This past Monday was a bank holiday here and Memorial Day in the States, so I joined the girls at Canela Cafe, a Portuguese restaurant that Ana wanted us to try and happily we did.  We tried several appetizers and some main dishes and a little Portuguese wine.  For some reason I cannot find the pictures of our dishes so I apologize for that.  The dishes consisted of staples prepared simply with lots of flavor.  All really nice. The restaurant is in Covent Garden, a really great area of town with so much to see.  I passed a fun chocolate store on my way, Choccywoccydoodah.  Everything is created from chocolate.  It was difficult to take a shot through the window but if you can make it out, that’s all chocolate.  Not really sure what you would do with it but its fascinating and a little creepy all at the same time.   Inside, they had a lot of marshmallow  mixed with chocolate and not being a big fan, I didn’t find anything to buy.  To be clear, I do like marshmallows on Smores and floating in hot chocolate but that’s it.  I see no other use for them.

Cafe Canela, Choccywoccydoodah’s window and close up of window.

I also took some time to last week to visit Fabrique Bakery.  The school offers you the opportunity to have your knives engraved so instead of sitting around waiting, I wondered over to Fabrique because one of the chefs mentioned they were famous for their Cardamom buns.  I love Cardamom so off it went.  They were wonderful and the coffee was strong (for me) but the gal kindly gave me enough milk to help it along.  I took an extra Cardamom bun and a Walnut bun to go for the next day.  Highly recommend this nice, tiny bakery.

Yes, I started eating before I remembered to take a picture.  Nothing really fancy but really unique and delicious.

Tuesday night was pastries!  In my last post I included a picture of pastries from the Chef who did the Demo.   This is my work below which has croissants, both plain and with almond cream, Pains aux Chocolat, Craquelin (Brioche with chocolate inside) and Danois et Brioche or Brioche bread which I love.  Luckily the Chef who was with us for our Practical was willing to take some pastries home.  They usually don’t.  Since our class finished at 9:30pm, tough to give a lot of this away at that time of night.  I don’t get home until 10:00pm or so.  I did keep a sampling so I could at least taste them.

On Wednesday we had another Wine lecture to teach us how to pair wines with food.  It’s very interesting how certain flavors can change a wine completely, or if you want to look at it from another angle, how wine changes the flavor of food completely.

Then, more bread.  Turns out I love-making bread and I’m really happy they give us a couple of classes with it so we understand the basic principles. On Thursday we made Focaccia, Pain de Seigle (Rye Bread) and Baguette Viennoise (they call it a breakfast bread enriched with milk, butter and egg. Reminds me of Challah bread). These were just fun to make and they turned out  really nice.  Absolutely delicious.  I picked up some Jarlsberg cheese and salami to make a rye bread sandwich.  Yum.

Rye and Viennoise on the left and Focaccia on the right.  We worked in pairs and Elaine and I added sun-dried tomatoes, olives (sorry Karen Hart) a little Rosemary and a touch of rock salt to the Focaccia.

So with all the pastries and Brioche and then this bread, you can see why my small fridge has nothing but bread in it (and some salami and cheese, almond milk, yogurt and OJ but plain this time.  No “juicy bits”).

Friday was a “skills” test so not fun.  Oh and to add a little extra pressure because a test isn’t enough, they had us pair up and whip up a traditional English fruit cake.  These take up to 2+ hours to bake so we had to get everything prepared in 30 min or less.  There is SO much that goes into them, it took our whole team of 8 to weigh, measure, zest, juice and cook down the ingredients just to get it into the oven in time to cook during our class time.  We won’t see those cakes again until the end of Intermediate.  That’s fine.  Not sure I really want to know what I’ll have to do with down the road.    So skills test happened and happy to have that behind me.   This section of class is going so fast.  The next 3 weeks are madness and then our final exams.  Bob arrives the day after finals.  Can’t wait.

We ended our week with a night out at the Blues Kitchen up in Camden.  It’s a take off of something you might find in New Orleans.  Dinner was really good although I wish I had gotten the Burnt Ends instead of Jambalaya.  The Blues Kitchen’s was wild rice with shrimp and a little sauce.  It was good, but I was hoping for some good Jambalaya.  The live band was supposed to start at 9pm.  I made it until 10p and they still weren’t close to starting so Elaine and I took off but looks like the rest of them stayed and danced the night away.

Jambalaya, having dinner at Blues Kitchen, later in the evening by the dance floor have drinks, a blurry pic sent after I got home from the dance floor I’m sure after a couple more drinks.  This is a fun bar though.  Cool bar, good atmosphere and fun people.

Talk later.

Mel