The Zilte undertaking

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...