… turkeys and ducks and chickens and guinea fowl and geese ....
I am sitting up in my current adopted flat in London – keeping an eye on Mark and Matt who seem to have designs on abducting Miss Kimmie and sparking an international catnapping scandal – and looking directly out towards the square. At the:
Rain
Sheeting
Down
And I finally realised that it does not matter where you go in the UK and Ireland or when you go there. Take an umbrella.
And so it was when I arrived 3 months ago in Shanagarry, County Cork, Ireland. Not exactly sheeting, but the rain – sometimes proper rain, more often a misty sort of rain that seemed to hang in the air without falling – was with us on Day One, and stayed with us for the majority of the course. No wonder everything’s so freaking green.
The course was the 12 Week Certificate Course at Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, and I was there in my crispy chef’s whites and kind of discouraged because I had to have a special needs-style silver star on my name tag to show I’d never made bread ? I was getting ready for 12 weeks of techniques, constant training, assessment, and living in and on the property that produces the fruit, vegetables, eggs, pork and beef for the school. I had previously grown some herbs in pots which survived when my mum came round to water them, and get a bit nervous around animals larger than the average small domestic dog. Geese also scared me when they hissed and I was just glad there were no swans around.
Now amongst the many, many, many things I learnt on the course, the one I didn’t really think about was how to pass your spare time in the country. I don’t go out a huge amount in London anyway, it was going to be lovely and restful, back to nature, so on, so forth. Well, I can tell you, you go a little bit crazy, and create soap operas around the most random things. In our case it was the animals. The love affair between the enormous black rooster and the solitary gander, and the ensuing love triangles involving chickens, other ganders, geese, and possibly a duck. The potential involvement of one of the dogs. The ongoing trials and tribulations of the chicken with half a beak (“Brokebeak”, of course, although her involvement with any of the gay love triangles was never confirmed).
In between the enthralling instalments of what the Rooster Did Next we were normally in or around the kitchens and the gardens. Over the 12 weeks each of the 45 of us:
- cooked around 170 dishes each, including 40 rounds of bread;
- rolled out 2916 layers of puff pastry;
- sat through demonstrations and explanations for more than 900 dishes;
- filled up four ring-binders worth of recipes;
- boned and skinned and carved chicken and ducks and parts of lamb and filleted fish and scooped out lobsters and crabs and worked out how to get inside a cockle and what to do once you got there;
- developed a terrifying reliance on full-fat butter and cream (according to the teachers, each student eats a pound of butter a week); and, inevitably
- were eventually unable to fit into any of our old clothes.
You got used to burns. To having little blue Band-Aids on all the time. To hanging out in chef’s whites and forgetting how unflattering they were. To ditching jewellery, nail polish and make-up. To the idea that if you feel like pizza, you start making a dough and looked out some basil in the herb garden rather than calling Dominoes. You created a sourdough starter, gave it a name, and treated it like a small child (when people went away for the weekend, you had to organise a “feeder” as in “would you mind feeding
Adam/Craig/*insert name of starter* this weekend? He’s on Day 4”).
You eventually did things as second nature that seemed entirely foreign on the first day. Whilst I can’t claim ALL of these as mastered arts yet, at last count my top 5 unexpected new skills are:
1. Milking a cow, yes a real live cow
2. Plucking a guinea fowl, yes a real dead bird
3. Hiding botched dishes in the hen’s bucket (and excess pastry and left over garnishes and …)
4. Smoking meat in a disused fridge – although I’m still not convinced on the environmental OK-edness of this one. Smoking salmon in a biscuit tin
5. Capturing escaping lobsters
So I’m off to find a wandering cow, some gamebirds, and an escaping lobster in the streets of Bayswater. The boys haven’t authorised the use of their nice new fridges for smoking and I think the biscuit tin method may result in the firemen arriving. However I am being let loose on a bakery here in London next week so we’ll see how that goes.
And now that I’m finishing up – the sun’s out. So the rule for the UK and Ireland - always take an umbrella AND your sunglasses.
xxxc
PS – Finally, finally, some vital information for anyone thinking of 3 months at Ballymaloe:
- Answer to most random final exam question - YES a woodcock is trussed with its own beak (WHO knows something like that???)
- Most unusual standard kitchen implement you’ll need to get used to – the hacksaw
- Best temperature for popping popcorn on the Playroom back right hob – 5
- RyanAir, no matter how nicely you smile, will not let you sneak in 4 full ring binders of recipes on top of their PALTRY 15 kilo maximum, most of which is already taken up by your knives, whites, and Craig the sourdough starter.
______________________________________
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson
Friday, July 20, 2007
Turkey… yes the country - 20 July 2007 - London, UK
... re turkeys for your dining pleasure please see next email.
I know it has been a while between messages and I think it is probably time to get myself sorted on a blog instead of email... but I have only just mastered facebook. I hope everyone's well.
TURKEY - A FAMILY TRIP
Many, many, months ago (well, three) I threw myself onto the Heathrow express train from Paddington, settled in and later in the day was stepping off into Istanbul’s International Ataturk Airport. Interesting. I remember my old uni flatmate Kylie studying Ataturk for one of her history units. Obviously an important guy if he has an airport named after him. At this point I was chugging through Istanbul on my way to my parents and our flat for that week the European side of the Bosporus, and trying to work out what I did know about Turkey.
Not much.
Fortunately the phone rang with my parents demanding to know where I was. The taxi driver certainly wasn’t going to tell me so I muttered something about bridges and tulips and traffic jams and went “grrrsssh grrrssssh signal breaking up” – my normal way of breaking off a parental conversation where I was being asked questions with no reasonable answer. I mean, really, I was pretty certain I was in Istanbul. I didn’t have any information beyond that.
[Fast forward 5 days]
I LOVED ISTANBUL.
... top 5 city without a doubt. You can walk around on your own without being nervous, the food and drink were great, you could get ferries all along the Bosporus, the cab drivers were insane, the people were amazingly friendly and intensely nationalistic, and it
had that great mix of country-market-you-can-buy-everything and haggle for it too (people just keep asking me “How can I spend your money?”), and then the designer shops and glam hotels that were straight out of Mr and Mrs Smiths. I would move there in a flash very happily.
... it was all helped by the best guide in the world – Pinar. Particularly when I discovered that dad’s request in doing the *very gruelling* itinerary was to arrange the visits chronologically – so we kicked off with Byzantium, moved onto the Ottoman, and so on. It says a lot for my general knowledge that I only realised this last week.
... very suspiciously, I went along carpet shopping – and then wholeheartedly embraced the Turkish retail tradition of having to accept every time coffee is offered. The nice man offered, I said yes. I finished, he offered again, I said yes. I smiled, he smiled. They were thunderingly impressed by my grasp of Turkish – “az” - it seemed to mean I wanted a little sugar. It all went swimmingly, I had coffee and the parents concentrated on rugs.
... a memorable rollercoaster ride through the city with the Kurdish taxidriver. Never knew his name, every question he answered with “I am Kurd!”. Ok, good. Then he would randomly ask “You know Bin Ladin?”. Well, of him, of course….. Then “Bush… he is terrorist.” Dad fielded those ones.
... the end of my tan in the Turkish baths. I was lying on the big hot stone platform and Helga (or whatever the Turkish equivalent is) came stomping over with flesh shaking like there was a menagerie of small animals in there trying to escape and wearing a pair
of black knickers and that was it. I was a little scared and so I just lay whimpering quietly as she scrubbed away at my tan and briskly slapped me each time she wanted me to roll over. I ended up squeaky clean and significantly paler and am still a little
traumatised.
GRAND AND MAGNIFICENT TRAVELLING
... the family headed off to do a guided tour from Ankara back to Istanbul - the Grand Turkey Tour. WithMagnificent Travel & Tourism. If I ever have a business I want it to be grand and magnificent too (I was a little disappointed there was no “unique” or
“super-exceptional” tours on offer at the time) so I thought this was a good sign of Mr Nihat’s belief in his team.
... the Mausoleum of Ataturk (Ankara), he of the international airport and generally-recognised founder of modern Turkey. He reformed the alphabet, the system of names, got on with the roads, recognized women’s rights, and in theory at least established Turkey as a secular society. Now this last seems to be getting a real bashing at the moment but all in all a mammoth job. I was quietly impressed and pleased for him that his picture seemed to be on every poster, tea towel and flag in Turkey.
... [Just as an interesting aside that probably belongs in the next email – a pretty unlikely and certainly unsubstantiated but fun story about the Turks (the Ottomans in those days) and the croissant – the summer of 1683 and the city of Vienna is under siege. The Ottoman Empire has asked that the Hapsburg city to surrender, and the leaders have told the Turks to bugger off home. The Turks are, as you would expect, unhappy and set about laying siege to the city. One way they planned to infiltrate the city was
to set off explosions underneath the city walls – and a plan they began to implement by digging tunnels to set the explosions in. Unfortunately for them, a baker, working in his basement during the siege, heard the noise of the digging, alerted the authorities, and thus foiled the evil plan. The baker, being something of a marketing genius, and not one to miss an opportunity, created a pastry in the shape of a crescent, the symbol of the Ottoman empire. It became a local traditional to serve this crescent-shaped delight with coffee, and a century later, when the Viennese princess Marie Antoinette married the French King Louis XVI, she insisted that the bakers in Paris learn how to make it. Over the years, the French bakers added butter and yeast to the mix (as they tend to do with most things), and the croissant (meaning 'crescent') as we know it was born.]
... anyway, back to Turkey and the Evans Road Trip.
... finally got up in a hot air balloon (having been held back by mist first in Kenya and then again in Cappadocia one morning) – I was determined to get up the next morning – and it was great. Mum even went up although she stayed squarely in the middle of the basket at all times.
.... Capadoccia and the underground cities, the fairy chimneys, and many, many, many rock chapels.
... I met the Australian bikers in Cappadocia too. A huge hairy bearded man came to my aid when trying to access the local wifi network. It transpired he was from Queanbeyan (of course) and on a bike tour with about 30 other Australian bikers. He was also writing a trip journal for a motorcycle magazine back home and was travelling with the magazine’s resident teddy bear as travel and photo muse (and making friends with other Turkish stuffed animals – people would apparently produce their own teddy or piglet or whatnot so that could be photographed with BikerBear).
... the Whirling Dervishes. I’d seen the Sudanese version of this in Khartoum, I was really interested to see what they would be like in Konya. Very formal, almost like a concert, and without the Sudanese feeling of a community event, lots of chatter, a healthy marketplace going next door. And I got in trouble for wanting to take a picture.
... I saw – I kid you not - the antique box which supposedly contains Mohammed's beard. Apparently these kind of relics were brought back to Turkey from the Middle East by Ottoman Sultans to preserve them from fundamentalist Islamic sects who were out to destroy the “idolatrous” Mohammed relics. I read that the museum also has a reliquary, which supposedly houses one of Mohammed's teeth. The poor man must be spread all over the place.
... hitting the Mediterranean coast was beautiful. There were lots of truly spectacular ruins along the way and I have the photos, but really, I was ready for out of that bus and onto the foreshore. Not for long. Hell, we had an itinerary and a timetable to stick to. Perge. Aspendos. Manavgat... an afternoon at the travertine pools at Pamukkale – with hundreds of determined tourists walking up the salt pools in their bare feet. Aphrodisias. Ephesus. Pergamum. The old medical centre at Asclepion. Stopped in at Troy. The horse was long gone.
"THOSE HEROES THAT SHED THEIR BLOOD AND LOST THEIR LIVES... YOU ARE NOW LYING IN THE SOIL OF A FRIENDLY COUNTRY..."
But the most amazing sites were on the last day – and that was our visit over the Dardanelles to Gallipoli. We were there just a few days before Anzac Day, so Lone Pine and Anzac Cove were being set up with hundreds of rows of seating for the ceremonies. But obviously people just come and go on the day, as there were very few other visitors when we were there. We did bump into a couple of lovely guys from the Australian Federal Police who were along to make sure everything was going to run smoothly that week, and who offered advice on what to see – “The Nek? Why would you want to go there? If I was you, mate, if you want to see a bunker, your best bet is to go along the road towards the New Zealand Memorial and just before it on the right, …. “ and so on. Our local guide was a bit taken aback.
And the cemeteries were unbelievably moving. Just row on row of stone plaques, looking out to sea, or sitting up on ridges, it was the only indication in such a peaceful place that there had ever been a war. I wasn’t sure what it would be like on Anzac Day, with the roads clogged and busloads of people trying to get in and out, and decided I’d probably have hated it. If you’re going to go, I say go when it’s quiet.
[Note - Gallipoli is also home to my prize of “Best Interactive Information Centre” for Turkey, teeny little flashing lights and everything.]
Then back to Istanbul, back to Ataturk’s airport, and back to London. For less than a day and then I was off again, to learn about turkey the bird, and how to make those pastries shaped like half the Turkish flag (and lots more).
xxc
__________________________
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson
I know it has been a while between messages and I think it is probably time to get myself sorted on a blog instead of email... but I have only just mastered facebook. I hope everyone's well.
TURKEY - A FAMILY TRIP
Many, many, months ago (well, three) I threw myself onto the Heathrow express train from Paddington, settled in and later in the day was stepping off into Istanbul’s International Ataturk Airport. Interesting. I remember my old uni flatmate Kylie studying Ataturk for one of her history units. Obviously an important guy if he has an airport named after him. At this point I was chugging through Istanbul on my way to my parents and our flat for that week the European side of the Bosporus, and trying to work out what I did know about Turkey.
Not much.
Fortunately the phone rang with my parents demanding to know where I was. The taxi driver certainly wasn’t going to tell me so I muttered something about bridges and tulips and traffic jams and went “grrrsssh grrrssssh signal breaking up” – my normal way of breaking off a parental conversation where I was being asked questions with no reasonable answer. I mean, really, I was pretty certain I was in Istanbul. I didn’t have any information beyond that.
[Fast forward 5 days]
I LOVED ISTANBUL.
... top 5 city without a doubt. You can walk around on your own without being nervous, the food and drink were great, you could get ferries all along the Bosporus, the cab drivers were insane, the people were amazingly friendly and intensely nationalistic, and it
had that great mix of country-market-you-can-buy-everything and haggle for it too (people just keep asking me “How can I spend your money?”), and then the designer shops and glam hotels that were straight out of Mr and Mrs Smiths. I would move there in a flash very happily.
... it was all helped by the best guide in the world – Pinar. Particularly when I discovered that dad’s request in doing the *very gruelling* itinerary was to arrange the visits chronologically – so we kicked off with Byzantium, moved onto the Ottoman, and so on. It says a lot for my general knowledge that I only realised this last week.
... very suspiciously, I went along carpet shopping – and then wholeheartedly embraced the Turkish retail tradition of having to accept every time coffee is offered. The nice man offered, I said yes. I finished, he offered again, I said yes. I smiled, he smiled. They were thunderingly impressed by my grasp of Turkish – “az” - it seemed to mean I wanted a little sugar. It all went swimmingly, I had coffee and the parents concentrated on rugs.
... a memorable rollercoaster ride through the city with the Kurdish taxidriver. Never knew his name, every question he answered with “I am Kurd!”. Ok, good. Then he would randomly ask “You know Bin Ladin?”. Well, of him, of course….. Then “Bush… he is terrorist.” Dad fielded those ones.
... the end of my tan in the Turkish baths. I was lying on the big hot stone platform and Helga (or whatever the Turkish equivalent is) came stomping over with flesh shaking like there was a menagerie of small animals in there trying to escape and wearing a pair
of black knickers and that was it. I was a little scared and so I just lay whimpering quietly as she scrubbed away at my tan and briskly slapped me each time she wanted me to roll over. I ended up squeaky clean and significantly paler and am still a little
traumatised.
GRAND AND MAGNIFICENT TRAVELLING
... the family headed off to do a guided tour from Ankara back to Istanbul - the Grand Turkey Tour. WithMagnificent Travel & Tourism. If I ever have a business I want it to be grand and magnificent too (I was a little disappointed there was no “unique” or
“super-exceptional” tours on offer at the time) so I thought this was a good sign of Mr Nihat’s belief in his team.
... the Mausoleum of Ataturk (Ankara), he of the international airport and generally-recognised founder of modern Turkey. He reformed the alphabet, the system of names, got on with the roads, recognized women’s rights, and in theory at least established Turkey as a secular society. Now this last seems to be getting a real bashing at the moment but all in all a mammoth job. I was quietly impressed and pleased for him that his picture seemed to be on every poster, tea towel and flag in Turkey.
... [Just as an interesting aside that probably belongs in the next email – a pretty unlikely and certainly unsubstantiated but fun story about the Turks (the Ottomans in those days) and the croissant – the summer of 1683 and the city of Vienna is under siege. The Ottoman Empire has asked that the Hapsburg city to surrender, and the leaders have told the Turks to bugger off home. The Turks are, as you would expect, unhappy and set about laying siege to the city. One way they planned to infiltrate the city was
to set off explosions underneath the city walls – and a plan they began to implement by digging tunnels to set the explosions in. Unfortunately for them, a baker, working in his basement during the siege, heard the noise of the digging, alerted the authorities, and thus foiled the evil plan. The baker, being something of a marketing genius, and not one to miss an opportunity, created a pastry in the shape of a crescent, the symbol of the Ottoman empire. It became a local traditional to serve this crescent-shaped delight with coffee, and a century later, when the Viennese princess Marie Antoinette married the French King Louis XVI, she insisted that the bakers in Paris learn how to make it. Over the years, the French bakers added butter and yeast to the mix (as they tend to do with most things), and the croissant (meaning 'crescent') as we know it was born.]
... anyway, back to Turkey and the Evans Road Trip.
... finally got up in a hot air balloon (having been held back by mist first in Kenya and then again in Cappadocia one morning) – I was determined to get up the next morning – and it was great. Mum even went up although she stayed squarely in the middle of the basket at all times.
.... Capadoccia and the underground cities, the fairy chimneys, and many, many, many rock chapels.
... I met the Australian bikers in Cappadocia too. A huge hairy bearded man came to my aid when trying to access the local wifi network. It transpired he was from Queanbeyan (of course) and on a bike tour with about 30 other Australian bikers. He was also writing a trip journal for a motorcycle magazine back home and was travelling with the magazine’s resident teddy bear as travel and photo muse (and making friends with other Turkish stuffed animals – people would apparently produce their own teddy or piglet or whatnot so that could be photographed with BikerBear).
... the Whirling Dervishes. I’d seen the Sudanese version of this in Khartoum, I was really interested to see what they would be like in Konya. Very formal, almost like a concert, and without the Sudanese feeling of a community event, lots of chatter, a healthy marketplace going next door. And I got in trouble for wanting to take a picture.
... I saw – I kid you not - the antique box which supposedly contains Mohammed's beard. Apparently these kind of relics were brought back to Turkey from the Middle East by Ottoman Sultans to preserve them from fundamentalist Islamic sects who were out to destroy the “idolatrous” Mohammed relics. I read that the museum also has a reliquary, which supposedly houses one of Mohammed's teeth. The poor man must be spread all over the place.
... hitting the Mediterranean coast was beautiful. There were lots of truly spectacular ruins along the way and I have the photos, but really, I was ready for out of that bus and onto the foreshore. Not for long. Hell, we had an itinerary and a timetable to stick to. Perge. Aspendos. Manavgat... an afternoon at the travertine pools at Pamukkale – with hundreds of determined tourists walking up the salt pools in their bare feet. Aphrodisias. Ephesus. Pergamum. The old medical centre at Asclepion. Stopped in at Troy. The horse was long gone.
"THOSE HEROES THAT SHED THEIR BLOOD AND LOST THEIR LIVES... YOU ARE NOW LYING IN THE SOIL OF A FRIENDLY COUNTRY..."
But the most amazing sites were on the last day – and that was our visit over the Dardanelles to Gallipoli. We were there just a few days before Anzac Day, so Lone Pine and Anzac Cove were being set up with hundreds of rows of seating for the ceremonies. But obviously people just come and go on the day, as there were very few other visitors when we were there. We did bump into a couple of lovely guys from the Australian Federal Police who were along to make sure everything was going to run smoothly that week, and who offered advice on what to see – “The Nek? Why would you want to go there? If I was you, mate, if you want to see a bunker, your best bet is to go along the road towards the New Zealand Memorial and just before it on the right, …. “ and so on. Our local guide was a bit taken aback.
And the cemeteries were unbelievably moving. Just row on row of stone plaques, looking out to sea, or sitting up on ridges, it was the only indication in such a peaceful place that there had ever been a war. I wasn’t sure what it would be like on Anzac Day, with the roads clogged and busloads of people trying to get in and out, and decided I’d probably have hated it. If you’re going to go, I say go when it’s quiet.
[Note - Gallipoli is also home to my prize of “Best Interactive Information Centre” for Turkey, teeny little flashing lights and everything.]
Then back to Istanbul, back to Ataturk’s airport, and back to London. For less than a day and then I was off again, to learn about turkey the bird, and how to make those pastries shaped like half the Turkish flag (and lots more).
xxc
__________________________
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson
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