Continuation of Last Week's Cuisine

Ok guys and girls, sorry for the delay!  Here's part of cuisine last week.  

Starters:  1)  Fresh peas tartare flavored with Peppermint.  2)  Eggs stuffed with truffles, port wine glaze.

3)  Crab and tomato with Avocado cream and orange powder.

Mains:  1)  Puff pastry 'pie' of quails and lamb sweetbread with shiitake mushrooms

2)  Lamb rolls filled with vegetables and parmesan crisps.   (the plate with the 'sail' of parmesan crisp is mine)

3)  Sea bass in a crust Coulibiac style, stuffed eggplants

Desserts:

1)  Chocolate Nougat glace with cherry coulis.

2)  Sago with fresh pineapple, jasmine tea ice cream.  What we call sago in SG, it's apparently more commonly known as tapioca or Japanese pearls.  

3)  Lemon grass cream, strawberry jelly and rhubarb crisps.

A Date with Mr Cod

Starters:  Spicy vegetable 'jelly' with avocado cream (Fondant de Légumes Epicés à l'Avocat).  Why some menus insist on using the French terms is because, and I find this case a good example, is that, something is lost in the English translation.  Fondant in French means 'melting' as a noun, de legumes, of vegetables.  It's a  cool, melt-in-your-mouth consistency, yielding to small brunoise of vegetables rolling on your tongue, as its sweet and spicy flavour warms up from your palate to your nose.

Mains:  "Roasted Cod, Basil Gazpacho, Vegetable and Chorizo skewers" is very tasty, and reminds me of the kind of food I like best and would love to make, Mediterranean... eggplants, zucchini, bell peppers, herbs.  

Desserts:  Stuffed Dates wrapped in phyllo pastry and saffron ice-cream (!!) Delicious!!! 

Interestingly, this is the 2nd cod dish we produced.  The other being Cod with Red Cabbage in Beer Jus Vinaigrette.  The cod we receive is unlike the 'black cod' that we get in SG.  Although the cod is also a white fish, it is far less oily than what should be correctly termed as 'Chilean seabass'.  The taste is more delicate and the cooking is definitely more so!  It risks of drying and flaking very easily once overcooked.  The chilean seabass is more forgiving as it exudes plenty of fish oil when cooking, and this fat absorbs flavours very well.  I should count myself lucky to be able to work with the genuine cod, as its species are on the brink of extinction.  

Cuisine Week 2

I have a break on (most) Wednesdays this term.  Take the opportunity to upload more regularly. 

Dessert:  Baked bananas in its skin, with red fruits sauce and banana sorbert.

Starter:  Foie gras flan with morel sauce and herb salad.

Main:  Hake fish wrapped in parma ham and grilled baby eggplants, side of olives and fava beans with turned carrots/celeriac root/zucchini, sauce fresh tomato and olive oil with herbs.  You will see 2 platings here, the one with a more yellow background (landscape) is the chef's demo, the (portrait) one with dots of sauce is my dish served to the chef.  

Continuation:  We looked at a creamy pumpkin soup with truffles and smoked duck breasts; main:  pot-au-feu of monkfish in a herb butter sauce.  The photo with the snowpeas radiating outwards on a dish is chef's, mine was a centralised plating with 2 'discs' of chopped herbs at opposite corners.  Dessert:  Liquorice flavoured panna cotta with some crunchy sugar studded choux allumettes! 

Lobster and terrine

Lobster, an item you see on the menu, but never dared order it, cos' it costs way too much!  Well, we had a chance to make our very own lobster dish.  The grey/black lobster (before) flew in the very morning, almost late for our class, still alive of course..... the legs were moving and it was trying to get away from my platter of ingredients for that morning.  Sad fact is....we had to kill it.  No freezing, no dipping into boiling water.  Just a sharp knife, tip goes in, 'crack!' and split the head in half.  Squirmish girls may beckon the french chef instructor, ever willing to help..... Lobster a l'americaine, the red one (after), with raisin pilaf rice.  Why american?  Legend has it that a few americans showed up at a parisian restaurant late one night, for lack of ingredients by the time the restaurant was closing, a pair of lobster was idling in the fridge... the chef created a new recipe, the americans loved it, and it went on regular menu.

We also made guinea fowl with cabbage pie in class.  

Starters:  Eggplant caviar on toast with semi-oven dried tomatoes, verrine (terrine in a glass "verre") in 3 colors (tomato, goat cheese, avocado) with raw sea bream marinated in vanilla-infused olive oil.  Second, millefeuille wit tomatoes and confit fennel.  Third, white boudin, with caramelised apple.  We stuff our own sausages, of course.  (... and we hide it well too.)

The next dish on practical took over 2 sessions to prepare:  ballotine of chicken with foie gras mousse and pistachio.  It's like a sausage, or a terrine, if you like, wrap in a whole chicken, deboned.  Man, it's hell trying to debone a whole chicken in one piece!  Why they have so many bones anyway?  (By the way, we also have also made our own sausages in last week's recipe of duck legs pot-au-feu, fun stuff.)  It has to be slow cooked in prepared stock, and leave it in until it cools, thus, we only had the product today.  That is not all.  This is typically served on a buffet spread, and you need to have a presentation platter.  The first layer is a thick white coat of milk and gelatine, and next you make some decoration, and set it with a layer of thickened chicken consomme.   Each year there is a competition in France for such presentation platters.  Yes, you can each everything on the platter.  The squarish platter was the chef's demonstration, and the roundish one, mine.  I think I have to go for some fruit and veg carving class after this.  It's a very pretty picture.  You may not see it so well in the pics, it's like an archaic mirror.