things bulk cookery won't teach you

A handful of LACs and AC/Ws got to spend the week at Hamilton TAFE, brushing up on skills that may potentially be shown off as part of a Salon Culinaire competition. Before we even make it that far though, we had some plates casually judged by a Flight Sergeant and a Sergeant, and we're going to have an on-base cookoff of sorts next month, presenting the same or similar dishes again.

On one hand, it was great to be back in a school environment, learning things in a dedicated education zone, as opposed to sucking all the knowledge that you can while you're on the job and treading water. On the other hand, it actually made me miss working in proper restaurants, where you get the thrill of the chase... that rush of service, and the simple pride from putting out plates of individually presented dishes. We get to do a bit of that when functions are on, and there's a little more freedom (and budget) to play with. I'm seriously considering getting an outside hospo job once I move off base, just to stay in touch with the real world. Even if it's only serving food, it's good to be in a slightly less homogenous working atmosphere.

Fortunately, unlike Chisholm where we couldn't take photos of our work because we weren't allowed to take valuables such as phones and cameras to TAFE, I had my camera along for the ride. Unfortunately, I was mostly busy cooking or helping to plate up dishes in our four-person team, so our tutor had to take photos for us, and I didn't go into much detail over how to use my camera properly. Some pictures are better than none at all, I figure!



Scallop and blue eyed cod boudin blanc served on baby spinach with a seafood reduction and balsamic dressing. I didn't realise that there was another way to have sausage on the menu without all the bad connotations that the mere word 'sausage' brings. I think we all got sick of the taste of this by the end of the week, it's basically white fishy mush with a bit of dill, cream and Pernod that's gone through enough steps to look like a sausage. About the only thing it's got going for it is that it's not your typical snag made with random intestine or questionable skin/contents! To me, a dish like this just doesn't scream anything amazing. Actually, it seems like the yuppie food equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb.



Roulade of Atlantic salmon with shiitake mushrooms and beurre rouge on a bed of rocket. This was actually quite tasty in the end, after a few modifications we made to the original idea. Version one involved rolling the salmon fillet around a farce, which was some of the boudin blanc mix from above. We thought that diners should get something more surprising (read: different to the first course) when they got to the centre of the roulade, so a bit of baby spinach was rolled into the middle for contrasting colour, texture, and flavour. The beurre rouge looked dramatic on the plate (you can't really tell from the photos), and tasted fantastic as well.



Duck breast filled with apple and raisins on buttered zucchini noodles and carrot confit. This was by far my favourite dish that we made. I'm guessing that the adjective 'stuffed' is another one of those clumsy menu words, even though we all know what it is and what it means. Duck is always something special in my culinary world, and this is probably just a result of me being psychologically tuned to know that duck doesn't come into one's life very often, so when it does, one must definitely take time to appreciate it. Even the zucchini and carrot were tasty, and they were just there to boost the duck!



Braised ox-tail wrapped in crepinette on soft polenta and petit legumes. I've been a fan of ox-tail ever since being brought up on my Dad's ox-tail soup, which seldom failed to make me feel better whenever I had it. Seeing how it all came together in the crepinette was interesting too, as I've only ever seen crepinette used on a Marco Pierre White video, if I recall correctly. So I thought it was crazy out-there fancy French stuff, and it probably is, but now that I've seen it done and tasted the results, it's actually simpler than it looks. I've never loved turning vegetables, and don't see the point in turning them, no matter how cute they look... just think of the wastage! This dish has to win the quiet achiever award... it seems quite unassuming, but is actually packed with flavour. Slow cooking does indeed have its merits.



The dessert plate was actually a trio of vanilla bean pannacotta, mini corella pear tart, and milk chocolate 'millefeuille' with honeycomb cream, but we were a bit rushed getting it out, and the camera was somewhat forgotten by then. I think the coolest thing about desserts was seeing honeycomb get made (Mister Hart, what a mess!). We spent most of a day playing with chocolate and made moulded chocolates, as well as filled chocolates. The above is a shot of my chocolate sculpture, made from simple shapes and the assistance of some rings and silicone/rubber 'noodles' used as moulds. I think it looks sort of like an obscure awards ceremony trophy. You can't really tell, but there's a heck of a lot of chocolate there - the base is about 2.5cm thick with a 15cm diameter, and the whole thing stands around 25cm high. Those curvy bits are around 2cm thick, but the balls are more like Easter egg thickness. Consider it an award for Most Amount Of Chocolate Eaten In A Single Week Without Being Physically Ill!

We'll see if it makes it through the weekend. :)

I love the smell of career limiting moves in the morning

Say you're wanting to write a book about your experiences in the military.

You come across an award whose prize includes $10,000 cash, guaranteed publication, royalties on book sales and editorial support to develop the proposal into a finished manuscript.

All you need to do is submit a proposal comprising a one-page description of the work, a table of contents, an author bio, a comment on target readership and two sample chapters. An indication of proposed word length should be given (40K min and 90K max) - final word length is subject to negotiation with the publisher.

In the event that you win, do you:
a) conjure an untraceable pen name and cackle with glee each night after work whilst tapping away at a no-holds-barred account of aforementioned military experiences
b) write conservatively under your real name and hope that no one in the military that reads you will find you
c) write what you want under your real name, and if the military finds out, include the aftermath in an added chapter to the book
d) take the $10K, change your name, go AWOL overseas, and write whatever you damn well please

on patisserie

too many sweets and
too many syllables to
know where to begin



(More news at eleven.)

jousting sticks!

Times like this, it's a good thing I live on base. That means there's a cubic metre limit to how much I can own whilst still being able to make a path to my bed and desk, as well as open the doors to my wardrobe. There's also a limit to how much wall space I can take up with furniture shoved against the sides of my room, considering one length has my desk and wardrobe, the other side has a fixed wall heater, and the other two walls have a window, above-bed light, and a full length mirror.

I've just discovered the holy grail of intranets. It's the public For Sale folder for the base. Where every man and his dog can buy and sell from people they may or may not know and trust - other RAAFies and APS, or whoever else is cleared enough to access the Defence Restricted Network. With the amount of people posting, deploying, buying, renting, upgrading, etc. there seems to be no end to the amount of stuff people are trying to get rid of. Oh yeah, that's the other thing... the classic sign that you've got too much disposable income is when you've suddenly changed your circumstances and it's time to liquidate your newfound assets at a crazy price.

So what am I currently interested in on RAAFbay? A Bontempi organ.


I haven't played in years, unless you count a rather drunken dabble in the back of Madame Brussels last year or maybe the year before... I don't even know if I have room on any of my walls for an organ! But this guy's moving house, and I'm kind of doing him a favour, and I get to have a musical instrument in my life again (they're like pets and plants really, I miss them until I realise that they require more effort than I think). Oh, and I can finally annoy my noisy neighbours with MY bad taste! Everybody wins.

I think Project Pimp My Room is going to be improved dramatically by the joys of hand-me-downs that have been subsidised by other people's impulse purchases and throwaway wages! I'm sure the For Sale section will also help once I make it off base, what with the rent ads, furniture, whitegoods and even vehicles I've seen so far. It's like an incredibly parochial Trading Post, but for once, I'm automatically part of the exclusive shopper list.

things corporals will forward via email

The media (accidentally?) missed this one!

The troops overseas would like you to send it to everybody you know.



Don't know whether you heard about this but Denzel Washington and his family visited the troops at Brook Army Medical Center, in San Antonio, Texas (BAMC) the other day. This is where soldiers who have been evacuated from Germany come to be hospitalized in the United States, especially burn victims. There are some buildings there called Fisher Houses. The Fisher
House is a hotel where soldiers' families can stay, for little or no charge, while their soldier is staying on base, but as you can imagine, they are almost filled most of the time.



While Denzel Washington was visiting BAMC, they gave him a tour of one of the Fisher Houses. He asked how much one of them would cost to build. He took his cheque book out and wrote a cheque for the full amount right there on the spot. The soldiers overseas were amazed to hear this story and want to get the word out to the American public, because it warmed their hearts to hear it.





The question is - why do:
Britney Spears,
Madonna,
Tom Cruise
and other Hollywood fluff
make front page news with their ridiculous antics and Denzel Washington's charity doesn't even make page 3 in the Metro section of any newspaper except the local newspaper in San Antonio?





This needs as wide a distribution as we can create... share it!

---

According to Wikipedia, Washington made a 'sizable donation' to the Fisher Houses, so it seems that this story is mostly, if not completely true. I sometimes wonder how far information can travel via the virtual rabbit warren that is military forwarded email. I'm not sure where half the games, jokes, pictures, surveys and trivia come from, seeing as most 'fun' sites are blocked on the Defence computers, so how would people find any of this stuff to be able to send it through a work computer in the first place? Obviously there must be connections to and from the outside, somewhere along the line.

Sure, it just might be my paranoia that Big Brother is sifting through every joke email that goes against our basic equity and diversity training, recording the amount of times particular messages get forwarded around the network. Heck, if I was in charge and I wanted to catch people in the act, all I'd have to do is collect a week's worth of junk mail and look through the headers to see who's been forwarding to whom. Even if stuff is particularly funny, I just practice good netiquette and save other people's inboxes from the junk that will no less get forwarded to them from someone else if I choose not to.

It's frustrating sometimes to take a couple days away from the computer and have to go through piles of irrelevant email from well-meaning friends posted all over the nation, as well as the odd message from the Secretary of Defence. I haven't had to deal with this many dodgy jokes since I was at uni, and that was back in the nineties when joke emails were actually all the rage (well, there was no Facebook yet, what can I say). What's wrong with the odd bit of actual correspondence from old recruit friends? Do people really count themselves as your friend when they forward along a schmaltzy powerpoint presentation telling the moral about the cookies at the airport? Someone actually asked me the other day if I was getting their emails, because I hadn't seen them in a while, and hadn't responded to any of their forwards! I just don't have the heart to tell people that when they send me a 'real' email, I'll consider taking the time out to reply personally. Or perhaps I should start replying personally to each forward I receive, in an attempt to find out what's really going on with the lives of my military cohorts.

Maybe I'm just jealous of the fact that so many people I know seem to have all the time in the world to read and forward such blatantly non-work-related email. I mean, the above story is a quite effective warm and fuzzy one, so I suppose ten points go to the corporal for getting sucked in enough to pass that one on (it is interesting what kind of spin US as well as Australian media is willing to put on celebrity, as opposed to military... and as for celebrity military, well look out!). I find that by the time I've been at work for nine hours, I simply can't be arsed reading, let alone forwarding, any junk mail, no matter what the quality is. Technically we get paid 24/7 to serve the country, so I'm bitching about people wasting company time while I'm still on company time, but that's not the point. Maybe I should start blogging from the kitchen again!