I arrived in Ireland exactly four weeks ago today, touching down at Dublin airport with 74 kilos (Kilos! not pounds! Kilos!) of baggage, managing to pay for just 14 of them as excess over the 20 I was supposed to be allowed to bring with me. The worst bit was not the weight – my employer had already agreed to pay the excess baggage charge – but the fact that Aer Lingus (and, I presume, other airlines too) limit individual suitcases to a maximum weight of 32 kilos. Did you know that? No, me neither, so the fact that one case weighed 42 kilos meant I had to buy another bag and put 10 kilos of books into it. And where do you buy an additional bag at Lyon airport? The only source is the excess baggage counter where they’ll let you have one of those fibreglass laundry bags the Pound Shop sells at three for a quid for a mere 10 euros. ‘Arnaquage,’ I told the clerk who perhaps then took sympathy on me by mis-calculating the overage I was to be stuck for. My employer had already booked and paid for me to bring two suitcases with me, and the check-in clerk had, mistakenly, taken this to mean that I was allowed 40 kilos of baggage so I had an excess of 34 kilos (she was wrong but I didn’t intend to correct her – your allowance is 20 kilos no matter how many cases you pay for). Then the clerk at the payment counter who’d already sold me a 50 cent bag for 10 euros looked at the slip demanding payment for 34 kilos excess and said, “Right, so your allowance is 20 kilos so that means you owe for 14 kilos”. At 9 euros a kilo it was still plenty, but plenty less than the 486 euros I should have paid. Then she slipped in a wobbler by announcing that they didn’t take cheques, cards only – not even cash; I was pretty sure my Visa card was maxed out but we gave it a go and, miracle of miracles, it coughed up the requisite 126 euros and I was on the plane.
Phew.
So I settled into my cottage halfway up the highest mountain south of Dublin that evening after Paul the estate’s resident taxi driver stopped to let me buy a six-pack of Guinness and some eggs. Day one I spent driving round our various suppliers – butcher, fishmonger, green grocer, wine merchant – with my boss, setting up accounts where necessary and getting to know him and them a little better. They’re all very good suppliers, top quality stuff and the fishmonger sells plenty of decent cheese and olive oil to make me a little less homesick for France than I would if I were forced to stick to Irish block cheddar and Flora ‘genuine’ sunflower oil.
He and his various guests have loved everything I’ve cooked, and I’ve been having fun with the local produce and ingredients; that first day driving round with my boss I cooked him some of the fantastic locally-caught Dublin Bay Prawns, langoustines, in dry Martini; normally I’d have done this in Noilly Prat, but that seems to be taken as some sort of insult round here and no one has heard of it outside Dublin’s posh cocktail bars. The Martini is sweeter but that goes nicely with the Prawns, it turns out. Just get your pan hot, chuck in some coarsely-ground black pepper and a little salt, glug in the Martini and, when it boils (pretty much straight away) throw in the prawns and cover with a lid. Shake well, leave a minute or two, shake again, leave another minute or two, serve. Easy and delicicious and quick, three words all cooks like to hear together.
Day two I cooked the white asparagus I’d, erm, bribed out of a friendly chef back in Avignon (still not available in the shops here in Ireland a month later – I know that was the very first of the season back in Provence but really – only crappy green Spanish stuff is on sale here at the moment) with a vinaigrette and served yesterday’s prawn heads made into a nice little creamed consomé or bisque, please yourself which.
I’ve cooked a few old favourites since then – pumpkin and crab soup with tomato cappucino (an original Jean-Rémi recipe although I do mine by whipping cream with some tomato purée stirred in, rather than putting cream and tomato powder into a soda syphon – works just as well either way) , plenty of poached fish and risottos, kedgeree (excellent home-smoked haddock from Caviston’s, our fishmonger), carrot and ginger soup (the one thing I’ve cooked that the boss didn’t care for), chicken and mushroom casserole (made with what our greengrocer labelled ‘king oyster mushrooms – they were actually ceps with giant stems and tiny, unformed caps but which actually tasted like ceps, just a third of the price), sea bass tagine (with rice instead of cous cous), stuffed pineapple, lots of olive oil mash, vanilla rice pudding, twice-cooked cauliflower (make a purée with half the cauliflower and deep fry breadcrumbed florets from the other half), crumbles, beef bourguignon, fish pie, belly of pork (roast it slowly covered with foil, about 150ºC, sitting on a bed of veg or the spare ribs trimmed off it, for two or three hours then blast it at 180ºC for half an hour to crisp up the crackling – don’t forget to slash the skin before cooking to facilitate the carving later; also, rub plenty of good salt into the skin and leave it for an hour or overnight, even 48 hours, before roasting), tarragon chicken and lamb leg steaks – although I didn’t just fry/grill these, I browned them quickly to start with then added a good slosh of port to the frying pan along with lots of fresh rosemary and cooked it gently for about six or seven minutes, allowing the port to reduce down to a nice thick sauce while leaving the lamb nice and pink.
I’ve made a few new dishes too, some which I’ve been very pleased with indeed. Top of the list comes chicken liver pâté with raspberry vinegar; or rather, vinegar with raspberry pulp in it. This gives a slightly acid, very fruity taste to the pâté and renders it completely delicious. No really. I’ve added a couple more soups to my repertoire: duck and cabbage, made with half a leftover duck breast sliced very, very thinly and some leftover cabbage, again shredded very thinly. Warmed through a little and allowed to infuse in decent chicken stock, a decent amount of coarse-ground pepper (poivre mignonette, actually) and wow, it’s a good ‘un. Second great soup was crab and chestnut, something that I wasn’t as confident would work as I was about the duck and cabbage, but it’s another winner. I’m no real fan of chestnuts but found a sous-vide packet at the fishmonger/deli and planned to use them with some brussel sprouts, but then couldn’t find any brussels. So I took half a packet of left-over crab meat (oh please, I can’t be doing with cooking and messing with whole ones), mixed the chopped chestnuts with it in some more good chicken stock and away we went, adding a little fish stock too to beef it up a bit. Really a great surprising combination. Another nice discovery was how to cook a filet mignon of pork without drying it up. Pork filet – the same cut, but from a pig, as filet steak in a beef animal – is very tender but can dry up horribly if you roast or fry it. Marinades aren’t much help if they’re alcoholic – that just dries up the meat even more. I made the mistake the first time I did this of browning the filet and then cooking it in a port, mushroom and apple sauce. Which was very nice, but the meat remained too dry for my tastes. The second time I browned the filet as before, but then wrapped it in clingfilm and steamed it for about 20 minutes to cook it, returning it, sliced, to a – this time – mushroom and mustard sauce to serve it, and deliciously moist and tender it was too. Recommended. I may try this next time I get a beef filet too, although the traditional Wellington will do more or less the same thing. And ages ago I read about someone making a pea purée from pea pods, which appealed to me as I hate throwing anything away – shell the peas then blanche the pods until they’re soft, throw into the Robochef with a little cream and force through a sieve. Very nice, but you need TONNES of peas to make a decent amount, so I ended up just stirring this into an oyster mushroom sauce and serving with grilled sea bass. Very nice it was too.
And I’ve been extending my pudding repertoire too, something I’ve always thought to be my weakest area – I’m definitely no patissier and have stuck, in the past, to a fairly simple repertoire of rice pudding, chocolate mousse, stuffed pineapple, fruit salad, poached pears, crêpes suzette, profiteroles, Grand Marnier soufflés, clafoutis and, er, that’s about it. Now I’ve mastered fools, if ‘mastered’ is the right word to describe working out how to mix pulped fruit (rhubarb, caramelised mango and blueberries, that sort of thing) with whipped cream. Too simple to even merit a ‘good grief’. I’m also pleased with a mango cream and crunchy chocolate mousse confection I made last week – make a cream as in crème brulée, chop up your mango as small as you can, mix and allow to infuse for as long as you can, spread chocolate mousse on top. I make a nice, light chocolate mousse using just whipped egg whites and melted chocolate and, if the chocolate has cooled enough, instead of mixing smoothly with the egg white it forms tiny blobs of chocolate which give a crunchy effect on the palate. Which is nice.
So now I have a couple of days off, the first I’ve had since I arrived – although I did spend one day in bed with what at the time I thought was food poisoning (it came on exactly 4 hours after eating beans on toast so I assumed the can was ‘blown’ and I just hadn’t noticed) but now think is more likely to have been a bug that’s going around, since others have had the same vomiting-and-diarrhoea; and I didn’t really feel like eating much at all for most of the next week, so a bug seems more likely. But everyone here was amused to find out that, when he cooks for himself, chef eats beans on toast. Well, they’re good for you and you just can’t get them in France. And I like them.
Today I’ve just been cleaning out my cottage and moving the furniture a little to allow me to make better use of the space, although there’s a distinct lack of cupboard space (as in, there are NO cupboards at all) here. So I’m effectively still living out of suitcases, albeit two mightily-stuffed ones.
Tomorrow I’m planning to go into Dublin; I spent one day there towards the start of my stay, visiting potential suppliers – most of which turned out to be ‘delicatessens’ selling a few manky olives, some biscuit crackers, the same few Irish blue cheeses and, erm, that’s it. The wholesale fruit and veg market was interesting but normally available only to professionals buying by the wagonload. The area round Connell street looks interesting though, and I plan to get there in the morning to see the food market and Chinese supermarkets.
Apart from that, Delphine’s doing very well, thankyou; the baby’s coming along nicely, even though D does have a light case of gestational diabetes; Scarlett will be a big baby when she arrives some time in the next month.
I had an interesting moment with the UK Inland Revenue, from whom I haven’t heard in four or five years since I started earning money exclusively in France. I told them this back in 2004 but recently received a bare ‘statement of account’ from them saying I owed £2006.34. Eh? So I called them and the rather unpleasant young lady to whom I spoke said that this sum is for assessed tax due on my UK rental property. Eh? And Eh? again. When we first moved to France we did indeed rent out our old London flat, but sold this in 2001, as the Revenue well knew since we’d told them this. Well, she said, this sum due is for the tax years 2003-4, 2004-5 and 2005-6. Ah, I said, well the flat is sold so I wouldn’t have declared any income for those years. And anyway, I paid tax in France those years, as I’d told them. Well, she says, I should still have filled in the tax demand forms for those years when I received them, even if I was declaring that I’d earned nothing. But, I said, this statement is the first bit of paper I’ve received from Her Majesty’s Tax Inspectors since 2003. “Well,” she declared haughtily, “not receiving the forms is no excuse for not filling them in.”
I’m afraid I cracked up laughing at this point, something which only hardened the heart of Unpleasant Young Lady. I could hear her lips pursing and her brow furrowing in anger even from a thousand kilometres away. I didn’t help my case by replying, “Well not receiving the forms and not even knowing of their existence because I’d told you I was now declaring my income in France seems like the perfect reason for not filling them in to me.”
Clearly, even after 10 years dealing with the world-class bureaucrats who staff the government offices of France, I am not ready to deal with the Inland Revenue’s own special branch of logic. “It is not an acceptable excuse to the Inland Revenue,” she said. The telephone stuck to my hand as it frosted over at the glacial tone in her voice. “You should fill them in now and send them back, and we will consider whether or not to continue our demand for these sums and further penalties too, if necessary.”
I don’t have the forms, I told her. Never have had. No, I can’t download them from the Internet either, no Internet access here. Eventually she agreed that I could try writing a letter, explaining the situation and throwing myself on the mercy of HM’s Inspectors of Taxes and Revenue. Well I did, and I just hope my letter finds a grown-up who understands simple logic. I rather feel, though, that this one will run and run.
Cheers.

Our weekly classes are settling into a nice rhythm now that we’re just over half-way through our year here at the Ecole d’Hotellerie in Avignon.
We cook one dish in the morning, a second in the afternoon and have an hour-long lunch break followed by one hour of classroom lecturing in the middle.
And I had sort of realised this before, but now I’ve fully realised that many – most, even – of my fellow pupils are also coming to school on Tuesday mornings to study maths, chemistry, French, English – all the regular school subjects that they will be examined on come the end of the academic year. I, having already done a degree at university in England (BA in Geography from University College London, don’cha know? remind me to tell you the full, gory story one day…) am excused such exams by dint of my previously-proven cleveress. Lucky me, one hour sitting in a hot classroom trying to stay awake is enough for one week. In fact, all those years ago when I did my very last public exam I had enough spare time after writing down everything I knew about the subject to calculate that it was my 50th public examination. Then, I swore that I’d never sit another examination but I’ve made an exception for this cookery course. We’ll have a four-hour practical during which we’ll cook and present two or three dishes, plus two written exams: one on cookery directly, a second on law, hygiene, nutrition and so on. Oh, and a third oral exam on business practise. Those who don’t already have a higher qualification also need to take all the ‘regular’ exams taken by the 17/18-year-olds doing our qualification, the Certificat d’Aptitude Professionel (option Cuisine) – it’s the equivalenct of the UK’s GCSEs and whatever qualification you get when you leave High School in the USA.
So this morning we cook ‘Darnes de saumon grillé, beurre blanc” – salmon steaks with a beurre blanc sauce. And since I told Chef at the restaurant that I’d be doing this today, I’ve been cleaning and preparing salmon and making beurre blanc for a fair proportion of the past week.
I’ve even learned to tell the difference between farmed and fresh salmon by sight – let alone by taste. Fresh salmon, whilst available everywhere in France, is not by and large native to the country and particularly not to the south, the Midi where I live and work. But the French do set great store by Scottish salmon, even though it’s currently the subject of a Major Food Scare back in the UK; everyone there tells me that you’ll die on the spot (or similar) if you so much as sniff a Scottish farmed salmon. French people, on the other hand, will snap up the Scottish stuff whilst sniffing haughtily at the Norwegian variety so prized now in England.
Even more remarkably I’ve recently been harrangued by a keen amateur cook of my acquaintance about the fact that she can now buy organic salmon. What, as we say, TF? Organic fish? Ignoring the food mile and stock depletion questions for the moment, how can fish be organic? Well, it turns out that the organisation in the UK which can certify vegetables and beef and whatever as organic has now established criteria for the certification of salmon as ‘organic’ – it’s all to do with what they eat (not very different to what non-organic fish eat, it seems) and stocking levels (less crowded than the non-organic ones), apparently.
I’m not convinced. Especially since the august body which is offering this organic certification to fish is called – I am not making this up – ‘The Soil Association’. Right.
Anyway, today’s ‘darnes de saumon’ – lazy cuts of salmon where you just chop a vertical slice through the fish without bothering to filet it – come, school chef proudly tells us, from Scotland. I say nothing. French people, once they get an attitude in their heads about food, are as stubborn as mules. AOC mules with knobs on, in fact.
I, being class clever dick, have already learned how to grill salmon and make beurre blanc, thanks to Jean-Rémi Joly my chef at the restaurant who is taking great pride – and deriving much fun – from the process of teaching me how to do next week’s recipe when I return from school to the restaurant every Tuesday. The fun comes when his method for doing something differs from that of my school chef, Philippe Garnier. So grilling a salmon, the restaurant way, means filetting it, removing the bones, cutting it into pretty portions, cooking it skin-side down very fast on a fierce heat for a minute or two to make the skin crisp and then turning it over in the pan and finishing the cooking in the oven for a few minutes.
This is all very well and good for a posh restaurant in a four-star hotel, says M. Garnier, but for your CAP examination we will need to know how to cut a darne, not a filet, and to cook it by grilling only. Harumph.
So, first part of the lesson is, Clean The Grill. The grills are heavy cast-iron plates which sit on top of a couple of gas burners going full-blast beneath them, making them smoking hot – hence the need to clean them thoroughly first because, obviously, the last students who used them wouldn’t have cleaned them properly. Now it’s my turn to harumph – if it came through my plonge and I was responsible for cleaning it, it would be spotless whenever it was next needed.
So we clean them and heave the grills onto the burners where they all start smoking like billy-o, since they’re so encrusted with crud after generations of lazy, non-cleaning students have ignored them and left them filthy. I even scrubbed mine with a wire brush to no avail.
But we brush the darnes with melted butter (olive oil in the restaurant, school is more traditional and less Provençal) and put two each onto the grill, where those of us who haven’t been paying attention discover that (a) the grill needs to be really, really, really hot and (b) you need to have enough confidence and/or experience to leave it a good couple of minutes before trying to flip it over if you don’t want it to stick and then break up into lots of little bits as you try to scrape it off. And everyone learns that although they’re not listed in the official list of Things You Must Buy sent to us by the school, a pair of metal tongs are actually invaluable for picking up and turning over hot things.
We also learn how to do two things at once, i.e. make a beurre blanc sauce whilst grilling salmon. I’ve come to love beurre blanc sauce in the past couple of weeks since I learned how to make it at the restaurant. It’s one of those great sauces which are very, very simple to make but which give the appearance of being very difficult and complicated – the sort of thing only professional chefs can make. It’s just a shallot or two chopped up very finely (all the bits the same size, of course – any irregular bits should be disposed of in the usual way if your chef will be inspecting them for consistency, i.e. you eat them), popped into a saucepan with some poivre mignonette (literally some very cute pepper, actually some crushed black pepper, but not from a mill which makes it too fine) covered with – and here the arguments start – with white wine and/or white wine vinegar. Some say just wine, others just vinegar, others that you need secret combinations of the two. Half and half works fine for me, and just enough of the two to cover the regularly-sized bits of shallots. Reduce this down until it’s almost, almost completely dry but not quite, and then whisk in some unsalted butter. Cold butter. How much? Well…the official recipe we’re given calls for 150 grammes of shallots – say, three or four of them – 200ml of wine and 100ml of vinegar, and a whole kilo of butter. And, just in case you fear this won’t kill your clients of cholesterol poisoning on the spot, you can add an optional 100ml of cream. Burp.
The tricks are to make sure the butter is cold, to cut it into plenty of cubes and whisk them one at a time into the shallots and evaporated wine and vinegar mix, keep whisking too until it’s nicely emulsified and then keep it warm until you need it during service in a bain marie at about 60 centigrade – should be good for up to a couple of hours but no longer and don’t get it too hot or you’ll end up with melted butter with shallots in it.
At school we just poured it over the salmon and served it (well, sent it off to the teacher’s cafeteria which gets all the good stuff while we poor students get to eat the muck the junior kids have been messing around with all morning). At the restaurant it’s strained first to remove the bits of onion so our posh customers don’t have any nasty bits to chew on, but this is a personal preference – I like the bits in the sauce and so do both my chefs.
After making such a healthy, light dish this morning we get to make Now That’s A Pudding! this afternoon. Well, officially it’s called Tarte au riz à la Normande but if you ever saw one, you’d call it Now That’s A Pudding! It’s a pastry case which you fill with rice pudding enriched (burp!) with a crème anglaise (because, well, rice pudding just isn’t rich enough, right?). And then you cover the top with sliced apples, as if you were making a tarte fine aux pommes. Fried, naturally, in butter and flambéd with Calvados apple brandy. I’m sure there are parts of the world where this pudding would be considered a deadly weapon and possession of a slice could lead to imprisonment and a hefty fine.
I do learn a neat way to make rice pudding which had never occurred to me before, though – make it like a risotto. You ‘nacrer’ the rice (I’ve never found the English word for this, it just means fry the rice in some fat – butter here, olive oil for a savory risotto – until it goes transparent) and then add warm milk mixed with sugar rather than stock a ladleful at a time, and keep going until it’s done. I’ve since found that you need to add something to give your rice a bit of flavour if you’re serving it on its own to some diet freaks – lemon zest is nice, or a vanilla pod (remember to leave the pod in the mix after scraping out the seeds, the flavour’s in the pods more than the seeds).
And then we assemble our puddings, blind-baking the cases, making a crème anglaise and mixing it with the rice and then making pretty with the fried and flambéd apple slices (cut them on a mandolin). A pudding fit for a king, assuming that the king concerned is Elvis Presley after a six-month starvation diet.
ends

I loved Arthur C Clarke’s books from when I was about 9 or 10. I read them all in the town library, after the librarian allowed me an ‘adult’ library ticket as I’d already read just about everything in the children’s section.
Wow, what an eye-opener his books were, what an imagination. How cool to be the man who ‘invented’ geo-synchronous satellites and space elevators (well, almost – certainly he popularised the ideas).
Childhood’s End is one of the first ‘great’ books I remember reading. And then Rendezvous with Rama in 1973, just wow. The Nine Billion Names of God, such a crackigng idea. And then 2001, what a cool guy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7304004.stm

And a very cool stage prop, too. Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist (I paraphrase) who woke up one morning having a stroke, and describes here what it was like to watch it from the inside with her scientific background. Good talk, and one to watch if you know someone who’s had a stroke.

Nice article ‘Always in the kitchen at parties‘ – on the Cheftalk site where you’ll find some of my stuff too.

We’re having a baby! Just found out today (20 week scan) she’s a girl.
We’ll be calling her Scarlett, works in French as well as English.
Due early May.

That is, John Irving’s new book, Until I Find You – what a great read. Really, very highly recommended. I haven’t enjoyed and been moved by a book so much since William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, which you should buy at the same time as Irving’s new one. A huge novel encompasing decades of Jack Burns’s life from his memories travelling in search of his music-tattooed, organ-playing father around Europe with his tattooist mother to his later return to those same cities in search of the truth about those earlier memories.

There seems to be something very personal of Irving’s in this book; while assembling his usual misshapen cast of characters – including the now obligatory wrestlers – there’s also an enormous amount of emotion packed into every chapter; Jack is always the bewildered little boy, asking ‘But why? But how?’

Until I Find You will seize you on a fundamental emotional level; I loved reading it so much that at times I devoured it until the early hours of the morning, at others put it aside for a day or two to postpone the inevitable end when the story would be finished.

Honestly, I’ve read and loved every single thing John Irving has written, but this book is better than all the others put together. Order it today and set aside next weekend to read it, money back if disappointed.