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French bureaucracy is complicated for a number of reasons, not least the fact that it’s charged with keeping French bureaucracy going. In the UK, 11% of the workforce works for the government in one capacity or another – policemen, nurses, bureaucrats, whatever. In France, the percentage is 24%. Twenty-four percent! A quarter of the workforce…
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I have worked for mad chefs and for obsessive chefs. The two are not necessarily the same.One mad chef told everyone in the kitchen different stories about his life: to me, his daughter was finishing her studies to become a doctor; to the sous chef she’d just been airlifted by helicopter to a specialist brain…
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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…
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Whilst searching for something suitable as a subject for a dictation for my English-learning French students, I came across a new craze: Freakshakes.They’re milkshakes gone bonkers; milk, ice-cream, chocolate sauce, chantilly, sweeties, doughnuts, apple pies, whatever, all piled into and onto your glass.Miam, as they say in French.Once my daughters saw them, they wanted them…
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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…
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Bread is simple, simplicity itself; flour, water, salt and yeast and there you go. Well, almost – a certain amount of measuring and technique may well get in the way of your perfect loaf. Me, I’ve always had problems making anything that involved baking, especially if yeast was in the mix.Pastry I make is slimey…
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I recently came across something I wrote a while ago about omelets, which are pretty simple things really. Simple until you start mucking about with them, that is. Then they become complicated.Like the rib of beef I cooked a few weeks ago; brown it on both sides, pop it in the oven for a few…
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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…
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So WordPress, being the kindly folks who host this place, invite me to write about Smooth….And as I’m here to answer your questions about cookery (like I used to about computers but now you can eat your mistakes), I’ll answer the one about how to make smooth custard.Crème anglaise, as it’s known in French, is…
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The cooking is really simple; all the complicated bit is done by the farmer who raises your rib, the butcher who chooses, ages and cuts it and then you who buy the right one. Once you’ve done the hard bit, fry off your rib of beef just to colour it – the outside looks lovely, the…
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