Piglets & Canapés

Just home from our weekly Wednesday family dinner with The Play Room, Max, Erin, and Theresa cooked a wonderful meal. We enjoyed a few drinks (of course), lots of Ballymaloe conversation, and now it’s time for bed!

Today was our lecture day, cheddar cheese and cheese biscuits, canapés, spices, freezing, olive oil and balsamic vinegar were on the list. Darina took us through lots of different canapé ideas, with various ways of serving, and chatted a bit about how much to charge, and how many options you should offer. Very informative and interesting demo. We will have a spice recognition exam at the end of the course, so after lunch she briefly went over all of the spices. We then moved swiftly onto freezing, which wasn’t the most thrilling topic, but there are always useful tips to be picked up along the way and funny stories to keep us entertained. We tasted about thirteen different olive oils after chatting about the process of making olive oil, the different types, and varying qualities.

After demo I headed down to the greenhouse, and to try and find the new cow – no success. But, the six piglets were out running around with their mum, and they are darn cute. They snort, and chase each other up and down the field. I watched them for about five minutes, but could have stayed much longer.

Looking forward to getting back into the kitchen tomorrow. We have a wine lecture after demo, which I assume will be a bit of a refresher because our exam is next Friday.

“Nature would not have put fat on things if we didn’t need it.” – Darina on cooking meat without fat

Four of the piglets!

Look what's growing in the green house!

Daffodils in the fruit garden.