Day 65 - Help Yourselves

I had braced myself for a long morning when I awoke, bleary-eyed in order to get ready for salad duty. Salad duty involves turning up an hour earlier than normal to help make the salad to be served at lunch that day. It is a horrible thing to find out that you have to do right at the beginning of a day which you have been dreading (see yesterday's blog).

I have to say now that I don't actually like buffets. Darina was at pains to point out all of the ways in which the Ballymaloe buffet was superior - better ingredients, freshly made and not refrigerated, but the fact remains that buffets are essentially collections of not very appetising food. I am sure that it all tastes lovely, but I can just never work up the eagerness to actually desire anything that is on show: for me, buffets are generally about picking out some boring, plain food because I am too boring to go for the lovely salads and chutneys. A day spent devoted to the art of buffet food was not therefore something that I was necessarily looking forward to, but I was pleasantly surprised by the success of my morning.

Perhaps it was because I wound up cooking one of those things that I do like to eat from a buffet - glazed loin of bacon - or perhaps it was because I was doing less work than I had dreaded that I might, but it turned out that in the end I had a relaxing morning. I even had enough time to make a second brioche dough which will be finished tomorrow. It really wasn't too bad.

Apart from the bacon, I had to produce a cumberland sauce, which is a spiced redcurrant jelly with port and orange peel in it, and an apple and carrot salad. This was produced by grating some apples and then grating some carrots. Difficult. The bacon was not initially hard - it is cooked by being boiled for about an hour. You have to remember to blanch it first though - the first time that you bring it up to the boil, scum consisting of salt and preservatives rises to the top of the water: you then discard and replace the water and leave it to cook happily by itself.

When the bacon is cooked you score the fat on top with your knife and stud the thing with cloves; then you cover it with demerara sugar and put it in the oven until the top caramelises and turns crispy. Not at all difficult.

The demonstration today involved squid - an entirely new life-form for us to eviscerate in the name of cuisine. Squid is quite difficult to get right - if you cook it for too long it goes to the texture of rubber bands - and so I am looking forward to having a go at char-grilling it myself: it is just half a minute of cooking to get it to the right stage. I'll let you know how that went tomorrow.