Day 78 - The End is Nigh

The day dawned bright and early and I awoke with a smile upon my face as I walked over to the school for the final morning's cooking session. Yes - the very last one. The institution that has kept this blog going and has given me something to write about, laugh about and weep about at the end of every day has come at last to its end. In a very real sense, the course has now finished and we are ticking down towards to time when we may leave. Only an exam stands in our way now and we are rolling towards it with a disconcerting and frankly indecent speed - I'm sure that only yesterday there were a good four weeks until this exam and now I find that I have only a day. I am appalled.

The cooking this morning was some of the most relaxed that I have yet experienced on the course. It is always a rare treat at Ballymaloe to be able to stand still and look around in an 'I have nothing to do and I am smug about it' fashion, but today half of the room seemed to be doing just that as we were given practically nothing to do. A little gift perhaps, from our headmistress to keep us going before the exams start.

My list for the morning was Pork en Croute, rosettes of smoked salmon and a bread. That, honestly was it. The bread was a rye and caraway loaf, but I can't report back on it because it took hours to cook and I didn't get a chance to taste it before I went into the afternoon lecture. I haven't high hopes for it though: the amount of caraway that went into it was quite obscene and I'm not sure that I would have wanted to try it.

Pork en croute is a very simple dish to prepare: you take a pork tenderloin and stuff it with a mushroom stuffing called Duxelle, then you wrap it in puff pastry and bake it so that the pastry puffs up and looks pretty. It really is that simple. This was the second time that the puff pastry that I made on Thursday has had a starring role in my cooking and it survived the weekend quite well, rising in perfectly good layers. After I had wrapped up the pork in the pastry, I realised that I had an awful lot of scraps left and my teacher told me that I was supposed to do decorations on the top of it. I looked around the kitchen: I saw artful twists, beautifully crafted leaves and fine bows of pastry sitting atop the others' work. I knew suddenly what I had to do - I went and got a small circular cutter and used it to construct four little pig's heads on the top of my pork. It was a moment of divine inspiration which was rewarded with one of the most bizarre reactions imaginable: I was soon surrounded by admirers and on-lookers who came to gaze at the beauty and cuteness of my pig's faces, adorning the pastry like little...faces (but not in an off-putting way), and I had to pose for a photo. My teacher especially was extremely excited by the sight of little pigs faces decorating food, and she made an enormous fuss over it.

Unfortunately it is fairly common for the pastry to split open in the oven and sadly this happened in such a way that it detached the pig's ears from their heads in a highly distressing fashion. I therefore decreed that it was not to be served to children who might be upset by the sight of poor, ear-less pigs and the day moved on.

The only other thing on my list was rosettes of smoked salmon, where you take the smoked salmon, cut it and arrange it so that it looks like a rosette. I have nothing else that I feel I can add to that.

In the spirit of Ballymaloe, hard work and tying up loose ends, we had a demonstration this afternoon despite the fact that we won't be cooking any of it. We were shown how to prepare skate and how to bone chickens and I saw none of it because I am the official ambulance for the school and I spent the afternoon ferrying people to the doctor. Still - it was a nice afternoon, so I didn't really mind.