Day 14

It's great to be back in the kitchen again. It was Summer Pudding, Marmalade and French Peasant Soup (delicious and certainly something that i'll be making more of) that I made today, although the soup was the only one I could be marked on, the others will be finished tomorrow after they've done their magic in the fridge overnight.

Thats probably enough about the cooking stuff, i'm sure it doesn't make particulary good reading day after day. So i'll change tack and let you know some very interesting and probably very surprising little facts about daily life in Ballymaloe.

As I'm sure you've worked out now, this place loves food and the welfare of its livestock and vegetables etc (yes plants have feeling too). But that extends further than just the food, it's bred into the whole ethos of the place. For instance, there's a very small bucket in every kitchen where non recyclable rubbish goes, and at the end of every day, it's only half full. Food waste is split up in to two types, Stock (as in chicken stock) and Hens. The food that cannot be used again, goes in to feeding the 500 odd hens that roam around the farm. They have huge skips which they eat out of, and at the end of the week, whats left, goes to the composting area, and then obviously when that's done, it goes back on the plants.

The only detergent used here is the environmently friendly Ecover, and we're encouraged to use that sparingly (1 drop per sink, and the sinks are big). Bacterial detergents like Mr Muscle are never used in the kitchen, it's simply not needed, the place is kept spotlessly clean, and the theory being that the reliance of detergents actually breed laziness, which actually promotes germs to grow. And you only have to look at the MRSA bug to see where they're coming from, which incidentaly they do have in hospitals over here. The floors are obviously mopped every day, but again with envronmentally friendly products. Darina's fan that she uses to go to the farmers market is run using biofuel.

I thought that stainless steel kitchens were needed in a commercial environment. Not true. The only specification is that the kitchen has to be easy to clean, and although stainless steel is easy to clean, it's not needed at all. A well designed kitchen is all that's needed.

The same goes for chopping boards, I was under the impression that we'vd be using the colou coded boards (red=meat, blue=fish etc). But studies have actually proved that wooden chopping boards are cleaner than the plastic variety, and the least plastic that touches food the better.


MARK'S TIP OF THE DAY
I realise that some of these tips are a little bit lightweight, but some of them I want to keep to myself so I can surprise you all, the others are really down to simple techniques that I'd really need to show. For instance it's quite hard to explain how to properly line a flan tin. Or the secret to a great Soda Bread.

So here it is then. When boiling green vegetables, keep the lid off the pan, and your vegetables will retain their colour a lot better than if the lid was on.