Ballymaloe Weekend 9 - Pizzas and Party

It was the weekend but I was back in the kitchen like an idiot ‘helping’ out at the Saturday pizzas they sell here at the café in the school. The pizza dough is made up in a huge batch on Friday and left to rise overnight. Then it’s shaped and cooked to order on Saturday with lots of delicious local seasonal toppings such as Gubbeen cheese and bacon, black pudding, fennel, herb mayonnaise, rocket and so on. They make the pizzas out of this Italian 00 flour which comes in this huge cool looking bag, it also makes a really tasty dough more to the point:

Italian Flour

I was shaping the pizzas, they got better after the first few attempts, honest! It wasn’t too busy but I felt like I’d done loads. I also chopped some herbs for gremolata to sprinkle on the pizzas and for mayonnaise. The pizzas get cooked in the Italian wood fired oven so they are really authentic and crispy.

Pizzas shaped by me

 After a bit of a rest this evening we had a party and food in the courtyard cooked up by Ted of Wildside Catering. He made lots of asian style food including deep fried wantons with crab, a spicy duck soup full of fresh coriander and really fresh noodles with chicken and cucumber. There were also lots of cocktails to wash it down and we had a fire and stuff, it was cool.

Me in front of the cottage

Me on the balcony

Ballymaloe Weekend 4 - 4/5th February Cork City

Well, after a month here I eventually made it into Cork City centre. It was drizzling and being a Sunday some of the shops and the market was closed, but I will be back. Here are some pics:

Cork is full of these little streets

Cool old newspaper building

Crawford Art Gallery

Cork Opera House

Myself and some of the housemates also went to the Bodega for a tasty lunch, I had the Vegetable Curry. It's an old building that is now a cavernous bar and restaurant and inside it's really cool with model cranes suspended from the ceiling, lots of art and a massive bar. Don't think my photos really do it justice but it's really cool and all their menus and signs use a great art nouveau-stylefont http://www.bodegacork.ie/

Model origami cranes suspended from the ceiling

Ballymaloe Weekend 3 - 28th/29th January

Weekend number three and still I was setting my alarm… Myself and some of the housemates went to the Farmer’s Market in Midleton, this time I was there as a punter! Had some of the amazing hot chocolate from the O’Conaill Real Coffee Company, they have a shop in Cork and I got the large Praline Hot Chocolate, half milk and half dark chocolate. I think it was the best €3.50 I have ever spent, especially on a cold wet morning in January! Also got some smoked salmon paté from Hederman’s Smokehouse, and looked at the cheese and seafood.

 

 

En route back to the cookery school we dropped in at Ballymaloe House and had a quick look in the fabulous cook shop, tracked down some postcards (er, haven’t sent them yet folks) and had a coffee in the café there run by an ex-Ballymaloe student.

Then back at the school there was a weekend course on Gluten-Free cooking run by another former student, Rosemary Kearney. She made lots of pastry, cakes and desserts suitable for coeliacs. As students we got to sit in for free and it’s useful to get these recipes and knowledge for catering purposes, I think it would be a great service to offer in the future!

 

Ballymaloe Weekend 2 - 21/22 January

No alarm clock needed this morning, thank god, I went for a walk into the village of Shanagarry and tracked down a 2012 diary at the Design Centre/Gallery here. I then had to go and turn the cheese for everyone in the dairy before we salt it tonight.

Also at Ballymaloe today was Mickael Viljanen the Finnish head chef at Gregan's Castle Hotel. He is sort of the Heston Blumenthal of Ireland and has been winning awards as Ireland's top chef. Today he was here to do a demonstration of some of his molecular gastronomy including his famous beetroot meringues and an amazing roast chicken which had been poached first then fried to give it some colour. All the food was spectacular to look at and eat and as students we got to sit in for free!

Also got some great pictures of the surrounding countryside Saturday morning:

After the demonstration we went to salt our cheese ready to go into the fridge to mature. We're making a semi-hard gouda-type cheese. Should be ready in 3-4 months!

Mine is the cheese at the back on the left!

Then on Sunday the housemates and I had dinner together, Darina's Aunt Florence joined us! We also have a new housemate Sarah, who is interning here after being a pastry chef at the world famous Chez Panisse in California, very cool. Our housemate Dermot made chocolate and chilli mousse, it was yum. He has a blog over at http://gasmark7.blogspot.com/ so head over for a read!

Weekend 1 - Midleton Farmers' Market

So the first weekend here and instead of a lie-in I was up at 5.30 to help out at the Midleton Farmers' Market where Ballymaloe has a stall with all the produce from the farm. At 6.30am and wearing my wooly hat I was helping to lug the cool boxes of pheasant and crates of jams and pickles into a truck in the freezing morning air. This was not the job for a fairweather farmer! It was cold, cold, cold and only the second market of 2012 so I was wrapped up warm for the day ahead. The farmers' market in Midleton was set up and championed by Darina and hosts an array of local producers, veg, cheese, chocolate, organic poultry, fish, bread and baking.

Once we'd rigged up the tents, set up the tables and produce the customers rapidly appeared. It was clear that some people are regular customers that always get bread or eggs or salad, then later on more people were just browsing. The chicken liver pate, frozen soups and prepared red cabbage were all popular. I wrote up the blackboard signs!:

There were a cornucopia of stalls at the market selling loads of cool stuff, such as smoked fish from Frank Hederman's Smokehouse based in Cork:

Bread from Arbutus Bakery and Spices from Green Saffron, run by a former Ballymaloe student:

The whole place was busy, even though it was January and had a real community feel which I liked. It finished at 1.30 and everything had to be packed away and driven back to the school. I was knackered but still ended up in the pub to all hours that night. On Sunday I took some photos of the sea at Garryvoe down the road; so many shades of gray!