Day 1 of Light and Natural Cooking

In Light and Natural Cooking, (if it was even conceivable for butter and cream laden dishes typical of French cuisine), we aim to reduce the use or use reduced fat butter/cream, or use yoghurt in place.

Today, in Day 1, we learnt mainly Entrées. This is unusual cos' most of the time, Chef demo's 1 starter, 1 or 2 mains, 1 dessert. Well, this Chef decided to break up to day 1: Entrees, day 2, fish, day 3, meat, day 4, desserts. Which is a good break from usual as well.

First dish is a soup: Leek and Potato Soup, or Fr: Vichyssoise, which can be eaten hot or cold, according to the season. We placed some poached haddock in the middle, some diced Spanish piquillos in the bottom and on top. Some flaked almonds, and a sprinkling of Espelette pepper.

Chef liked it, though I would have placed more leeks in it. This photo is what I've made. (I thought for a change, I'll put my own creation in place of Chef's, but if you wanna see Chef's pics, lemme know, I'll post them up as well.)

Next are 2 dishes which we didn't make, but were Chefs demo's. The first is Cured Salmon with Ginger and Air-dried Beef (as the red crinkly juliennes in photo).

The second is Poached Tuna with Piperade garnish. Piperade is a delicious blend of blend of bell peppers, tomatoes, garlic. Some onion chips on the sides.

The next dish we made in practical was a toast of tomatoes confits (over dried tomatoes), and marinated young mackerel fish (marinate: garlic, olive oil, espelette pepper, cider, cider vinegar). At the end, the marinate is strained, and whisked into a vinaigrette. This was the dish I presented.

Next dish I presented, was Smoked Tuna on a Galette de Pommes de Terre (actually, a giant blini!). The tuna was first cured in coarse salt for abt an hour, and then washed. It's placed in a improvised smoking device (woodchip on the base of saute pan, fish on top of a round grill, covered and smoked slowly).

Last for Intermediate Cuisine

Calamari in Marseille-style, shellfish soup, bouillabaisse with rouille, veal "orloff", a cassoulet of pork medallions and chestnuts, and on its right, the plated version (vs. the one-pot-all version).

Let's go again!!

Welcome back.  I hope you did not miss the weekly features .  Well, school started 

on Monday.  Your eyes (at least) will be in for a treat.  

In intermediate cuisine, we will be following different regions of France and their regional specialties.  In intermediate pastry, we are using the basic building blocks of basic pastry, with more creativity, piecing different bases with different mousses, creams, tastes, colors, etc.  These usually takes more time, so organisation and planning is key.

To start off, here are some 'dryer' cakes that keeps well, aka 'travelling' cakes - which you can bring with you on a journey and need no refridgeration.  (Hint hint:  One of them will travel with PG to SG over this CNY.)  These basic cakes can be embellished with choc glazing, fresh cream and fruits like the photo above.  These will definitely sell in a pastry shop window.  Some other plated desserts, snow eggs in creme anglaise with blackcurrant, apple charlotte.

In cuisine, we had tomatoes stuffed with goat cheese and aromatics, shellfish soup with garlic glaze.  For our practicals, we made spring chicken with spring vegetables (notice the herb butter under the skin, like how I showed Idah how to make before?).  Stuffed salmon rolled in cabbage leaves with red wine sauce.

Good thing this term we finish all our cuisine practicals at 7pm; perfect timing to bring them back home for dinner!

Soups, Croissants, Brioches

Last week, we had a week of French soups - classic consomme, french onion soup, and a fish soup, in Pastry, we finally attempted Croissants and Brioches.  I made my own croissants!!  How proud am I of that!?  But it's not easy, I think it's even tougher than the puff pastry that I've done earlier.  The difference is that the dough is fermented (like a bread dough), coupled with butter lamination (like puff pastry), so it's really elastic, and hard to roll up to stretch them to workable sheets

.  So the next time you bite into a well-down croissant, thank your lucky stars.  Mine didn't turn out too bad either!  With a narrow strip of dough, we made pain au chocolat - chocolate croissant, most call it.  There're those squarish icing sugared ones you see in the pictures.

Brioches on the other hand, are not typically my favorites, but Tr

opezienne, a large flat brioche filled with orange flowered water infused cream filling is simply delicious!  The rest of the brioche pictures are as follows:

All in all, it was pretty good.