Oh Deer

Believe it or not, we've already finished Lesson 11 of 19.

Yesterday was Lesson 10, two fairly easy dishes: oeufs meurettes and consommé under puff pastry.

Chef 2 was in a cheerful mood, even though it was an early morning demo.

"Normally, the eggs should be poached in red wine, but I drank the wine, so there is no red wine."

The truth is, the wine we use in classes is horrible salted stuff - completely undrinkable and would have been ghastly for poaching eggs.  So we used water, but make a red wine sauce and garnitures of bacon, mushroom and brown glazed pearl onions.  What could possibly go wrong?  

To paraphrase Heston Blumenthal (who was paraphrasing W.C. Fields), never work with children, small animals, or eggs.  I have mixed luck with poached eggs generally, and yesterday I made three, of which only one didn't have the yolk break on me.  Let's call it an appetizer portion, shall we?

The consommé was fine, but in the now-brutal Ottawa heat it wasn't a lot of fun making a steamy soup and fighting with puff pastry.  Why couldn't it have been gazpacho day?

Today's lesson was also a nice cold-weather dish: venison loin in salt crust.  Like with eggs, I have mixed luck with salt crusts.  It's so easy to overcook something, and I find the crust needs a lot of patching up because it's so fragile.  And, true to form, I came perilously close to overcooking it.  Oh deer....

And just as I was slapping my food on the plate, my phone battery died, so I have no picture of my dish today.  It's too bad - I had a cute little stack of triangle-shaped potato and turnip and an adorable little microgreen salad (even prettier because I picked half the pansies and other flowers out of the package for my plate).  So this is the Chef's plate from the demo.  Pretty nifty, eh?

Tomorrow is yet another "black box" workshop.  This time we don't have even a partial list of ingredients in our book, but the items in the box are about the worst-kept secret, such that even the Chef has pretty much admitted that we'll be doing an egg appetizer and a duck breast main.  And there will likely be rice and the usual assortment of miscellaneous vegetables.  Lots of possibilities there.

So homeward bound to hit the books a little...I need some new ideas.