Up until now, I had managed to avoid the dreaded blue plaster (band aid). It comes out when you cut yourself. When this happens, you tell Chef, and he’ll saunter off to locate one from the first aid kit. It’s blue, a dark blue to be precise. This means that it can be easily spotted in the event that it accidentally drops off and falls into the food.

But this also means that everyone knows you’ve been clumsy with the knife for that dreaded blue plaster is pretty hard to miss. Almost one third of the way through my course and I thought I had managed to escape from the dreaded blue curse. But I’ve been watching my fellow students slowly succumb one by one to this fate. So it was inevitable (sigh) that I would fall too, and the other day I finally met with my destiny. But the stupidity of it was I didn’t cut myself because I had been butchering a whole chicken, or from finely dicing an onion or the like. Oh no, nothing glamorous like that. I suffered my cut washing my vegetable peeler. Go figure.

Last week, I missed blogging about cookery school, day 10. We covered rice dishes: boiled rice, fried rice, pilaf and a fabulous vegetarian risotto with lots of veg. The most gratifying thing about covering this dish in class was learning what it takes to make the perfect risotto – one which delivers a wavy, spring-back-when-touched-with-the-back-of your-spoon type consistency.

Vegetarian risotto

This week was all about eggs. Just when I thought I knew how to make eggs, this lesson took me back to the drawing board. We covered hard boiled (oeuf dur), soft boiled (oeuf mollet), scrambled, fried, poached (yes, we cooked it in acidulated water (with vinegar) which helps the egg white to coagulate quicker and form a more compact shape), and of course, the humble omelette. The right way to cook an omelette is to stir it with a fork whilst simultaneously moving the omelette pan until it starts to set. This produces an evenly cooked omelette with no colour. Never, will I make omelettes in the same way again.

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