Leiths: Intermediate Term, Week 7

Week 7, or the week that I only managed to spend one day in the kitchen. All day demos, work experience and a spot of illness to round off the week meant that Monday was the only day I actually got to cook, making it rather different from the last 16 (16!!) weeks I’ve spent at Leiths…Although Monday was the only day I actually cooked, I guess the fact that it was an all day cooking session (aka 9-5pm in the kitchen instead of our usual 3 hour session) makes up for this. One perk of all day cooking is that I got to eat the dish above for lunch – despite being it was a bit cold by the time I’d finished washing up and got to it it certainly beats a sandwich.The morning was spent trying to get the bulk of the work done before tiredness really set in and so our main afternoon task was filling and glazing the fruit tarts above. The pastry was super fragile, particularly in the tiniest tart which was smaller than most of our little fingers so it was quite a relief to get 4 unscathed tarts out at the end! My glazing still needs work to be a little less blotchy – as the last task in a long day I think I was probably more haphazard than I should have been!All this term a different group of 4 has been taking it turns to cook a 2 course meal in 3 hours for the opposite class, which has meant lots of lovely free lunches for us all! Friday was the big day this week as my groups turn finally arrived. I was gutted that I wasn’t allowed to cook on account of being ill the day before so I basically did any job that didn’t involve being near the food – washing up, tidying, fetching, organising and setting the tables! We went for a take away theme, as you can hopefully tell from the picture below, so our menu was: harrissa chicken wraps (making 50 tortillas from scratch takes a heck of a lot longer than you might imagine) with sumac wedges, guacamole and salsa rosa followed by triple chocolate cheesecake with raspberry coulis. Our only slight drama was when we had served on time only to be told that our diners would be 10minutes late. Cue 50 takeaway boxes full of wraps and chicken being rushed off the tables I’d just laid them all out on and back into the warming oven…where they promptly started to melt! Luckily we got them out in the nick of time and everyone seemed to really enjoy their meal. I owe a massive thank you to my team-member Rhian who had do the whole Tesco shop on her own when I was ill (no mean feat when buying for 50) and a general thank you to both Oli and Rhian for being so supportive and continually imploring me to sit down whenever I still felt a bit rough! Despite not being able to cook with them and feeling pretty rubbish all day I am still so proud of our group and it was one of my favourite days at Leiths so far. Bring on week 8!