Discover Top Posts Tagged with #ballymaloe

Ballymaloe No Churn Vanilla Ice Cream

#ballymaloe #no churn #vanilla #ice cream #food #dessert #no bake #recipe #theviewfromgreatisland

Chocolate tart

Tarts, soups and so much more

Tarts, breads and soups seem to be the order of the day at the Ballymaloe Cookery School at the moment, although there has been a jolly good showing from stocks and salads. The variety of foods that we cook each day is vast, ranging from jams, jelly and other such preserves to shellfish, meat and desserts and much more in between.

In fact, there is so much on the go during the week, it’s difficult to sum it up or to focus in on one or two things. Honestly, I don’t believe I’ve ever worked this hard, or been this tired at the end of the day, perhaps because the work is both physical and intellectual. After years of sitting in meetings, videoconferences and being on a computer, the combination of working in the kitchen all morning and then soaking up the lectures in the afternoon is both invigorating and exhausting. The satisfaction I feel after producing a good loaf of bread or a beautiful lemon meringue tart (with short-crust pastry and everything) is extraordinary.

And even more so because this is achieved in the midst of a highly chaotic kitchen, where you are required to collect and weigh your ingredients, fight for oven space and equipment, wash and clean up after yourself and dodge the other 17 or so people in the kitchen without irritating them too much, or getting too irritated yourself! The guidance and support of the teachers is critical – they are patient, highly experienced and very skilled, although I reckon they have a good gossip about some of the students at the end of the classes!

This morning, I churned butter for the first time in about 40 years. Growing up on a smallholding in Port Elizabeth, we had cows and would separate the milk and cream, make our own butter and buttermilk and much more, and I was invariably prevailed upon to help. But that is a long-forgotten experience (I certainly won’t call it a skill), and the sight of the yellow butter emerging from churning the milk of the cows I was hanging out with in the morning (yes, I was up very early again, bringing the cows in and watching them being milked on machines) was exhilarating.

We also had a visit to Ballymaloe House this week, where the iconic Myrtle Allen started her restaurant in the mid-1960’s with the simple concept of using their own and local produce – unpasteurised milk and cream, pork, fish from Ballycotton Harbour down the road caught on the day, fresh vegetables and herbs. The menu was written daily based on the seasonal vegetables grown on the farm. Myrtle – she is respectfully called Mrs Allen by all the staff - went on to became the first woman in Ireland to receive a Michelin Star and the essential spirit of this farm to table approach continues today.

I was somewhat startled to learn from the Head Chef that on a busy night, a sum total of five chefs in the kitchen produced dinner for 120 people. Wow – chefs are becoming my new heroes. The amount of work, co-ordination and skill required to do that is staggering. I will be working in the kitchen at Ballymaloe House this Sunday, so let’s see how I survive that adventure!

So back to the tarts, breads and soups, amongst other things that we made this week. As it turns out, it’s pretty easy to make a simple loaf of white or brown soda bread, as there is no yeast and thus no proving involved. The rider is having the right ingredients – ones that are fresh and of a high quality.

This week, I made both the white and brown soda breads with a minimal amount of effort, and they turned out pretty well. I have included an information note on soda bread, which is quite interesting in that it gives some good tips on how to get the best results. The tarts were somewhat more complex to make, but hugely satisfying in the end. They looked and tasted sublime.

I am learning much more about what I do and don’t like to cook, what I find enjoyable and what I find stressful or boring. Of course, the stressful things are often the best to cook as they teach you so much – learning by your mistakes is the only way to do it. I have rather taken against candied peel, which takes forever to cook, is fiddly and uses so much sugar, as well as things like pigs in a blanket and all types of fennel salad. Just no.

But I am loving making the breads, tarts and other forms of baking which has surprised me as I have never focused much on baking, perhaps because I did not have much confidence in my abilities in what I believed to be a highly technical side of cooking.

Anyway, in light of the vast number of dishes that are cooked every day, and the recipes we receive, I have decided to include my Top 5 recipes of the week during the updates. Here you go – in no particular order:

1. Hummus

2. Soda bread

3. Gruyere and Dill Tart

4. Greek Moussaka

5. Chocolate and Hazelnut tart

#ballymaloe

Arrival at Ballymaloe

It’s extraordinary how normal this enormous thing I have done feels – completely altering the trajectory of my life at a time when many people are settling into the endgame, and often the pinnacle, of their chosen careers. At 52, I have resigned from what some may deem to have been a successful career as a Director of Corporate Communications at a multinational organisation, and moved in a fundamentally different direction.

I recently arrived at Ballymaloe Cookery School, Organic Gardens and Farms in Ireland. http://www.cookingisfun.ie/ The school is set on a 100-acre working organic farm near Cork in the south of Ireland – very much in the countryside, as it were. I am here for the next three months on the 12-week intensive immersion cookery course, which is billed as a “farm to fork” experience, or a garden to table approach to cooking. There is a big focus on seasonality, so you cook with the foods that are in season at the time, which is not only healthier for the environment and yourself, but also makes food more affordable.

The first week has been amazing and completely overwhelming – a huge amount of information has been thrown at the 64 people on the course who range from the ages of 17 to 67. I am living in a house with six others (fortunately in a single room with my own bathroom, yay), all of us of a similar age and they are a really great group of people from the UK, US and Ireland, which is pretty representative of the course (with one or two people from France, Australia and Asia thrown in). Being the only South African in the house, and on the course, I am viewed with some interest and many questions come my way about the country, life in SA and much more.

Darina Allen who started Ballymaloe Cooking School 30-odd years ago with her brother Rory O’Connell has been guiding us through the past week – visiting the gardens, understanding the routine of the school (it’s complex at first) and demonstrating cooking lessons as we go along. She’s entirely fabulous – 70 years old with more energy than anyone I know (other than my sister Penny, perhaps, who has the advantage of being a decade younger) and a wonderful, dry, Irish sense of humour. I chuckle a lot at her many aside comments when she is teaching or roaring around the grounds, clambering over fences and stomping down lanes. At the moment, she is beside herself with excitement at the large number of mushrooms in the fields – there is a bumper crop and one she has not seen since her childhood. We have all been out late into the evening gathering mushrooms, as well as blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and much more.

So why am I here? A few reasons, actually. Those who know me will agree that I am something of a “planner”. I was at a school in Boston in the USA a few years ago on one of those leadership type courses, and we were asked to plot out our future five years. I had mine down to a tee, and the teacher was a tad flabbergasted at the level of detail I had gone into – she felt I needed to give some leeway for the possibility of life happening! And of course, she was right. Some of the things I had planned have happened, and others are very different to what I had envisaged then – like being here at Ballymaloe. So the idea was always to leave corporate life at about this time – late 2018, to sell our house in Johannesburg and move to the small town of Stanford near Hermanus in the Western Cape where we have had a house for the past six years. I wanted to work for an NGO or civil society in some form and/or perhaps start a communications consultancy to keep the wolf from the door, while my husband would write (and he was very keen to lie down a lot, as was I J).

But of course, life did happen and last year we had an opportunity to buy the most wonderful small country restaurant, called Mariana’s in Stanford, which we rather surprisingly decided to do. Surprisingly because neither of us has any experience in managing or cooking in a restaurant, or in overseeing a large vegetable and fruit garden which is part and parcel of the restaurant.

But once the decision had been made, I started to look around for courses that would equip us to deliver a food experience that at least made an attempt to do justice to the type of ‘garden to table’ quality food the restaurant owner and her husband – Mariana and Peter - had pioneered in the Western Cape for many years, and for which the restaurant had become well-known. I discovered that there are essentially two main options for learning to cook so intensively and work in the South African food industry – you either do a two or three year diploma or degree at Silwood, Prue Leith or other such schools, or you can do short courses for a week or two, sometimes a bit longer. Neither suited our purposes, so we looked further afield and there were, of course, lots of options internationally but the one that resonated was Ballymaloe. The philosophy of garden to table is one that we would like to carry forward, three months seemed doable (with several visits from my husband) and hey, I get to spend time in beautiful Ireland which I have never really explored even though our family has rich heritage here.

And so here I lie, in my single bed, writing the first of what I hope will be regular updates on my experience here. They say that the time here goes incredibly fast as the course is so intensive and you learn so much, that it all becomes something of a blur. Right now, after what has been an exhausting but exhilarating first week, I seem to have a long way to go. I am hoping that the course will help me decide whether I wish to cook in the kitchen, to manage our restaurant, to oversee and undertake the planting and growing of the vegetable and fruit gardens or perhaps a combination of all of these. We also need to decide on the new name of our restaurant as we did not buy the Mariana name. Apart from planning and running the kitchen, we must know what to grow and when to grow it, how to hire great people as well as understand specialist things such as costing of food, how to buy the right amount of stock and much, much more. All of which I will learn on the course.

I aim to treasure this special time and soak up as much as I can – very few people are lucky enough to have this opportunity and I know how very blessed I am to be able to have this extraordinary experience. So cheers for now, until next time!

#Ballymaloe

24 November 2024, Ballymaloe, East Cork. Sunday

#nerosunero #Ballymaloe #24 Nov #Sunday

#nyc #dinner #homecooking #lambchops #ballymaloe #mintsauce #mangosorbet from #eatalynyc #vanillaicecream #pistachio #raspberrydessert #dessert #raspberry #nywcamember (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CHB5isZjR3C/?igshid=1kddi4hmoy6db