This week is nice. Finally now that I’ve gotten my first supperclub out of the way I can get back to enjoying classes at the cookery school. No more sneaking off for an hour to buy orange tomatoes, in theory this week is something I can relax into…

Except that on Monday I killed my first creature… Well no, once again a slightly misleading statement… I’ve stepped on insects (unknowingly), dumped a bowl of prawns into boiling water, fished mackerel but this was the first time I took a knife and plunged it into the central nervous system of a creature that just moments before was blinking at me. Because crabs blink. And that was the most unnerving thing about the whole thing. That, and the fact it struggled so hard when I tried to hold it down… Not that I’ll turn vegetarian because of it, quite the opposite in fact – I feel absolutely obliged to eat all of the crab dish that we make from it. None of my crab will be going into the bin (you’d be surprised- maybe horrified- at the amount of food we each end up taking home and, quite frankly, chucking out).

Anyway, using quite a lot of force, I finally managed to plunge the oyster shuck knife into the part underneath the crab’s flap under which its central nervous system lies. An interesting thing about crabs is that you can’t boil them alive even if you wanted to because its natural defence mechanism is to shed its limbs and not killing the crab before boiling makes the meat tough.

Crab cakes on Thursday will be made from the picked crab. I shall dutifully eat every last morsel. Not that that’s a tough ask you understand, its just that we usually make so much food, and much of it is  enough to feed four so there really aren’t enough days in the week to get though all the food that we make.

For example, this Tuesday we not only killed the crabs but we made yogurt pannacotta with poached figs and we cooked pork fillet en papilotte with celeriac dauphinoise and made cookie dough (a good portion of which was consumed by me before it even reached the fridge). We ate the pork and some tiramisu (that out tutor had demonstrated the making of) for lunch and later the pannacotta as a… post dessert-dessert…

After picking our crab (which involves merrily pulling out the crab fresh from the cavities and legs of the crab and then spending the same amount of time again, searching for any shell that has fallen into the bits of meat) we were free to make our lunch. Starting with pork en papilotte.

On Wednesday we had a wonderful pork Holstein with a runny duck egg and anchovies. Apparently the anchovies are traditionally added at the end although, never having heard of this dish, its not a garnish I’m fastidiously attached to.

Although actually the anchovies did add a moorish salty note to a lovely dish. It was a very filling main (I haven’t shown you the rest of the pork escalope that hid out of sight of the photo but then jumped onto the plate soon and then was gobbled up by me. Passion fruit and mango eton mess after this.

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You should have seen the roast pork bell with roast veg and cauliflower cheese that we made. Oh wait.. Let me upload the picture.

We took home with us that day and I made that my dinner.

I don’t know how I’ll be able to go back to a sandwich lunch once this course is over…

A weekend can change a lot. I’ve just had my supperclub and although my fingers are itching to post about that and how it went, I am resolutely sticking to chronology (my recent out- of-synch post on week 2 aside). End of the week at Ashburton has been an odd one for me. Honestly, I’d been distracted by all the eventualities and possibilities of the supperclub. I was scribbling lists, typing lists, emailing lists and thinking new ones up in my head all the time. A problem it seemed could be solved by a list and so while chocolate fondants were being baked in the oven on Friday afternoon I was on my bike in Ashburton town centre looking for the perfect green and orange tomatoes. A key bullet point in at least 4 of my 8 lists. I had a list of all the things to take with me from Ashburton to London, a list of all things I needed to do in London once I arrived on Friday evening, a similar list for Saturday and Sunday. I had a list of components for each dish and a list of non food items to take to Ed’s flat (the venue for the supperclub) and a list of food items to take to Ed’s. But why am I writing about this? This is a post about end of week three – anyway you can see how distracting thinking about lists really is!

We made some fantastic lamb cutlets from a rack of lamb. We French trimmed the lamb ourselves with the joyful accompanying sound of bone against the metal knife and the group on my bench did such fine French trimming that it spurred me vigorously into action with plenty of frenetic bone scrapping on my part so that I was rewarded with four milky white bones skeletally protruding from the flesh. Yum

With the lamb we were to serve a tian of Mediterranean vegetables. Now I have seen tian of vegetables in recipe books the world over and I am thus happy to report that vegetable tians are not difficult. And they look so pretty. Firmly (but neatly), poke your chargrilled vegetables into the mould in layers and bake.

On baking the vegetables should shrink so its fairly simply to remove the mould. And that’s that.

Along with out super simple tian was the super difficult lamb, the French trimmed rack itself was one of the most expensive cuts of lamb and we were ordered to serve it pink which is fine with me – although after 8 minutes of cooking, I would say that in my case pink would be a polite euphemism for raw. Although I polished the whole thing off at lunch, so maybe I’ll look into starting a trend for rare lamb? Or just cook it a few minutes longer. Either is good with me, although to be fair by lunchtime I’m staving.

Actually the afternoon was a nice afternoon for me. We also made tarte tatin which is another thing I like to make at home. The precipice off which my tart always falls is always the pastry but on Thursday we were given a slab of readymade puff so it was a home straight really. If only the morning had been so easy…

Still I’ve learnt to cook my lamb for a few minutes longer than 8 minutes (depending on size and feel – yes I know – but that will take more time to work out). I’ve learnt that adding brandy to your caramel (or variations thereof) makes for the most supremely delicious caramel that even on typing this post I am salivating.

And then it was home to eat choux buns. And to check my lists…

I’m thinking that I should get more imaginative about my post headings. “Week 1″, “Week 2″… I might as well head each post with the day’s date. But then, don’t newspapers employ special people to think up good headlines – no not the journalists – other people, headline specialists. You can see why I might legitimately find it tough then… Today was about filleting Plaice and making goujons. Well that’s what mattered to me today. We also made treacle tart, spelt bread and sweetcorn a la Francaise (which, given the other main ingredient was chorizo, seems to be labouring under a misapprehension of being French) and we finished off the caramelised onion soup (both with respect to the cooking and the eating of it). But today, I was pretty damn proud of my filleting fish.

Let’s be clear, I’m not saying it was pretty, but it wasn’t ugly either and it is a skill and I now have it. Or at least a basic form of it which will improve with practice (actually given that I’m posting this 10 days late, I’ve filleted three further fish since then but let’s not get ahead of ourselves). And the other thing I really liked was that today focused a lot about the presentation of food. I love that. Afterall, in terms of taste, I like to think that nothing would leave my kitchen unless I thought it tasted great, but dining out is often about more than that. It should about celebrating the occasion, and the theatre of presenting food is part of what elevates food from something delicious to something special. Maybe that’s going too far, in fact I have plenty of friends who would think what I’ve just said is silly but at the very least its a chance for chefs/cooks to be creative which suits me fine. With the gougons, we presented them in a kind of preserve jar, and the tatare sauce was placed in another (preserve?) jar.

I really liked the look of it (including the way that our tutor cut his lemon for his example dish) but if I were being picky, I don’t think the props suited the dish. I mean, what have preserve jars got to do with fish? But it did get me thinking about presentation generally. Could you present the goujons in newspaper, or a little fried potato net, or am I being too fussy and fish in jam jars would generally raise no eyebrows? Actually I’ve also seen fishcakes served in a fancy conical bowl with a mound of piped bright green parsley mayonnaise which looked tempting and could work with gougons?

Another cute thing we did today was make spelt bread, both, in the traditional loaf style but we also baked some of the dough in small flowerpots.

It’s such adorable thing, I’d be so excited to receive bread like that (I was quite happy making bread like that too). Of course, in keeping with my fastidiousness on the use of “relevant” props, I decorated the top of the flowerpot spelt with sunflower seeds only and not the other sesame seeds on offer, because what have sesame seeds got to do with plant pots? Although having said that, my coursemates who did use a mix of seeds ended up with prettier bread than me… what to do?

Anyway, I was thinking about doing little flowerpot bread for the July supperclub. Just need to find some flowerpots…

I actually wasn’t looking forward to Monday. I’d come back 11pm the Sunday night from London, preparing for my supperclub and looking though the list of things we were making I wasn’t too excited. “Trim lamb” “Pea and Ham Soup” “Fruit Salad”. “Trimming lamb” sounds like you’re just going to square the sides of a chunk of meat and soups and fruit salads scream diet food to me (unfairly because the amount of cream and butter we’ve stuck into our soups over the past few weeks should totally explode the myth).

Anyway actually, it was a good day. Trimming lamb means skinning the belly of the lamb, trimming it off any excess fat and taking the meat off the rib bones. Then we stuffed it and tied it. So its not about squaring the sides of the meat at all. Well, I guess it is a little bit.

Pea and Ham soup was actually really interesting because the recipe involved making a pea soup and serving it with an island of ham in the middle. One of my intermediary courses for the July supperclub is a pea soup so I was avidly engaged throughout. Apologies to my coursemates who had to endure 10 minutes off me quizzing our tutors about the best way to keep the pea green colour. Soup was lovely though and tastier the next day also. We made a roux for the pea soup which admittedly I’d never thought off? Call me new fashioned but I prefer the consistency of my soup to come from the texture of the vegetables rather than the thickening of the flour globules. Although having said that, it was a useful technique to learn and actually the end product was good so I might experiment with it in the future.

The fruit salad and the accompanying sabayon was a chance to work on presentation skills. Doing the presentation work is the point at which I feel most cheffy and it was good to be able to make such a simple dish look like  dish that you would serve at a high end restaurant.  Its a bit like magic really.