Artichoke

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 used them for the recipe. Here are the tomatoes after they'd been cut and the almonds after they'd been grilled and put in olive oil. 
The next step involved cutting the artichokes. The baby artichokes will also have to be fried whilst the artichokes will have to be cooked and put into a vinaigrette. After the whole process I got the baby artichokes like this: 

Another awkward moment when making this recipe is realising that you didn't have enough nasturtium leaves to do the dish. I bought two boxes of nasturtium expecting them to arrive with only the leaves, but I also ended up having the flowers with them. In the panic I decided that I would wrap all the necessary components in the 2 leaves needed for the dish whilst I would make another vinaigrette from the flower extract (this one with white soy sauce instead of white wine vinegar). 

After cooking the langoustines and plating the dish looked like this: 

In the end I have to say that I got myself a tasty artichoke salad, where the langoustines added some heat to what would otherwise be a very cold dish. 


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