Week 52 - Garnish

I'm disappointed to be ending the challenge year on something that feels so lackluster, but with the Week 52 theme being garnish, there were few things my not-very-crafty self could do that would live up to how great some of the other challenge weeks were. I wasn't even sure what to do here. My usual garnishes are things like chopped parsley, but that seemed really low-effort for a challenge meal. Sprinkling herbs? Surely, that couldn't be what they meant.

I thought about it some more and then decided I would attempt to make a carrot flower. I followed the tutorial on Wikihow, and it turned out about as well as I expected (i.e., it wasn't good). I'm not the best at plating or artistic things with food, and my flower wasn't really much of a flower. I guess it could pass for a thick stem, but it was not very good at all.

When they put up the intro thread for the challenge week on Reddit, they talked about just making things pleasing to the eye, whether it was sprinkling salt or herbs or even non-edible garnishes. So I guess they really did mean something as simple as sprinkling some chopped parsley, even if that doesn't feel challenge-worthy to me. Since the carrot flower was a bit of a failure, let's end the year instead with a photo of a dish with a lovely sauce and garnishes of za'atar and parsley, which is the next installment in our Ottolenghi Jerusalem project that I'll hopefully write about soon.

Looking forward to another year of cooking challenges!