Ballymaloe Cookery School — County Cork, Ireland

I am in cooking school for 5 weeks. I am living and learning at Ballymaloe Cookery School which is an organic farm in southeast Ireland teaching farm-to-table and sustainable cooking from French, Italian, Spanish, Asian, South American, North African and too many other recipe traditions to name.

Ballymaloe House was one of the early purveyors of the slow food/fresh food movements in the 1960s. Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and Maggie Beer in South Australia are contemporaries of Myrtle Allen’s Ballymaloe approach to food.

While I am here, I am also feeding the hens, fermenting kefir, jointing fowl, and filleting fish. When I take a walk in the venings after class, I also stop by the pigs and sneak them apples that have fallen from the tress and harvest fresh berries on my way home.

Everyday we are introduced to at least a dozen recipes that always include a new type of bread, usually a jam, jelly, or sauce/salsa, a couple of meat/poultry dishes, and multiple desserts.

I also now know how to filet a fish and joint a chicken (jointing a duck is next week’s task).

We had a day focused solely on brunch – my favourite meal. I didn’t know classic French omelettes (with mushroom a la cremé ) were such a force to be reckoned with.

We are at least 45 minutes by car from the closest city, so my afternoon entertainment is basically wandering around the local villages and visiting our fruit and veggie patches.

We also have a fermenting shed where I am getting into making water kefir, kombucha, kimchi, and other fermented treats.

Everyday has been an adventure I didn’t see coming. We forage the farm for our salads every night, I am only drinking raw milk, and all of our water comes from wells.

There are 66 of us from from all over the world – our ages range from late teens to early 70s. There is large contingent of gap year students, several recent university graduates, mid-career folks, and beyond. Most surprising for me are the ‘groups of two’ that are here: two Irish brothers 18 & 20 years old, Scottish cousins, a German brother and sister, a mother and son from Victoria, a father and son from the Midlands, UK, an American aunt and her niece, and two best friends from the US.

Meanwhile, Norbie at home catching some zzzzzs in front of the fire . . .