From French to English...

What is British Cuisine?!
it's not so rich in taste as French Cuisine, but no doubt worth attention :-)
I'm going to tell you about some British dishes.

What about some fries early in the morning???!!!
It's eggs, bacon, sausages and beans (all fried) on breakfast. And if you hadn't got enough fries, you may have a potato fries as well. For that kind of breakfast I'll not be used to.






The next one is Jacket potato with choice of different toppings.
Jacket potato it's baked potato,skin on, cut in cross and topped for example with ham and cheese or baked beans in tomato sauce, or may be shrimps with mayo.



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And here come FISH AND CHIPS. Deeply fried fish and chipped potatoes.
You may go on England streets and smell the fried fish. It is just everywhere. Only this smell makes me feel bad.

Shepherd's pie or Cottage pie - it's a traditional English dish made from minced meat and covered with mashed potato.

That's could be nice dish on your lunch, I have tried it today and it was quite tasty. The recipe will come later.

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And finally it's Crumble for the desert - fruits covered with crumbled dough.

Apple and blueberry crumble is very popular, it's usually served with custard, cream or ice cream. I already made it several times, and it's very nice, since I like fruit deserts with ice cream. But I never have time to take a picture, it goes fast :-).

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So, as far as we live here, in UK, I'm trying some local dishes, e.g. being a part of community :-)
I think the Jacket potato could be a nice option when you have nothing in the fridge:-)
Simply, put the potato in microwave, it's ready after .. minutes, cut the cross, grade some cheese and put for another 30 second to the microwave, and your magic meal is ready to eat!!!

And, of course, I completely forgot about porridge!
Even in "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Arthur Conan Doyle (at least in it's Russian version)
Mr. Barrymore was serving the porridge to Sir Henry Baskerville :-)
Studying in Cordon Bleu, I was drinking my morning cup of coffee and watching some guys in suits ordering porridge!

As I already told, the recipes will come in my next posts.
And for now it's three days to go till my Israeli vacation.
I finally could sit on the beach and eat the light and tasty Israeli breakfast!

The cold war

I'm wondering if the Pastry chefs and Cuisine chefs are living in piece!?

When I was studying Cuisine the chefs were joking about Pastry and Pastry chefs.
For example: "The Pastry chef is a failed Cuisine chef!" .

When I was studying Pastry, the cuisine chefs were asking me :
"Don't you miss the real thing?". When I was answering : "Oh, Yes, I do" - they were very pleasant :-).
On the other side the Pastry chefs were always joking about Cuisine.
Pastry is a exact "science" - there is a recipe and if you do something wrong, you fail.
The Pastry chef was saying "It's not Cuisine here, you can't put in the pan a bit of this, a bit of that and get something nice, you should be very precised!"

What I think about all this it's following:
For me Cuisine, as I already told in my previous posts, is more exciting and interesting thing to do, I think there are more place for the fantasy, trying new flavours and tastes.
But I still think that it's not easy at all to be a good pastry chef. Yes, there are a lot of Pastry chefs that work in bakeries, shops and etc., but there are not so many of them that are really good, exactly the same as in Cuisine.
My point is - you should be good in what you are doing and never mind what it is.
(very philosophic sentence :-) )

See you in the next post!

Sugar work

Here it came - three weeks of sugar work!

At the first lesson I thought: "OK, That's enough!"

We were doing poured sugar, modeling with sugar and finally blown sugar.

The nice thing about it that I couldn't taste it, and came back to my healthy eating!

Actually you can do anything from sugar. As our chef says:

"You can do anything!

Anything?

Oh, yes, anything!"

You just should cook the sugar with water and glucose syrup to 165 degrees C, and then add some colours and do anything! Anything??? Oh, yes, anything.

Well, this cooked sugar is pretty warm, I would say it's hot, and you should work it by hands.

And again, as chef says: "It's slightly warm, think about something nice, everything is in your head!".

When you work with cooked sugar you should wear the gloves, to protect the sugar from you (from the moisture of the body) and not to protect you from sugar:-).

The chef said : "If your gloves sticking to the sugar, it can happen to your skin too! It's slightly warm!"

At the end of the day I couldn't feel my fingers.

But then I found myself enjoying what I was doing, because again it was something beautiful at the end.

Take a look