Farewell Dinner - Summer Cookery Course 2022

It's hard to believe that it's that time again - when we say goodbye to our 12 Week Students here at the Ballymaloe Cookery School, graduating from the summer course.

We had a beautiful last dinner together on a gorgeous sunny evening.

A starter of green onion soup with green onion oil.

Followed by Slow Roast Shoulder of local Lamb with a beautiful garlicky aioli and zingy salsa verde. Served with freshly dug potatoes with a peppery nasturtium butter, roast beetroots and carrots with red onions and a salad of organic leaves all from our farm here.

Dessert was an elderflower and strawberry jelly with a refreshing cucumber and elderflower granita. 

Menu by my talented daughter, Lydia Hugh Jones.

We wish our students all the best and look forward to hearing what they get up to.

A Sad Farewell...But Not Goodbye

We had a farewell dinner for our 12 week students, a couple of weeks earlier than anticipated, due to Covid-19 restrictions.

Farewell darlings and travel safely and comfortably... cook up a storm and keep in touch... with us here at the Ballymaloe Cookery School

Forage to Feast

At the end of each twelve week course, our students at Ballymaloe Cookery School put on a pop up dinner as a fundraiser to support the East Cork Slow Food Education Project.

The theme for this one was Forage to Feast: an evening of wild eating to celebrate the vast array of local and wild foods we are lucky enough to have on our doorstep here in East Cork, even in early March.

The evening is a collaboration of the student's talents - cooking, presentation, serving...and even illustrating.

The cafe was set up with evergreens and candles...

The double sided menu was created by @sievesandspoons

And the fun began... guests were greeted with drinks and live music...

The evening started with homemade creamy labneh cheese, served with foraged wild garlic, almonds and honey, fermented crackers and beetroot puree. And a mushroom and fiddlehead fern quiche.

As well as a whole host of ferments and pickles...

This was followed by a rock pool broth of fresh, local hake and shellfish, with sea spinach.

The main course was a locally reared loin of lamb with wild garlic, accompanied by stuffed butternut squash, kale puree, carrots and a rich potato gratin.

Dessert was a fresh, pink rhubarb tart with a vibrant lemon and ginger ice cream. And for petit fours we had these magical little woodland meringues, sweet geranium shortbread with crystalised primroses and a rich beetroot and chocolate bake.

If this has whetted your appetite for foraged foods, why not join me at Ballymaloe Cookery School on Saturday 25th April 2020.

Locally foraged foods have been an important part of the menu at Ballymaloe House for over 40 years, and we continue the tradition at the Cookery School. 

This one day course can literally be life changing as it teaches you how to identify and enjoy nature’s treasures: free ingredients that are fresher, tastier and much more nutritious than virtually anything you will ever find in the shops. This course is suitable for professional chefs, home cooks, keen foragers or anyone wanting to learn about sourcing and cooking with wild food for sheer pleasure.

• How to identify dozens of edible wild plants, flowers, seaweeds and shellfish in season, foraged from hedgerows, fields and the nearest beach. A walk in the countryside will never be the same again. Where you previously saw weeds, you’ll now see something to eat.
• How to prepare and cook the wild food that’s been gathered, while maintaining the benefits of the vitamins, minerals and trace elements that are lacking in so many processed foods. Depending on the season, this could include delicious soups and tasty salads featuring nettles, seaweed, samphire, strand cabbage, wild garlic and purslane...

• Take a walk with me, an enthusiastic and experienced forager, to search for wild food in the countryside. Before even leaving the front steps of the Cookery School, your eyes will be opened see five edible wild plants, reinforcing how much natural abundance is available to those who know what to look for 
• Two demonstration sessions, showing how to cook the food you’ve foraged, with overhead mirrors and two monitors showing close-up handiwork. Teachers share a wealth of knowledge through their expert tips and techniques. 

Ballymaloe Cookery School - The Twelve Week Course

We’re in full swing at the Ballymaloe Cookery School. Students from 12 different countries are settling into life in the midst of a working organic farm close to the sea in East Cork. They’ll be with us for three months. 

They’ve just discovered the long sandy strand at Ballynamona, a few brave ones are joining Rachel Allen for early morning swims - BRRRRH! - but they assure us it's super exhilarating. Others get up early to be in the ‘Bread Shed’ by six o' clock to discover the magic of making totally natural sourdough bread, a few others link up with the gardeners at 7:30 to harvest the fresh herbs, veg and salad leaves for the mornings cooking. 

Already we have a few keen foragers, just met a couple of those making their way to the stone boundary wall to pick the fleshy leaves of pennywort to use as a garnish for their starter. They’ve already picked some winter cress, a few dandelion leaves and some chickweed to add to the big bowl of green salad. 

Another couple of eager students have met up with David Cullinane to bring the small herd of Jersey cows in to be milked. Afterwards they’ll separate the thick rich cream from the milk. Some will be served with the lunchtime pudding, its Chocolate and Hazelnut Tart today and they’ll learn how to churn the remainder into homemade butter before coming into the kitchens at 9 o' clock. Others will be feeding the hens and collecting the eggs for the day's cooking ahead.

Just a couple of weeks ago, several of these students had never been ‘up close and personal’ with a cow in their entire lives. They might have had a vague idea that butter came from cream but no idea how the transformation occurred. They are all super excited to learn these almost ‘forgotten skills’. 

Several others have gone to Penny in the Bubble Shed to learn the secret of the water kefir, that wine correspondent John Wilson told his Irish Times readers was “the best I’ve tasted” and its available on a daily basis from The Ballymaloe Cookery School Shop, just outside the village of Shanagarry. 

Even though the weather is still wintery we’ve got lots of seasonal vegetable and fresh herbs.

Already, the fresh green spears of chives are peeping above ground and of course there’s lots of rosemary, sage, thyme and bay, the gutsy perennials that keep on going year round and are particularly good with comforting winter stews and gratins. 

We’ve got an abundance of winter vegetables, still some Brussels sprouts, lots of leeks and of course all the root vegetables, carrots, parsnips, celeriac, gorgeous white turnips, swedes and of course Jerusalem artichokes, the most exciting and nutritious veg of them all.

Ruffage

An exciting parcel arrived on my desk today, a present from a past student who wanted me to have a copy of her very first cook book – Abra Berens is the 28th Ballymaloe Cookery School student to write a best-selling cook book. It’s called Ruffage, published by Chronicle Books and has just been chosen by the New York Times as one of the Top 10 Books of 2019 – and that’s no mean feat….

Abra did a 12 Week Certificate Course here in 2006. She’s chef at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, Michigan and a co-founder of Bare Knuckle Farm. She’s making quite the impact and strives to connect people with their food both through dinners and progressive food policy, helping to further a food policy where farmers earn a living wage, protect our environment through agriculture and waste as little food as possible...no doubt influenced by the zero waste policy we do our best to espouse here at the Ballymaloe Cookery School.

A year and half after she left here she took up residence in a forest valley between two cherry orchards on Bare Knuckle Farm in Michigan. She plunged all her savings into the project, worked from dawn till dusk, ate brilliantly but by the end of the first year was so ‘poor and cold’ that she decided to return to Chicago to get a job that paid “in green backs” rather than green leafy vegetables. There was lots of delicious food at the pie shop where she worked but soon she was craving the carrots that seemed to get sweeter with every passing frost, the tiny kale greens that still sprouted from the stalk and the almost obscenely orange-yolked eggs. “Farming changed the way I cook”.

I too, know that feeling, when you sow and tend a seed and wait patiently for it to grow into something to eat you will cook it carefully and lovingly and use every single scrap. You will want everyone to know that you grew it...Furthermore, it gives one a far greater respect and appreciation for those who grow nourishing and wholesome food all for us.

The format of Ruffage is also interesting. It’s not a vegetarian book but Abra has chosen vegetables as the principle ingredient and gives deeply knowledgable advise on how to select, store, prepare, cook and serve them using a variety of cooking techniques. She starts with a pantry section and some essential condiments.  There are recipes for each vegetable and suggestions for 3 or 4 delicious variations, and many, many cooking methods, pan roasting, poaching, boiling, sautéing, grilling, oven roasting, braising, confit, frying, stuffed, marinated, baked, caramelized and of course raw.

Who knew, that there so many super exciting ways to serve vegetables, I love this book and plan to stock it in our Farm shop here at the Ballymaloe Cookery School. We don’t have much space so I’m super fussy about what I ask Toby to stock but this is a ‘keeper’.

A Summer Feast in the Garden of Eden

We had our annual Long Table Dinner in the greenhouses a couple of weeks ago in aid of the East Cork Slow Food Educational Project. It was completely sold out with a waiting list of people eager to come if there was a cancellation, even at the last minute. Six nationalities travelled here for it: English, South African, American, Swedish, French, Swiss... as well, of course, as a large Irish contingent.

This is always a wonderful time of the year in the Cookery School gardens, with everything looking lush and luxuriant. But I love to have the added excuse of a special event to polish everything up an extra notch.

The preparation for this event starts several months ahead. After the early potato crop was harvested, Tim and the garden team planted grass seed in a couple of bays of the greenhouses. This lush lawn creates a beautiful green carpet for the Long Table Dinner. The field kitchen in the neighbouring bay was beautifully screened off with fresh beech branches and willow lattice. 

Pam was in charge of the table operation. A few students from the summer Twelve Week Course had asked to stay on to help at the dinner. 

They loved the experience, and being able to see the behind the scenes preparation, cooking and serving of a summer feast for a hundred people.

For the past couple of weeks there has been a frenzy of activity - with Rory testing and tasting dishes made with the seasonal summer produce. Here's the menu he eventually chose:

Menu illustrated by Lydia Hugh-Jones

The weather forecast was pretty grim, so we all held our breath... Guests started to arrive at 4pm and Colm McCann and his team had some cava with elderflower or rhubarb cordial and fresh mint lemonade ready for the guests. Emer and Pat grilled sourdough bread and topped it with heirloom tomatoes and basil, or scrambled organic eggs and Ballycotton lobster.

Despite our apprehension, we were fortunate with the weather. About an hour before the guests arrived there was the sort of sudden downpour that we've become accustomed to this "summer". But after that it was blue skies all the way.

We welcomed the guests and thanked them for supporting the East Cork Slow Food Educational Project - and explained we are saving up to convert a disused shipping container into a prototype teaching kitchen for local schools to teach their pupils how to cook the produce they grow in their school gardens.

After the aperitif and nibbles, the guests divided into a couple of groups for a walk through the organic farm and gardens. We explained that the Cookery School and farm are completely integrated: the School is our indoor classroom, we use the farm and gardens as an outdoor classroom. We showed them the photovoltaic system that generate electricity for the School, even on dull days, and the student beds where local children learn how to sow seeds and grow vegetables and herbs. Many were also fascinated by the dairy, where our Jersey cows are milked and the butter, buttermilk and yoghurt are made. 

We wandered down through the herb garden, the wild flower meadow, and the vegetable and fruit gardens, arriving at the glasshouse just minutes after 6pm. 

At this time of the year it looks like the Garden of Eden with kiwi and passionfruit overhead, and a wonderful variety of aubergines, sweetcorn, chilis, salad leaves, peppers, beans, heirloom tomatoes, beets, zucchini ... as well as peach, fig, nectarine and grapevines around the edges - so beautiful.

The Gardeners - Rupert, Sheanie and Colman - were playing trad. music as we arrived. 

People took their seats. It was all very convivial, as is the nature of Slow Food events. There was no seating plan, so people could mix and mingle and make new friends. 

And then the feast began.

We started with a Garden Leaf and Herb Flower Bouquet with Almond and Marjoram, Grape and Elderflower Mist served in little glasses, which had been assembled minutes earlier from the freshly picked leaves.

There was lots of freshly baked Ballymaloe Brown Yeast Bread and Jersey butter from the farm. The flavour of homemade butter was a trip down memory lane for many guests.

The second course was served family-style, the guests helped themselves and each other to: 

Beef Carpaccio with Horseradish and Tarragon

Sushi Rice with Smoked Ballycotton Pollock and Ruby Beetroot

Hot Smoked Wild Blackwater Salmon in Oeufs Mimosa

and Mustard Seed Pickled Cucumbers.

The main course was also sensational, in the words of the guests around me: Grilled Breast of Nora Ahern's Duck with Stonewell Tawny Cider, Roast Nectarines and Mint.

Rory had also braised the duck legs and wings with Indian spices, Llewellyn’s balsamic vinegar and tomatoes. That dish too was enthusiastically received. 

The Jersey butter and sea salt on the table embellished the floury new potatoes, a variety called Colleen, and the green beans which had been dug and picked not more than a half an hour before dinner.

Next the cheese course: Kinoith Farm Dairy Labne made with dripped natural yoghurt, served with Radishes, Savoury, Highbank Orchard Apple Syrup and Homemade Cheese Biscuits.

Then pudding, which was quite simply irresistible:

A Compote of Cherries with Kirsch

An Iced Sandwich of Peach, Raspberry and Buttermilk 

And Crème Brulee peppered with Mark Kingston’s Single Estate Coffee

Needless to say, everyone had to have a taste, or rather several, of everything.

Robin Wight, one of the guests who has been coming to Ballymaloe for almost 50 years, gave a touching speech and proposed a thank you toast to my mother-in-law Myrtle Allen (pictured below), and my late father-in-law Ivan Allen, who opened Ballymaloe House restaurant in 1964, without whom none of us would have been gathered together. 

The music played on, and then there were JR's raspberry marshmallows, candied chocolate orange peel, biscotti, and madeleines, still warm from the oven. Served with coffee and fresh herb tisanes

It was a truly memorable dinner, and a sumptuous celebration of summer produce. A big thank you to Tim and his ace team in the farm and gardens, Rory and his talented crew of Ballymaloe cooks, and each and everyone else who worked so hard to make it such a special night.