1st course - Pea soup with creme fraiche and horse radish - Alex
2nd course - Potato and pea samosas - Marcin
3rd course - Pizza - Jesper
4th course - Rocket, radish and asparagus salad - Eilidh
5th course - Lime and lemon mousse with kiwi - Shruti
As we ate each course, the cook was asked to explain what they had made and how. Both Alex and Marcin used peas but Marcin went the extra mile and bought whole peas that he then shelled versus Alex who used frozen ones.
If you consider that whole peas arent available all year round, right there is a little lesson in eating seasonally.
Jesper who had the main course had by far the most questions. All week I got clarifications like “is using yeast cooking from scratch?” and many times I was unsure too. His first plan of doing Danish meatballs and potatoes had to be changed because we had a vegetarian person. Once he decided To make pizza he had to get find a good recipe for the base. For that he turned to Martina, our italian food expert who gave him her family recipe.
Another little lesson in eating traditionally and learning what your grandmother knows about food.
Jesper ended up using some salami which broke the rules of cooking from scratch. He said that it was “just meat” and that he did not want to go to the butcher.
Would he have been able to buy meat and cook it if he had to go to the butcher and select a cut from looking at the animal?
The salad course which probably seemed the simplest was all about eating what is in season - rocket, radishes and asparagus.
For the dessert, Eilidh and I discussed a great deal if using flour was in the rules. I agreed that it is greatly processed. However it contains no additives and secondly, wheat in its seed form is not consumable by humans. It needs to be converted to flour if we are to eat it.
Yet for arguments sake I decided not to use flour. The dessert and meal on the whole ended up using double cream and creme fraiche and cheese. One can argue that these are processed states of milk.
So how much processing is too much processing?
