I stopped cooking for a living nearly 13 years ago – carpal tunnel problems brought on by those 7 years julienning carrots and 25 bashing computer keyboards for Mr Murdoch, among others.

What to do? Write again? Meh. Translate? Turns out you need a Master’s degree to do this properly in France. Become a security guard? (Seriously, the French dole office person who looked after me had 13 security guard jobs to fill and I was big enough to fill at least two of them).

Well no, I don’t want to be a security guard, I told her, so she sent me off for 20 hours of French lessons. Anything to get me off her books and reduce the employment totals, basically, even though my French was pretty good. I got thrown out of my French class after 17 minutes because I spoke better French than the teacher.

My unemployment counsellor then had a brainwave – become a teacher! An English teacher! Turns out, you also need a Master’s degree to do this in France. Unless, that is, you teach in the private sector.

So I started teaching, with a special discount on my taxes offered by the Government for two years for changing professions.

I taught teenagers who could care less in their homes to start with, then fell in with a few agencies and taught adults in their workplaces – some interesting companies like Alstom and Ubisoft and Astra Zeneca. During this period I had sent my CV on spec to Vatel, the world-famous (no, really) Hotel and Restaurant management school in Nimes. A year after sending it in, I was summoned to an interview and hired on the spot to teach English to First, and then later Second year, students.

And also teach Professional Culture, i.e. the history of French gastronomy what with me having been a professional cook and all.

And also teach Professional News, what with me having been a journalist for all those years.

All these subjects I taught in English to international and in French to French 1st and 2nd year students and the French and International Master’s Preparatory students (three classes), who also got me for Culinary Culture (English and French) and F&B Environment and Professional culture (again all in two languages).

And at the start there were six 1st year classes, six in the 2nd year, I did a Culinary Culture class for the six classes of 3rd year French students, there were 3 French and 3 international preparatory classes. So 24 different classes of students. Most subjects were just 2 hours a week but English was six hours a week.

And my life was full and I worked full-time at one of the most prestigious schools in the industry anywhere in the world.

But over the years the number of students has dwindled and I lost more than half of my work there, so had to turn to other schools to make up my wages. Which should have been easy, except Vatel refused point-blank to change my lesson times. So to do 11 hours of English lessons and 7 hours of other lessons, I would need to go there five days a week. For 18 hours of teaching. Including starting on Monday morning at 9 am, doing two hours of teaching, then coming back in the afternoon for one more hour from 5pm-6pm.

Genius.

So we have parted ways and, I’ve discovered, there’s a national shortage of English teachers in France. Many who were teaching on the black have found it impossible to continue and, without tax records, have been forced back to the UK. Leaving their jobs open for me, thankyouverymuch.

Now I’ll be teaching in three schools, all for either half-days or full-days of teaching. And only English, nothing else. Plus I’ll be teaching in Scarlett and Roxanne’s Montessori middle-school which is just down the road from where we live. And I’ll be at home most Fridays to write, do a spot of online teaching or have a nap.

Most Excellent.

When I started working with Jean-Remy Joly at La Table des Agassins just outside Avignon, one of the first dishes I learned to make was this, the Trilogy.It’s layers of confited (dried or preserved) tomato, goat cheese and aubergine caviar, an assemblage of Provençal ingredients he put together when he first arrived in the region in 2000 as a tribute to the local gastronomy.It’s been on his ever-changing menu continually since then.Of course, I wasn’t allowed to make them at the start; I had to work my way up through the plonge, the dishwashing room and do my CAP cuisine qualification before he allowed me to do anything more than remove the stalks from the tomatoes, but it was a worthwhile education.Although the Trilogy appears very simple, it takes time to make and illustrates the biggest lesson you have to learn when you start cooking for others than just your immediate family: Planning. You can’t decide to eat this dish half an hour before you sit down at the table; you can’t even decide to eat it tonight if you’re thinking about your menu any later than first thing in the morning, since it takes some time to prepare.The longest preparation is for the tomatoes which need to be peeled, de-seeded and slow-roasted. In French this is called ‘Monder les tomates’ which means literally blanching them. You need to remove the skins to allow them to dry properly and not be too tough when they’re eaten; leave the skins on and they’re pretty chewy.To do this you need a saucepan of simmering hot water and a second of iced water. Start by removing the stalk and then cutting out the part of the tomato to which the stalk attaches. Do this by holding the pointy end of a small vegetable knife between your thumb and index finger and, with the tip of your thumb on the hard, green bit of the tomato push the point about half to one centimetre into the fruit. Use the tip of your thumb as the axis and cut a cone shape out of the tomato to remove the hard bit.Dip each tomato into the simmering water for 10-15 seconds – until you see the skin starting to peel – and immediately transfer them to the iced water. Do this with kitchen tongs, not your fingers. Then peel off the skin – I find it easiest with a vegetable knife, sliding the point under a loose bit of skin and pulling it off.Cut the tomato in half horizontally and pull out the seeds. Keep them and the fleshy bits around them to make a tomato sauce later, they’re very tasty. Lightly salt both sides of the tomato and add some dried Provencal herbs if you wish. Leave them open side down on a rack to drain liquid for an hour or two in the fridge before transferring them to a baking sheet (I line them with baking parchment or silicone sheets) and putting them into an oven at 80°C for three or four hours. Yes, as long as that. They will shrink but keep an eye on them after the 2.5 hour mark to make sure they don’t colour too much.While they’re drying you can make the aubergine caviar; cut off the stalk end and then cut your aubergine in half lengthways. Cross-hatch the flesh with the point of your knife quite deeply then sprinkle with salt and Provençal herbs, then add a good dose of olive oil. Note, when you’re cooking there’s no point in using the good stuff – heat denatures most oils and removes the taste to a large extent, so use some cheap stuff for cooking. Keep your sippin’ olive oil to pour lightly over food just before serving.Roast the cut aubergines in an oven pan with the tomatoes or if you need to do them separately, for an hour at 180°C. Pour boiling water into the oven pan so they don’t dry out – a few centimetres is enough, about halfway up the sides of the aubergines.When they’re cooked, scrape the flesh off the skin and squish it up between your fingers so there are no big bits. You’re looking for a fairly rustic effect here. The original recipe calls for sheets of gelatine to be added at this stage to firm up the caviar, but I prefer not to use it. Your choice – if you prefer firm aubergine caviar you should use two sheets per kilo of flesh.Take the tomatoes out of the oven when they’re dried enough.The last ingredient to mix is the goat cheese. Buy the youngest, freshest pelardons you can find, the fresher the better – I buy them on the local market at just 4 days old when they’re just starting to firm up and have a delicious, goaty flavour. (They’re delicious spread like butter with Vegemite on toast, too).Mash them up with a fork, a light sprinkle of salt and Provençal herbs and some of your sippin’ quality olive oil – just enough to bring the mixture together, you don’t want this to be liquid.Now comes the assembly. Put a small dribble of olive oil into the base of a silicone cupcake mold, then a tomato half. You will have two types of tomato halves, of course, one with a hole in the middle and one without. Serve your guests the pretty ones, obviously.After the tomato comes a dessert spoon of goat cheese mix, then another of aubergine caviar.Pop them into the fridge for at least an hour to allow them to ‘set’ a little before serving.While they’re in the fridge, make some basil sauce to serve them with. Strip the leaves from a whole basil plant and put them into a pot.Add in a small pinch of salt and a few glugs of good olive oil. Then, using a stick blender, mash them up into a pouring consistency liquid.Keep adding olive oil until you have the consistency required. A large basil plant will need something like 250-350mls of oil.To serve, place your Trilogy tomato side up on a plate (a soup spoon is a good utensil for persuading them out of the mold) and dribble over a dessert spoon or two of your basil sauce.These were so popular in the restaurant in Avignon that some customers would have them as a starter and dessert.Bon appetit!

Father’s Day today, so I get to have a day off from cooking and washing up.Ha ha ha ha ha!No seriously I enjoy food too much to leave my wife alone in the kitchen, so I’m cooking today.On the menu: duck breast with mushroom sauce, roast potatoes and asparagus with parmesan.The planning: The duck takes about 10 minutes to cook and 10 minutes to prepare; the asparagus 5 minutes to cook and prepare; the potatoes about 15 minutes to cook and 5 to prepare. And the mushroom sauce takes….well, as long as you can give it, really. The longer you can cook the sauce, the better it will be.The real art of being a good restaurant cook is getting every part of the client’s meal onto a plate and onto their table at the same time. It’s no good serving them the steak and sauce and then arriving five minutes later with the fries. This is what I spent a fair amount of time learning about when I became a professional cook – timing.The first timing sheet is the sort of thing you’d get a commis to use when they’re learning how to cook one dish; the second is the type of sheet you’d be expected to use during a whole-day exam to show your timings in 30-minute slices throughout the day of the exam. This one’s just for patisserie – I did a general cookery course, not this specialised one.The procedure is fairly simple – at the bottom you’re shouting ‘Service!’ and the monkeys waiters turn up and carry the prepared plates out to the hungry customers. You work backwards from there for each dish – remembering to have separate serving times for your starter, main and dessert courses. You spread your time out, in this case including your compulsory breaks, back to now to see what you have to do first.The principles are simple – if I need the duck out of the door at 1pm it need to have spent two minutes being cut up, and have rested for five minutes before that, and have been roasted for five minutes before that, and been browned for five minutes before that, and been prepared during 10 minutes before that so I need to have started working on it, at the latest, at 12:33. Assuming I have nothing else to do.So in the case of the simple duck with mushroom sauce and roast potatoes, the thing which needs to start first is the mushrooms – the longer you cook them the better, so you start chopping them. Next I’d do the potatoes which simply need to be steamed at this point – later on they’re cut up into quarters lengthways and fried off in duck fat and, since the duck fat comes from cooking the duck, you need to cook the duck before you can fry the potatoes. Simples.Whilst the mushrooms are frying in a little olive oil and salt (the goal is to remove liquid from the mushrooms at this point, with the aim of concentrating their taste) I trim the duck breasts. This is what the duck breasts look like when they come out of their sous vide packaging. Note that in France these magrets de canard (nothing to do with maigret) come from ducks raised for foie gras and so may be larger than the duck breasts available in other countries where gavage is frowned upon.You may find that there are a few stubs of feathers sticking into the skin side – if so use a pair of fish tweezers to remove them.They’re heavy-duty tweezers with a curved end, ideal for poking into fish and other types of flesh for pulling out reluctant bones and feather roots.Once you’ve finished de-feathering, turn over your duck breast and remove the traces of fat and, in particular, two areas of what in France are called ‘nerves’ but which are really veins and/or ligaments or some such anatomical things. You should remove them as carefully as possible, since if you leave them in they’ll feel like gristle in the eater’s mouth.Trim around the edges to make the fat level with the meat and chunk up the fat into a fairly small brunoise-size dice. Cross-hatch the fat so that it dissolves more easily and looks prettier when you cook it. You should have an odd number of cuts down through the fat just to the flesh – everything is done in odd numbers in kitchens because it’s more pleasing to the eye.Place the duck breasts fat side down in a very hot pan and sear them until they’re nicely browned just on the fat side. Don’t brown the meat side at all. You can see a slight incision in the lower side of the nearer duck breast – this is where I cut out the nerve/vein/whatever so my diners don’t have a mouthful of gristle.Here you can see the fat is nicely browned and quite decorative; the meat side isn’t coloured at all. When cooking time arrives they’ll go (fat side up) into a 180ºC oven for 4 minutes saignant/rare, 6 minutes à point/medium. Any more cooked than that and you’ll be in trouble with the taste police, proceed at your own risk.While the pan is still hot, throw in the bits of duck skin you cut into cubes (not the trimmings from the meat side – they’re basically inedible even to French people).They will colour quite quickly and you need to keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t shrivel up to nothing. But basically when they look cooked, take them out, put onto a serving tray, sprinkle with salt and try to resist the temptation to eat them all before dinner.Now you have the duck prepared the mushrooms should be nicely fried off – keep an eye on them while you’re preparing the duck so they don’t stick to the pan. Now it’s time to déglace/deglaze the mushrooms with the alcohol of your choice. I like to use Noilly Prat vermouth or, sometimes, Muscat wine. The latter is sweet and goes well with chicken and lamb sauces. The vermouth gives a nice grown-up taste a depth to your sauce. Déglacer/deglazing means using alcohol to scrape up the caramelized bits of whatever you’re cooking that have stuck to the bottom of the pan; you add enough to cover the bottom of your pan and scrape with a wooden spatula, and then leave this to reduce until the alcohol has almost disappeared. You can add a second round of alcohol if you like or, if not, some stock.I mostly use chicken stock because it is easy to make and, since we eat a lot of rotisserie chicken, I always have lots of chicken stock on hand. The secret – one of the secrets – to making a good sauce is not to add all  your liquid at once. So if you’re adding, say, a litre of chicken stock to your sauce then you add it a little at a time in four or five batches. Just enough to cover the main ingredient of the sauce, the mushrooms in this case, then reduce it down until it’s almost all disappeared then add some more. It doesn’t take any longer than reducing down the entire litre added at once but gives more flavour – the mushrooms or whatever aren’t simply boiled in the stock liquid.When your sauce is reduced to a decent consistency you can simply take it off the heat, ready to re-heat just before service.Your potatoes should have cooked by now, so when they’re cooled enough to handle cut into quarters. Keep them somewhere safe where they can dry a little – on the chopping board is fine. The dryness and rough bits will become nice and crunchy. Last thing to prepare is the asparagus. Preparing asparagus is quite simple; hold it in both hands and snap it in the middle. It has a natural break point – the lower, root end is harder and will break off easily. This is the part that’s harder to eat but which is fine used in a stock, for example, so I keep and freeze these broken off bits to use in the future.The spears I line up on a baking tray and grate parmesan across them, then grill them under a very hot heat for two or three minutes. This works well with very fine spears of asparagus, if you like the thick ones or white asparagus you’ll need to go a more traditional steaming/boiling route.So by now you should have everything ready and five or ten minutes away from being served.Make sure the kids/butler have set the table then put the duck into the pre-heated 180ºC oven, put the potatoes into the pre-heated (maximum heat please) duck fat in the frying pan and the asparagus under the grill. In this order, too.After four/five/six minutes, take the duck out of the oven and set it to one side to rest for five minutes (meat should rest for as long as it cooks, generally speaking). Put the mushroom sauce on to heat and add in some cream if you like – I usually add a 200ml briquette of single cream. This should just heat up – if it boils it may curdle.When the parmesan has melted and is browned, take the asparagus out of the oven. Keep turning the potatoes until they’re browned on all sides.Put the potatoes on a serving dish and them and the asparagus go onto the dining table. Cut up the duck – diagonal slices down from the top looks nice – and arrange it on a serving dish, pouring all juices into the mushroom sauce. Send out the duck, put the sauce into a sauce boat and send it out. Have a drink. Sit down at table with your adoring family.

 I was slicing some gravlax one mid-summers evening in a busy restaurant, when a thought occurred to me.Now, thoughts can be good and they can be bad when you’re working in a professional restaurant kitchen.Good thoughts are things like “Ah, the Maitre d’ just called another salmon so I’ll keep slicing this now rather than wrapping it back up and putting it away immediately.”Bad thoughts are things like “Ooh, Marilyn Monroe…” Distracting thoughts, in other words.The thought that came to me that evening back in the middle of 2008 was, “Blimey. I can slice salmon. Properly. Like they do in restaurants.”Well of course I could. By then I’d been working for the best part of five years in gastronomic restaurants and the homes of some of Europe’s wealthiest people. But still, it’s like the day when you realise you’re an adult now and no longer an adolescent – a bit of a shock, really.I was using my Special Knife, the one proper cooks use to slice things like salmon, but it wasn’t really a knife porn moment. Proper tool for the job, especially as I was slicing through 10 kilos of salmon or more a day.No, it was just that I had a momentary out of body experience, looking down on a Chef de Partie doing a good job, slicing the salmon thinly but not too thin, nice big pieces, covering the plate well. And it was me doing it.Blimey. A transformation from keen amateur to cool professional overnight. With just several years of training and experience to get to that overnight transformation.Blimey.  Transformation