So I’m making an effort to catch up. Once I’ve posted this (provided I post this today, on Monday) then I will be back up-to-date and I can have a few blissful days of uninterrupted digestion without having to hunch over a broken laptop to update the blog.
Blissful uninterrupted digestion, here I come…
Monday, Monday Monday. What to say. Well today we concentrated on vegetarian style fare with a more rustic note. I don’t know if the two go hand to hand but either way I took fewer photos today as I wasn’t really stunned into flashbulb submission on account of either the stuffed aubergine or the goats cheese tart that we made. They both tasted good though but I kinda expect that now.
We made vegetarian samosas today also so I guess today was also about a foray into cuisines beyond the European flavours and techniques that we’ve mainly focused on. If I were to be honest though – I like learning new techniques and it seems like a lot of the technically challenging techniques are French, sometime Italian in origin so when we did out various recipes today, I felt like it was something I could simply follow in a recipe book at home. Except i’m probably being a bit unfair… we made a gluten free shortcrust pastry today, and given that I’m approximately 9999 attempts away from being able to make a decent shortcrust, I should be grateful for the opportunity to practice. Also the actual shaping of the samosa isn’t intuitive so actually I have learnt a new technique – not based on French cooking. I do wonder sometimes if I’m falling into that trap of underestimating things that I don’t know a lot about – like non-European cooking… It annoys me when people suggest that Indian/Sri-Lankan cooking can’t be “posh” just because its not something that they themselves have experienced with Indian food in their limited contact of such food. But I seem to spend a lot of time myself thinking about sage and lemon and not enough thinking about tamarind and lemongrass. Actually that’s partly the reason that I’ve themed the September supperclub around Mexico – plenty of new flavours to explore I should think…
Does this count as an update on Monday then? To round the day off, we did get assessed on our stuffed aubergine and goat’s cheese tart. I made an effort to get them looking fancy although I don’t think they look a patch on some of the “restaurant” style dishes we’ve made over the past few weeks.
Although I clearly have plenty to learn about vegetarian cooking (and tarts generally) as my tutor’s comments show… Well there’s always tomorrow, tomorrow I’ll be better.
