atmosphere in the kitchen was much more tense than usual as everyone got down to business, but I worked steadily and moved through my tasks at a good pace, and when Ansobe called the service time I was all plated up and ready to go, and reasonably happy with what I’d made.

What a naive fool I am. It turns out my fish was overcooked, my dressing was too acidic and ‘horrible’, my crushed potatoes were too crushed, my presentation was dated, my soup had been heated for too long and was too thick and under-seasoned, my bowl was too hot… I cant even remember all the things I did wrong now, but I think the only thing I did right was hitting my service time, and that doesn’t do you a lot of good if your food is awful.

I was very happy to put that morning session behind me and, luckily, our afternoon dem was with Peter Vaughan, an engaging, passionate presenter who worked and spoke at 96 miles per hour for his whole talk and successfully distracted me from feeling sorry for myself. It’s always good to have someone visit from the outside world and remind us that it is possible to have a career in food and love it, and that once we get to the end of this year we will actually, technically, be qualified for something. He fed us delicious, healthy food – always good to reset the balance when I am currently using brownies as my main energy source – and I left feeling much better.

Tuesday morning was very much the calm before the flood/tornado/storm for us, because the other half of our class were preparing their buffet for 32 people and we were quietly making a nice salmon salad in the corner and icing some cakes. I thought my salmon way yummy and ate the whole thing as a slightly odd 10.30am snack. The less said about plastering cakes with royal icing the better (the cake trolley they were on was in the hall, which got very hot, causing all the icing to start melting off the cakes so we had to do them again. I may have had a bit of a sulk about this), but all in all it was a very relaxed morning while the other half of the group cooked us a buffet lunch that was beautiful and absolutely delicious.

In the afternoon we had another guest demonstration, this time with Jane Nemazee, who is a bit nuts in the absolute best way. We were thoroughly entertained throughout her session, and though it was probably halfway through the afternoon before she actually got round to cooking anything, I enjoyed her stories about her career so much that I couldn’t have cared less. I think it was the first time everyone clapped at the end of a dem.

On Wednesday morning, our half of the class had to cook a buffet for 32 people. I had been worrying about it for three weeks, so was very much looking forward to crossing the finish line. We had been given a tight budget to work to and had to choose our own menus, cost everything, and buy all the ingredients ourselves. Our final menu was:

Beef and booze mini pies
Mushroom and mozzarella arancini with thyme and aioli
Roasted root vegetables with rosemary and feta
Winter crunch slaw with honey mustard dressing
Kale salad with figs and pomegranate
Gingerbread with pears, pecans, and cinnamon cream
Apple, cardamom, and oat crumble

Despite the usual last minute rush to hit the service time, everything went pretty well and people seemed to enjoy the food. I had about three pieces of the gingerbread, which was so good that I ate a chunk of it out of tupperware like a starving wolf on my train home, despite being given serious judgy looks by the suited businessman next to me.

In the afternoon we had a presentation from Belazu, during which we had our first olive oil tasting – not quite as enjoyable as wine tasting but very interesting nonetheless – and also got a try a balsamic vinegar that was so insanely, weirdly delicious that I ended up drinking it right out the little cup as though it was some high-end liqueur. We also had a mildly terrifying theory revision session with Claire, in which I realised quite how much I have to learn for our theory test this coming Friday. It’s lots. Lots and lots. Excuse me while I bury my head in this nice pile of sand over here.

Thursday felt like a comparatively relaxing day after the buffet mayhem of the days that had come before it. We had a morning session with another guest teacher, Jenny Chandler, who showed us some delicious Spanish food, including an empanada (huge Spanish flat pie) that was so tasty that some people decided to go home and make it immediately. We then got to enjoy a buffet cooked by the other group for lunch, before having a fairly gentle afternoon of making yet another shortcrust pastry case for our Friday flans and going over some core skills that we needed to practice. I chose to practice steak and bread, a decision definitely motivated by a desire to learn rather than a desire for a steak sandwich.

Our Friday morning dem was a lovely way to end the week, as Michael and Annie did a session on freelance cooking and dinner parties for us. Annie worked as a freelance chef before teaching at Leiths, and so was able to answer everyone’s questions about why word of mouth business is important and how exactly it is possible to cater for a wedding party of 150 out of a home kitchen. We got to spend the morning sampling dinner party dishes, before heading upstairs for another fantastic buffet lunch, and then spending the afternoon cooking pork and baking apple tarts. I genuinely spend all my time now either eating, cooking, talking about food, or deciding what to eat next.

I completely messed up the cider sauce for my pork in about six different ways, but my little apple tart came out quite pretty and James ate the entire thing as a late night snack, so I hope it tasted alright too.

Next week is our final full week of teaching, and then it’s the practical exam the week after, before our beautifully and ridiculously long holiday starts and I must get to thinking about this whole Christmas thing. Also, I should really spend less time eating and more time wedding planning.

And if anyone out there knows how to fix phone cameras then please let me know. Seriously.

Leiths: Foundation Term, Week 7

14th November 201515th November 20153 Comments

Week 7 seems to have slipped by with unsettling speed, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that we had Monday off and assessments instead of a dem on Tuesday morning, so by the time we got started in earnest it was Wednesday and, hey, already halfway through the week! In my assessment I learned that I passed both my wine exam – thank god, as I really didn’t fancy doing it again – and my most recent Leiths theory test. Then we got back into our normal rhythm with an afternoon of scattershot cooking that saw us segmenting oranges, icing cakes, steaming mussels, and making caramel sauce without much rhyme or reason (at least in my case).

Weirdly, I found segmenting oranges to be the trickiest part of all this. It’s fiddly, and as I’ve mentioned before, I am clumsy and impatient. You have to remove every last bit of pith from each segment and make sure they are perfectly shaped with no straggly bits. I actually managed to get my first in-kitchen cut doing this – I’m surprised I made it all the way to Week 7 without this happening, frankly – because everything gets very slippery and the serrated knives are wickedly sharp, as I found out when mine sliced into my thumb. I think you’re supposed to wear these cuts like badges of pride. I wish I’d gotten mine doing something a bit more rock and roll than cutting up an orange.

Wednesday was a rather pleasant day in the kitchen, which saw us making smoked haddock, spinach, and tomato gougères. Gougère is savoury choux pastry with added cheese, and it’s stupidly delicious. It’s actually a bit of a cheeky shortcut to making a pie: far less faff than lining a tin with shortcrust or, god forbid, making puff pastry from scratch. You knock up your choux, which takes about ten minutes, then spoon it round the walls of your pie dish and whack it in the oven to expand and go gloriously golden while you get on with making your filling. Then you pop the filling into the crispy pastry to heat it through and that’s job done.

IMG_20151113_215411-1024x699 — Full disclosure – this is actually a picture of my fellow student Jack’s gougère. I forgot to photograph mine before the teacher cut into it, and after a tasting your pretty food always looks a mess. But mine looked pretty much exactly like this.

Thursday, on the other hand, was a bit less satisfying, and probably one of the worst days in the kitchen I’ve had so far at school. We were making coq au vin, and I did everything wrong. My chicken was overcooked, my mushrooms and bacon weren’t cut correctly, my sauce was too salty and yet under-reduced, my broccoli was overcooked, my presentation was awful… just bad bad bad. I also got burns on both my right arm and my face when someone’s hot chicken pan decided to spit a spray of sizzling oil up in my direction. All this failure took so long that we were delayed in leaving the kitchen, so I got out of school late and missed my usual train, meaning a harrowing cycle in traffic that was much heavier than what I am used to. Then, when I got to Paddington, there were crowds so huge that there were police controlling the scene because a big train had been cancelled. I made it onto the later train back to Oxford, just, but then it was delayed by twenty minutes because of some signalling problem, so I got back stupidly late, and then I got stuck in a standstill traffic jam trying to get home because there are ridiculous roadworks around the station and that evening there was the added complication of a burst sewer pipe. I was incredibly grumpy all evening and poor James had to put up with me sulking.

I’m not even going to show you a picture of the chicken because it was that bad.

Luckily, I managed to slightly redeem myself on Friday, by making well-cooked lamb cutlets with new potatoes en papillote, green beans, and a tomato salsa. I even got a good mark for knife skills, and, as we’ve established, my knife skills are generally rubbish.

It felt a bit odd having only three dems this week, but they were good ones. We started with pastry on Wednesday, then had healthy eating for a bit of a contrast on Thursday, and finished with game on Friday. The pastry and glazing dem covered delicious things that were fairly familiar to anyone who is an avid (read: obsessive) watcher of Bake Off, like myself. We saw Heli expertly demonstrate the endless rolling and folding that constitutes the making of rough puff pastry, and got to sample some beautiful Eccles cakes. There was also a stunning glazed fig tart on walnut pastry that I wish I had had the sense to get a photograph of, and a fiddly little apple flan which we will have to try and recreate next week.

Belinda and Sue talked to us about healthy eating and special diets on Thursday. I’m not completely inexperienced in this area as I’ve cooked for vegetarians, vegans, and coeliacs fairly often, and cooked for and lived with a diabetic at university (although he just ate whatever he liked and then corrected his blood sugar with insulin afterwards, so making him dinner was never exactly a challenge). Much as I love the near-constant stream of sugar I subside on at Leiths – and trust me, I love it – it was a good change to eat some fresh salads, soups, and stir fries and feel briefly virtuous before going home and eating all of the chocolate in the world (sorry about how there is no chocolate left for anyone else).

Friday’s dem was on game. This, I think, is Michael’s particular bailiwick, and he guided us through the basics of how to prepare and cook some furred and feathered game. See the picture at the top of this post? The reason that plate of food looks so pretty and professional is that I did not make it: Michael prepared woodcock for us in the traditional way, trussing it with its own beak. We all got to have a taste and I liked it, but I think I was perhaps the only person that did. Woodcock has, to put it mildly, a very distinctive game-y flavour – I like offal and I liked this, but lots of people were pulling faces. Less controversial were the delicious roast pheasant and slow-cooked venison shanks. Perfect autumnal fare. We have to pluck and draw pheasants on our own at some point in the next couple of weeks, which I can only assume will cause chaos and carnage.

I am writing this post curled up on the sofa in the boat, which is a warm haven, despite the fact that it’s currently being tossed about the river by a fairly vicious storm. It’s all very atmospheric and dramatic, and with the clouds scudding past and the fierce wind making waves smack against the boat’s hull it finally feels as through winter is truly drawing in. Only two more full weeks to go of Foundation term, and then the practical exam week (which we shall not mention, ever, please), and then I get to sleep in til 1pm every day, construct a duvet fort to live in, and stop cooking fancy meals so we can subsist on pain au chocolat and crisps.

Kidding.

Sort of.

Leiths: Foundation Term, Week 6

7th November 20158th November 20151 Comment

Before I started at Leiths, I basically hadn’t done any sustained exercise since being on the netball B team in primary school in 1999. I have attempted several different sports – running, swimming, cycling, walking, yoga, badminton, pilates, lifting weights, dancing, roller derby, ice skating, working out at the gym – and every time I try to exercise, the universe steers me away by making horrible things happen to me. You think I am exaggerating, but I’m not. This is neither the time nor the place, but I could tell you many harrowing stories that end with me in tears, disgrace, and/or hospital.

So, six weeks ago when I started at Leiths, I wasn’t in great physical shape. However, what I lack in core strength and lung volume I make up for in wilful, blind, stubborn determination. I essentially thought I could force my body to cycle ten miles a day while carrying heavy loads, on top of being on my feet all the time and never quite having enough sleep, by just… not giving up. This sounds stupid and naive, but up until this week it was actually going pretty well.

Unfortunately, I have now crashed. Previously unable to sleep in public places, I have now become one of those people who is instantly unconscious on the morning train and has to be politely prodded awake by wary fellow commuters when we reach London, whereupon I smush my face into the train window and moan ‘Nooooo, five more minutes.’ If I sit on the sofa when I get home, I fall asleep. I find my eyes sliding closed while waiting at traffic lights on my bike. I frequently come to a complete standstill in the school kitchens, unable to remember what I am supposed to be doing. Luckily, my name is written on all my aprons, right over the school logo, or I’d probably forget who and where I am all the time too.

Correspondingly, my cooking this week started out pretty mediocre. On Monday we had a day of delicious joy, cooking chocolate mousse, blackberry pavlova, and sirloin steak. I love all of these things. However, I managed to over-fold my mouse and over-cook my steak. This last was particularly galling as I like my meat blue, and think over-cooking steak is a very sad thing indeed. However, we were instructed to cook the steaks medium-rare, and I cooked mine for two minutes per side, which turned out to be a massive over-shoot. The picture below shows stages of steak cooking, starting off with blue and progressing up to incinerated. I like my steak at a 1 one this scale, but for class was trying to cook it to a 3, but ended up at a 4. This is sort of like the unhelpful pain scale in hospitals, yes? But more delicious.

Tuesday was another disaster day. Due to general exhaustion and my brain not being in gear, I cut the lamb for my spiced stew into pieces which were too small. That’s a mistake you can’t really undo once it’s done, so I had to get on with the long process of assembling and cooking the stew (which carried on into the next day), knowing that I’d done something fundamentally wrong at the start. We then had to make fresh marzipan for scratch to cover our Christmas cakes, which was surprisingly tricky. Actually, not ‘surprisingly’, more like ‘expectedly’. I thought it would be hard, and it was. Marzipan is delicate and prone to cracking, and so when I tried to cover my cake with it the whole sheet started to fall apart and I had to madly seal up cracks as quickly as possible, without over-working it. It was not a pretty sight. Still, the Christmas cake has been drowned in Calvados, so how bad can it really be?

On Wednesday, I slightly redeemed myself. I finished off the stew and it actually, against all the odds, tasted good. I also made autumn crumble with my table partner, which was pretty delicious. I know this because I wolfed the whole thing down cold for lunch in the dem room out of tupperware with a plastic fork, because I missed my lunch break while trying to adjust a costings spreadsheet. My life: all glamour.

I was reliably informed that the fruit juices bubbling up from under a crumble topping make it look ‘more real’, and thus they are acceptable.

Our Thursday session began with us being reprimanded for how slow we’d been in our Wednesday session. Correspondingly, in our Thursday session we worked so quickly that we were done by 11.30am rather than 1pm, and ended up making choux pastry for Friday a day in advance so that we had something to do. That came after pork tenderloin in Marsala sauce with kale, and pizzaiola sauce for Friday. I surprised myself by making a good Marsala sauce and cooking my pork well. The pork-cooking was a complete fluke and I had no idea it was cooked well until Ansobe cut into it, but shh, they will never know. (I am seriously assuming that Leiths staff will never read this blog and realise what an incompetent fool I am).

By Friday, I was not the only one rendered insensible by exhaustion. Sensing this, perhaps, Leiths gave us what I thought of as the ‘children’s birthday party day’: cooking pizza and profiteroles in the morning, followed by a jelly and ice cream dem in the afternoon. Now, please don’t hate me, but I tend to be a bit lukewarm about pizza. I worked in a travelling food van with a wood-fired pizza oven over the summer, and that produced absolutely amazing pizza which was a joy to eat. As a general rule, though, pizza doesn’t particularly excite me. I tend to think that unless you are getting the absolute best stuff available, it doesn’t taste that amazing. Takeaway pizza and restaurant pizza is usually disappointing, and I’d always go for Thai, Indian, Chinese, or pretty much any other option over ordering a pizza delivery. Unfortunately, making my own pizza didn’t change my mind. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I totally ate it all, but without a proper pizza oven and the authentic techniques, it did not even slightly rock my world. Profiteroles, on the other hand, will always be a source of delight.

The jelly and ice cream dem with Hélène was a lovely, gentle way to ease out of the week. I haven’t done a huge amount of work with setting agents and I found the theory portion of the dem really interesting – learning about powdered and leaf gelatine, what the different gradings mean, what agar agar and rennet actually are, how vegetarian setting agents are made and so on – and it definitely inspired me to be less afraid of making things like panna cotta and made me lust after an ice cream machine all over again. We got to taste lots of things, my favourite of which was a completely delicious Perry jelly with caramelised pears. And I don’t even like cider. I might even make it at home and post the recipe on here if I ever get an hour free (perhaps in 2018).

I have now decided to work through the dems backwards to Monday in a completely chronologically illogical way. Thursday’s dem was shellfish, which was brilliant for me because I love all fish. Phil slightly scared me by warning us that having shellfish poisoning feels a lot like dying and thus it is vital to make sure your gastropods, cephalopods, and bivalves (little bit of mollusc definition lingo for you there) are very fresh and of good quality, lest you kill someone. Sadly, Oxford is incredibly bloody landlocked and I don’t know any good fishmongers around here, but if I ever find one then I will be making the mussel recipe we tasted in the dem because it was great.

Wednesday’s dem was delivered by Angela Malik, who came to visit us at Leiths to teach us about Indian cooking. I knew that Indian cooking is very regional, but I hadn’t understood before what the classic hallmarks of northern, southern, and eastern Indian food are, and it was incredibly interesting to learn about how different the cuisine is in various areas of the country and why. Tuesday’s dem was delivered by Michael and was on meat preparation and cooking. Against really stiff competition, I think it was one of my favourite dems so far in terms of the food we got to taste. Everything was delicious and I wanted to go home and try every single recipe, particularly the chicken with forty cloves of garlic. Although, really, I don’t have the patience for such things and would probably end up doing seventeen and calling it a day. Finally, we began the week (still with me?) with a dem on sugar syrups with Ansobe. I’ve done a bit of sugar work before, but nothing very technical – I tend to make dry caramel by simply dumping a pile of caster sugar into a pan, whacking it on a really high heat and hoping for the best. Unsurprisingly, this approach has given me mixed results in the past. On Monday we learned about the nine stages of sugar syrup, and how to make caramel safely without sustaining extensive and hideously painful sugar syrup burns. Always useful.

Week 7 approacheth, and I have blistered feet, burned knuckles, and lots of choux pastry in tupperware. Onwards.

Leiths: Foundation Term, Week 5

31st October 201531st October 20152 Comments

In one of our many introductory talks, I distinctly remember someone saying that by the end of Week 5, everything would have started to fall into place. We’d be used to the routine of Leiths, we’d have built up some stamina, we’d have the basic skills to be able to navigate most of the recipes… we’d be amazing, basically. That last bit’s not what they said, but you know.

I don’t feel amazing, exactly, but I’ve settled into the routine. It now seems like a completely normal thing for me to get up at ridiculous o’clock and trek to London to cook daily. So much so that the clocks going back has thrown me off a bit. I’m used to leaving the flat in the dark: the new cold light of morning is not kind to my 6.30am face. Nevertheless, I now know exactly where to stand on the train platform so that the door of my favourite carriage judders to a halt directly in front of me: it’s the small satisfactions that get me through the commute.

Looking at our timetable this week, it initially seemed like Leiths was going easy on us Monday-Wednesday in order to make up for the fact that Thursday was our first all-day cooking marathon. More on that in a moment. Monday was fairly lovely as cooking sessions go – brownies, scones, tartare sauce, and feeding our Christmas cakes. We were delighted to find that we had been provided with a substantial vat of clotted cream and gigantic jars of jam for scone-garnishing purposes (cream then jam, obviously, you heathens) and spent a happy afternoon melting chocolate, shaping scone dough, and sampling the booze we’d brought to feed our Christmas cakes, in the name of science.

Things were slightly less relaxing on Tuesday, when we made pastry and chilli. Because we’ve made pastry four times now, we were expected to know what we were doing… and it turns out that I don’t. I messed up the shaping of my pastry in the flan ring, and even after I’d spent a good fifteen minutes perfecting the edges, it still ultimately came out of the oven ugly and misshapen. The chilli, while a relatively simple recipe, did involve sixteen people browning mince over high heat at the same time. Such was the heat of the oil that things occasionally went up in flames, and not on purpose. We later finished our chilli – mine came out incredibly spicy – and developed our little pastry cases into lemon meringue pies. My meringue was a bit of a mess, but my lemon filling was tasty and held well, so I’m calling that a draw.

DSC_1075-1024x590 — My slightly dodgy pie, on the left, and my partner’s much neater meringue, on the right.

Thursday, our first all-day cooking extravaganza, saw us making slow-cooked beef stew with caramelised baby onions and a potato and celeriac mash, individual loaves of white bread, goujons of plaice with tartare sauce, and fish stock. When I list it like that, it doesn’t actually sound like much. The thing is that at Leiths you can’t cut corners. If I was at home, for example, I’d whack my meat for browning in the pan all at once, and sort of vaguely get some colour on it whilst half watching 90s music videos on YouTube in the background and call it a day. At Leiths, we season and brown the meat in batches – being sure not to crowd the pan – lovingly turn each perfectly-sized piece in rotation to ensure all the meat is coloured evenly on all sides, and deglaze the pan after each batch and taste the juices. Obviously, doing everything properly takes much longer. Who knew? You can’t even have Mint Royale on in the background, and if you absent-mindedly start singing or whistling to yourself you get reprimanded, so you know they mean business.

Anyway, everything all went swimmingly. No, really. The day was absolutely fine, stress levels were pretty low, and the only real problem I had was that at the end of it I was so tired from being on my feet for eight hours that I had to sit on the floor while I waited for my bread to be marked because they could no longer carry me. And then I cycled 4.5 miles back to the station in the dark. And in the evening I went to bed at 9pm because I couldn’t keep my eyes open. But other than that.

Our Tuesday morning dem was with Belinda, who is a lovely, calming presence. She demonstrated many wonderful things that can be done with choux pastry (we demonstrated the eating of choux pastry – I always like to do my bit to be helpful), and we saw profiteroles, three types of éclairs, canapés, and savoury choux gougère. Wednesday was just as great, because it was steak day. Need I say more? Probably yes. Phil was technically demonstrating ‘tender cuts of meat and pan sauces’, but we all knew what that really meant: steak day. We got to sample bites of fillet, sirloin, rump, ribeye, and onglet, with various accompanying sauces and butters, and I felt quite spoiled. I don’t usually buy or order fillet steak because the price sort of scares me, so I’ve barely ever eaten it before, and it was gorgeous.

DSC_1070-1024x613 — I know this is a rubbish picture, but I couldn’t get a proper view from where I was sitting and I wanted to demonstrate the abundance of steak.

The dem of the week, though, against very strong competition, was Friday’s buffet session with Hannah and Hélène. They prepared us a gorgeous array of delicious buffet food, and stood back to let us feast. I don’t know what would happen to me if I had to prepare eight or ten dishes to feed fifty people in a morning, but I imagine it would probably end with me crying in a corner and begging for mercy. We all had second helpings of everything, and then dessert, and then I don’t really know what happened for the next hour or so because I was in a happy food daze.

Also, chocolate roulade? Surprisingly amazing. I have had very dry and crumbly roulades in the past, but this was moist and chocolatey and completely lovely, and I will definitely be making it at some point.

The trouble is that now we have to work in groups to produce buffets for 32 people, and making a buffet doesn’t sound quite as relaxing as eating one was. In our teams, we have to come up with a theme, design a menu, work out costings to a strict budget, source all the ingredients, and, er, cook the whole thing in three hours and serve it beautifully to a jury of our peers and teachers before receiving feedback and being marked. I am sure I will panic more about this in a future blog.

So Week 5 is over, and we are officially halfway through Foundation. Everyone keeps telling me I look tired and pale, last night I was so exhausted that I got confused and walked into a wall, and next week I will continue to work with lots of knives and fire while practically sleepwalking. Still, on Monday we get to make chocolate mousse, blackberry pavlova, and steak, so that will definitely ease the pain a little if I end up losing a finger.

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.