So I’ve just finished my fifth day at the Ashburton Cookery School. Wow I’m tired. As I mentioned we took three days out of the kitchen to do a Food Safety Course which wasn’t nearly as dull as I feared. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no pathogen groupie but it was helpful from a business angle e.g. knowing what laws a food business would need to comply with, and the resources the Food Safety Authority have for small business to get the HACCP plan in place. It was also enlightening to the extent that I understood that the routine that a chef undergoes in the kitchen on a day to day basis, labelling, clean down, placing old produce over new produce, all has a foundation in legislation. Hmmm I get the feeling that I’m still not making it sound interesting… Well, anyway we had a great course tutor so hats off to her.
Anyway, back in the kitchen today and it was super packed making omelette, scones, chocolate pots and chocolate run-outs as decoration.
Yes I know I went a bit overboard with the decoration…
The chocolate pot was… well look at it! I could live off chocolate pot alone.
We also made bread rolls (and we’re graduating to baguettes on Monday). 
We did more cutting of vegetables which today involved a little nick of my finger as well. But I was very brave and didn’t cry. I actually macedoined a carrot to the gruff approval of our chef tutor today so I think the cut finger was all part of the sacrifice.
So hot tip of the day? Well… (1) If you want a well risen scone, don’t roll the dough out too thin. But then, who doesn’t know that? (2) when making the scones, don’t twist the scones and dip the cutter into the flour each time before pressing into the dough so that the dough doesn’t stick; (3) If you heat the cream too much so that it is too hot then your chocolate ganache will split. Now that’s a tip! The number of times I’ve made ganache, and it’s split doesn’t bear thinking about (in fact, it happened just two days ago). But now I know – so never again will it happen. True fact. 
The only sad part of the day was when I coloured my omelette. A true omlette should never brown and although we made an omelette for lunch which I thought was delicious, I was disappointed because in my insistence to take a picture of my omelette while it was cooking, the omelette browned.
Although this may also have had something to do with the fact that I left the omelette over the heat and apparently I missed the bit where out chef tutor told us that we should turn the stove off on adding the egg and let the residual heat cook the egg (?). But no fear my friends – I made omelette again for dinner – with no colour! I also flavoured it with some wild thyme flowers I found in a field this afternoon but I’ll let you read my next post for more detail (I’m trying to organise my posts thematically).
