This is going to be my foodie year!

Last year was not a good foodie year for me, there was nothing like enough time to get to grips with food for the 21st century.  Oddly enough the older I get, the more I fall in love with the classics of food.   

For those of you who ever went to catering college in the good old days in the 70’s, you will remember tiresome college days when we wondered what it was all about, folding handmade puff pastry and scraping bones for stock.  It’s only now that I can look back on those days and really truly honestly want to revisit those classics - classics like demi glace and rafts made of egg white to clarify stocks.  

Who remembers the bavarois?  It is my plan, by the end of this month to have made a bavarois and to have also made the ultimate bavarois ‘the Riz Empress’.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  This triumph of a dessert was a confection of bavarios and milk rice pudding dotted with Glaze Cherries and shards of angelica.  Who remembers angelica?  To be honest I’m past caring about the snob factor of some many of those ingredients, it’s a wonderful dessert and we should celebrate it more.

If any of you get a chance take some time to watch Julie and Julia.  It’s a wonderful look at food after the war.  Julia Child – the Elizabeth David of American food writing – is disarmingly scatty and in her simple way makes French Cuisine all the more accessible.

Promise yourself you’ll cook something gorgeous this year, I know I will be!