Kitchen 28 - Spatchcock poussin, plum ice cream and brown stock

I greatly enjoy making ice cream, I really do. One, because it is astonishingly easy and two because it tastes so much better and you know what's in it. (But I guess that goes for a lot of dishes.) This meringue based one with plums and a bit of orange in it was really delicious in the making, we will see what it tastes like when put together in a dish on Friday.

The savoury dish of the day was the spatchcock poussin - a tiny chicken. In order to spatchcock it - which I had never done before - you have to cut out the back bone and then secure legs and wings with two wooden skewers pushed through diagonally. Once that was done, it was only seasoned and then cooked in the oven for about 12 min and crisped under the grill for another couple of minutes. With it we served Sauce Robert - no idea who Robert was but he is a lucky guy because he has a sauce named after him. The sauce consists of some of the Espagnole we made yesterday, a very intensive wine-onion-reduction, mixed with mustard, chopped gherkins and parsley in the end. And this is what it looked like in the end.

But the actual challenge of the day was cooking short orders - in my case poached egg with Hollandaise sauce. Short order meaning you get tapped on the shoulder and then have 20 min to produce the dish and serve it. Well, I managed alright and on time. The only thing is that the Hollandaise could have been a bit thicker: