Monday, September 21, 2009

Day One - Lurverly Lamb

So, first day proper at school. Quite a few in our class: The American contingent, the Kiwi family, the lovebirds, Simon on his work experience, the Irish/posh Scousers, globe-trotting Jeff plus the dictators......Mitler and Kitler

Our first challenge was getting the main for the evening meal on the go. Med veg ragout and pommes dauphinoise for sides. yes I know, I'm virtually fluent. Top quality local produce on offer here...yaay!
Here's our finished dish. The lamb was cooked in a scorching hot oven for 23 minutes then left to rest under a mountain of towels for a couple of hours. Yes it does get fully cooked through and turns out as delicious pinky, tender, properly rested meat

France......wahoooooooo

So Mitler and I have spent the last week in South West France at the 'Cook in France' cookery school. We didn;t really have any expectations....but were worried that there may be 'weird' people on the course. In the end we needn;t have worried about that.....all very nice, fairly normal people.
Sunday night was our welcome dinner. Up top you can see our main of confit duck, creamy mash and peas with a balsamic reduction. Oh I forgot to take piccies of our drinky nibbles, which included the delicious garlic butter popcorn. Dessert was pannacotta with figs and hazelnut biccies. What a great start to the week. We sat down for dinner with enough wine to sink a ship.....thanks to the fantastic efforts of all involved we had to send for reinforcements in the form of the miniatures from our rooms.....tut tut

Preparations


Getting ready for our trip also involved some complex non-food weighing and measuring. Getting a week's worth of gear under 10kg was tricky!
So now youw know, a small pair of flip flops = 300g

Friday, September 11, 2009

Vive le croissant!

I head off on holiday tomorrow to.................a cookery school in France.....wahoooo! So expect a plethora of posting. Not taking laptop because being a Scroogey McScrooge I refuse to pay £millions extra for cabin baggage, so the plethora will occur on our return.

Here's where Mitler and I are off to www.cookinfrance.com leaving Stokesy and Jake to do whatever it is men do when they are alone *shudder*

Au revoir mes amies! I will try to use all 10 words of French that I know while I'm there :o)