A day at Belle Isle

Monday, January 21, 2008
Bangor

There’s nothing like an entire day of concentrating in the kitchen to clear one’s mind – I arrived home Saturday night after my day in the Belle Isle Cookery School kitchen tired and content. Liz Moore is a wonderful cooking teacher, clear and direct, with just enough detail to ease your way but not so much that you’re overwhelmed. We made several delicious things including cabbage leaves stuffed with lamb, seed bread, lemon posset, and frangipane tartlets, assisted by the kitchen help who whisked away our dirty dishes and brought out the ingredients for whatever we were cooking already measured – it was heaven. We ate the meal we had cooked – although Liz had made the side dishes herself – at around 3 pm.

It’s always a little nerve wracking in the beginning – there you are with 10 perfect strangers, knowing you’re going to spend the day with them. But things quickly eased as we got busy. There were two married couples, Iseult and Paddy, and Brenda and Alan – Paddy didn’t know until he arrived what he was going to be doing for the day – a couple of sisters, Juliet and Karen, with their mother Barbara, another mother and daughter, Patricia and Una, another woman on her own, Hilary, and myself, the only foreigner. Hilary and I teamed up and did quite well I think – plus she was fast and very tidy which I really appreciated. I wish I could go once a week to all the classes they offer – I have a lot of theoretical food knowledge but practical experience with a real chef is so fun. I even learned how to sharpen a knife properly for the first time in my life.

County Down to County Fermanagh

Friday, January 18, 2008
Belle Isle, Lisbellaw, Co. Fermanagh

The wind and rain are howling outside but I am snug in my courtyard cottage at Belle Isle, a country castle on an island near Enniskillen, full of my simple but delicious supper of salad, cold meats and cheese, fruit, and some eggs. I left Bangor at lunchtime, remembering to wave at Reed and Walt who were on the deck at home to see me off on the train to Belfast, where I got the bus for a 2 hr ride to Lisbellaw, where Fiona Plunket, the estate’s p.r. manager whose husband is the land agent, picked me up. Tomorrow I’ll participate in one of the cookery school’s day courses with chef Liz Moore. This would be a romantic destination for a couple but I am enjoying my solitude for this little bit of time, knowing that I’ll be back with the boys tomorrow night as usual.

The countryside is a crazy quilt of every shade of green, even in January, small pastures and fields of random shapes marked off by thick hedges and sometimes, rock walls. The countryside seems unspoilt to my American eyes – after leaving the environs of Belfast it was one bucolic farm scene after another, some grand country houses on hills overlooking their grassy grounds, some more modest gray clad boxes with slate roofs surrounded by stone or newer metal outbuildings, even a few whitewashed thatched cottages tucked away, slowly being overtaken by hedges and brambles. While in Bangor some of the houses facing the sea have been painted in cheerful pastel colors, the tradition in these parts looks to be gray or white buildings, either with the stone exposed or more usually, clad in concrete or plaster. Even the new houses are built in the shape and style of the old ones, so it’s hard to see where new development has happened, especially here where the creeping damp mossy greenness quickly takes the gloss off fresh stone.