23rd: Catching up

So yes, I've been doing a lot of cooking since April when I started at the Grange de Labahou. Lots. I've even learned some recipes off by heart, like the one for making two dozen Tiramisus at a time. In fact, I now make two dozen tiramisus every Thursday morning. Takes me about an hour now, down from an hour and a half back in May. I now also only use a dozen eggs, instead of the two dozen or so it used to take me - you have to separate the egg yolks and whites, something I didn't always manage successfully. If you have any yolk in the whites they won't rise properly. The only time my whites didn't rise properly was when Greg transferred them out of the mixer bowl into an ice cream glass while he used the mixer. I suspect the glass wasn't clean, but luckily Chef had some spare egg whites about his person so I didn't have to crack another dozen. It's a sign of a good chef, don't you think, to always have a dozen spare egg whites about your person?

I've also gained an awful lot of confidence in the kitchen. To start with, I was afraid to say 'boo' to a goose or, worse, ask Chef a question in case it made me look stupid.

So for example, one day back in May Chef asked me to top and tail a couple of kilos of haricots verts, French green beans, and wrap them up half a dozen at a time in a strip of poitrine fumée - bacon. He plunked the bowl of beans down next to a vegetable knife and a plastic cutting board, so I started in by putting the beans one at a time on the board and cutting of their tops and bottoms.

Now, in my head I knew that I should be pulling off the tops and bottoms manually, breaking them so as to pull with them the 'strings' that sometimes run down the sides of beans. But, Chef had put the bowl down by the cutting board and knife and, me being too timid to ask, I just got on with what he'd told me to do.

About a dozen beans into the adventure, Chef passed by again - he has a good habit of passing by when I'm doing something, clocking what's going on and continuing on his way as if he's not checking up on me at all.

"OK," he said, "two things.

"First, you should be breaking off the tops and bottoms of the beans with your hands so as to pull off any strings with them."

Well, yes, I said, I knew that but thought you wanted them cutting for some reason because you put them down by this plastic cutting board.

"And the second thing," he said, his voice still emotionless. "That's not a cutting board - that's my frozen puff pastry for my millefeuilles."

Greg the sous-chef found this very amusing. So did Isobel, Chef's wife. And everyone else to whom I've told the story, for that matter.