Week Two

Above: Taking a little break from the kitchen for a coffee in the garden

Hi all!

I’ve finished my second week of classes—the first normal, full-on week of the course—and it left me happy and exhausted. Almost every morning begins with a misty walk from my cottage to the school kitchen, where we’ve left the counters pristine and the floors so clean you could lick them. Then, we take our knives out and spend five hours making a mess that results in all sorts of beautiful dishes. When we’re done, we work together to clean everything up, leaving the space even nicer than we found it. Come next morning, we start again from the top. I love the circularity of kitchen life, the predictable chaos that bubbles up and then quiets once our food has been served. 

After cooking, we head to an afternoon demonstration, which is like watching a cooking show. I always look forward to sitting back and enjoying the presentation, scribbling notes here and there. My favorite demo this week was Rachel Allen showing us the different parts of a lamb and preparing a gorgeous leg of lamb, piercing it with sprigs of rosemary and slipping pieces of anchovy into its skin. I also loved our teacher Pam’s cake demonstration; she made lemon curd cake and chocolate cake and coffee cake, and watching it all was, in a word, joyful!

My housemate Eliza and I signed up to do a bread extracurricular together this past week, so we woke up at 6 am on Friday and trudged to the bread shed for duty. It was hard to get out of bed while it was still dark outside, but worth it once we were working with the dough, learning the rhythm of shaping loaves of bread with our hands. Tim Allen, Darina’s husband, guided us through our tasks and showed us his way of doing things. He also helped us create our very own sourdough starters, which we’ll need to nurture every day in order for them to thrive. Dough caked in our fingernails, Eliza and I left the shed at 8:30 am to continue our days in the kitchen.

Above: Me and Eliza with our sourdough starter children (Will I be able to fly home with my child in 10 weeks? TBD)

There are so many smart people reading these emails, so I’d love to gauge the crowd: how do you reckon with the feeling that you’ll never know everything in your field? It’s so true that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, and I feel that acutely here as our teachers pummel us with information every day. I want to be as good a cook as I can be, and I’m daunted by how much I’ve yet to learn. Similarly, I get overwhelmed when I walk into bookstores because I want to read everything but know that I don’t have enough time in my life to do so, and it’s inevitable that great books will keep coming out that I’ll never get to read. Please respond to this email if you have any wisdom for me! xx

My housemates and I went to Cork today to go out for lunch and see the new Bond movie in theaters. It was such a nice day. I’m still shocked by how well we all get along! Last night, Angelica made us casarecce with homemade tomato basil sauce, and we debated food nerd things like whether it’s worth it to make homemade mayonnaise. My people! Can’t even think about leaving them in December. 

Love to all,

Phoebs