Napolean Never Had It This Good!

We've completed one week of our European Cuisines ending on the shores of Britain including the Loovely Land O' Errrland. (you know, shamrocks and leprecauns) Accents are so hard to to electronically. Bloddy 'ell.

How good was the food you ask? Eh. I made something called Colcannon and Boxty potatoes. The Boxty's are something like a hash brown with buttermilk in them. They were hard to cook, fell apart at the sight of a spatula, and tasted like a... hash brown. BFD. Waste of good buttermilk. Who buys buttermilk anyway?! If you do buy some to make these god-forsaken little burps of misery (cooking wise) then you'll be making them again and again just to use up the buttermilk. We shall call it the Buttermilk Conspiracy with Matt Damon at the lead. He'll carry a folding spatula in search of the Holy Teflon Pan. AFTER I struggled with the freakin' Boxty's (where do these people get these names for food?!) then the Chef gave us all some "Tips" on how to do this recipe without the food sticking to our skillets. Gee thanks Chef. I had to pick blackened bits of boxties off your chef plate and NOW you tell me.

The Colcannon was good, but then again, it was basically a hot potato salad with the addition of only cabbage and green onions. It did have a wad of butter though. We should just make food like this and serve it to our enemies to win wars. They'll die from artery clogging butter fat in no time flat. How do the Brits manage to live through their own food?

Our class also made a Scotch Broth (lamb or beef stew), London Clam Soup (think fog colored soup), Shepard's Pie, which for some reason the Chef made some connection to the Johnnie Depp movie Sweeny Todd, about cutting up people and putting them in these pies and selling them to the unsuspecting public. So for that reason, I don't know how it tastes since I don't eat people.
We did have some good Fish and Chips and a nice platter of broccoli and cauliflower with a Mornay sauce.

In the end, it was all good fun. I love the swearing, yelling, ecentric pace of 12 chefs a'blazin'! The energy is exciting. You're running here and there with hot pans of grease and boiling pots of water constantly passing behind you by someone running to the sink pit. Its like a wild game of dodge ball, blind man's bluff and Rover, Rover all at once. I really like our Chef too. He's a hoot. He keeps calling me Barbara so finally yesterday I taped my name tag with masking tape and wrote Barbara on it! I then told him that I probably won't respond to Barbara SINCE that's not my name and if he calls me Debra I probably won't respond to that either since he hasn't called me that in a WEEK! Ha. We laughed.

I've been perfecting my Dead Pan humor in his class. Its been very difficult for me since I really find my own sayings funny to myself. It's like my voice box is possessed by someone else sometimes and I hear what comes out of my own mouth and its pretty darn funny. So I laugh. So I'm currently trying to tame the funny beast that lives inside me. This is a lesson in restraint.

But I digress..... Back to foods. Next week we creep up in the still of the night on France and Italy then we wage a fierce battle of tongs and vegetable peelers for two days until we make mincemeat pies from them! We shall clear the streets of France of all the Slotted Spoons in the Red Light districts and we shall pry and fry the remaining spaghetti westerns from the very hands of Italian Producers! Onward Kitchen Soldiers!!

[somewhere along the line my reality base is fuzzing up, doncha think?]