The Zilte undertaking

I had sea bass before I made this recipe, but one of the issues I had with it was the fact that I undercooked it last time I made a dish with it. Hopefully it will be a great dish this time around.  The first step is to fill the fish with herbs, garlic and citrus.  After that you add a mixture of salt and egg whites to it and cook it at 200°C for 20 minutes.  You also make a vinaigrette of tomato, basil, puffed garlic, zucchini, olives and capers.  Over that you pour a mixture of mussels and the remaining jus together with some sour cream.  Finally, you also have to make a side dish of puffed paprika with some rice and chickpeas.  The end result looks like this:  This is by far one of the most enjoyable fish dishes I had in a long time. The fish is beautifully tender and the vinaigrette and mussels add to it an enjoyable acidity. Next to it there is the puffed paprika and basil together with the rice that supplements the dish with grain and that togeth...

Legumes isn't exactly what I know to be exciting food. Simple beans never excited me all that much. That being said I was still excited to make this dish for another reason, which is the usage of pork belly. Rarely have I cooked it, but it is easily one of the fattiest and tastiest parts of the porc.  One of the first things you have to do is to marinate the pork belly for 24 hours in salt, pepper, coriander, thyme and Leary.  After baking the pork for 1.5 hours on low heat you have to coat it with a solution. Below you can see a picture of the solution I made for it.  After it has been coated with the solution the remainder of it has mixed with coriander, dashi-vinegar, dried peppers, oil, chicken stock and chives. Here's the result after everything has been mixed.   You also have to create a salad with beans and peas, which is where the name of the dish comes from. Here's what mine looked like:  I also added some algae and soba noodles to the side.  Combi...

I must make the confession that I have never cut an artichoke before, even though I've definitely eaten it before. The way I used to make it is by making a vinaigrette, peeling off the leaves and sipping the sauce with the leaves before I ended with eating the core. Me cutting an artichoke is a first, and unfortunately, I think I failed to apply the steps to do it correct on the baby artichokes.  The recipe begins with you having to peel almonds. Thankfully the retailer I carried them from already peeled them. It was thus one step less that I had to do.  One thing I did have to do though was to grill some of the almonds that I got, which you do by putting them into an oven for 15 minutes. In the picture below you can see what the process looked like after I grilled them.  One of the other things that you have to do at the beginning is to peel and cut green tomatoes. I didn't have any, so instead I went to the shop looking for the greenest tomatoes that I could find and us...

For this recipe I had to wait a month before I could get in touch with you guys again. One of the ingredients is a preserved lemon and I decided to make on for myself, which admittedly takes one month of time. Similarly, I had to blend spices to make a Vadouvan blend and made my own chicken broth. I had thus quite a bit of work to do before the recipe even started.  I've never eaten cockles before and as a result it is quite a challenge for me to talk about them before I came to eat the recipe as stated in the book. I am excited what taste they do have.  The first thing the recipe does in fact instruct you to do is to cook the cockles in a bath consisting of fennel, shallots and garlic. Here's the result after I cooked it:  Next there will be a curry reduction on the menu, which is obtained by grilling fennel, shallots, garlic and celeriac, adding spices and amontillado sherry, then reducing it with the cockle broth and a chicken broth. After infusing the reduction with t...

The dish that is about to be made is a tomato dish, apparently. I don't know about you, but I found the standard raw tomato that you can find in the supermarket to be rather bland. Thankfully, the people who made this dish call for cherry tomatoes instead, which are less bland, but also kind of one-note.  The first thing the recipe asks you to do is to cut and marinate the papaya and cherry tomatoes.   This is followed by marinating chicken legs for 3 hours.   After 3 hours it is asked to grill the chicken legs. I don't have a barbecue with me so I decided to grill the chicken in my homemade grill instead.   The recipe also states that you have to make some grilled paprika wrapped in filo pastry filled with a Thai basil mixture. After assembling all of the components the final result looks like this:  In the end I got to say that the taste is good, but also what you expect. The salad and yoghurt tast likes, well, salad and yoghurt. The paprika wrapped in fi...

After the failure I made  last time I decided to throw away the bread into a bin and simply buy some brioche bread from the supermarket.  For those thinking that the next dish is simply going to be toasted brioche bread I am happy to inform you that the next dish is quite complicated with a fair bit of components. One of which will be indeed the brioche bread roasted in the oven with some hazelnut butter on top. The end result looked like this:  Added to it will be crab meat to which mayonnaise, ketchup and green tabasco are added to make the following combination:  Together with some mashed boiled egg yolk this will be the dish that will be served.  That is however not all. I will also serve it with an actual egg. First I'll cut open the egg and add a flan to it which is a mixture of dashi and egg.  Added to it on the bottom will be a mixture of potato, chives and olive oil, which ends in a sticky mixture.  Added to it is a beurre blanc of wine, shal...