Michelin Star Cookery Experience

Yesterday I attended the Michelin Star Cookery Experience at The Kitchen in Parsons Green.

 

My review for the Delicious. Magazine website has now been published!

 

We were given the option to bring the food we’d prepared home and I thought Steve would like to try the Stuffed Sea Bass and Tarte Tatin that I’d made. So when I got home I just popped the fish straight in the oven, as it was packaged in an ovenproof container.

 

 

The fish was stuffed with red onion, tomato and herbs, then topped with slices of lemon. After 20 minutes in the oven it was perfectly cooked. They suggested serving the fish with brown rice and luckily I had some leftover in the fridge so I cooked it with some mushrooms, peppers, peas and home-grown chives.

 

The sun was still out, so we ate our dinner in the breeze house. The fish was delicious and a perfect Summer dish. I told Steve it should be completely bone free as we had to remove the backbone, but there were still a few stray bones! He was still impressed though and declared he now liked sea bass.

 

 

We’d also put our Tarte Tatins in an ovenproof container. I popped this in the oven as soon as the fish came out and reduced the temperature. It took a bit longer than the time suggested for the pastry to become golden brown. I think the temperature gauge on our gas oven lies.

 

 

 

But when it eventually was ready, it looked delicious. We had to leave it to rest for about 5 minutes, to allow the apples to absorb the caramel. When I did turn it out onto a plate, a lot of the caramel was still stuck in the cooking container and had set. So Steve popped it in the microwave to melt and then drizzled it over the apples.

 

We ate it with vanilla ice cream and it was very nice, except Steve thought the caramel tasted a little bitter (I thought it was perfect) and we both thought the apples were a bit tart (they were Granny Smiths). The pastry was perfectly cooked though.

 

 

 

Overall, it was a lovely meal and I learned a lot in the cookery class.

Work experience at Delicious Magazine Website

 

Last week I had the pleasure of working on the Delicious Magazine website. I got to upload recipes from past issues of the magazine and this involved obtaining copy from InDesign files, re-sizing images using Photoshop and then uploading recipes using their bespoke CMS (content management system). I’d already spent a couple of weeks working on the new Tesco Real Food website so I had some idea of how to use CMS, but the Delicious one was fully working and much easier to use.

 

I really enjoyed writing the standfirsts (line of text after the headline that gives more information about the article)for the recipes as it allowed some creativity, but I had to keep in mind to use certain key words that would be picked up in search engines. I got praised for my standfirsts so I was really chuffed!

 

I got to work very closely with Debra the web editor and she showed me how the website worked and introduced me to Google analytics, which I will look into using for my own blog.

It was an absolutely brilliant experience and the people were so lovely I wish I could have stayed longer! But I have been given the opportunity to attend some cookery classes in the future in return for reviewing them, so I’m really looking forward to that.

 

I was also given the April issue of the magazine and there are loads of great recipes that I want to try. French macaroons/macarons (the kind made with almonds and not coconut) are the new cupcakes, so I’m going to give them a go very soon as I have loads of egg whites stashed in my freezer.

 

When I was uploading the recipes onto the website I had to classify recipes according to whether they were low calorie, low fat etc. for the metadata:

• low calorie = less than 400 calories
• low fat = less than 10g
• low carbs = less than 10g
• low salt = less than 0.5g

It made me more aware of what is considered healthy and since Steve is on a bit of a health kick at the moment, I will be trying out all the healthy recipes from the magazine – so watch this space!