A walk in the garden - Looking at the first course of my pop-up restaurant

 The Nearby Pond

I don't know if it's just me, but I've always thought that the most beautiful gardens tend to have a pond in them, so it's one of the things I associate most with the idea of my perfect walk in a garden. So, when I was listing things I like in gardens, making a pond in a bowl seemed like a beautiful idea. 

The first idea: Initially, I wanted to make a lotus soup. Lotus soup isn't uncommon, and it's actually quite interesting to think about. Lotuses are things you associate with ponds, so I imagined that a beautiful lotus soup could be perfect for my pond in a bowl. However, this idea DID NOT WORK. Lotus root seems to have an inherent pepperiness in them. Now you could add some form of milk or cream to it in order to combat the flavour, but in doing so, you would lose the clearness of the soup which is actually the main point of the dish. So lotus root soup was NOT an option. 

Reconceptualising the broth: Now at some point, I had to shift focus. Here, my aunt came in clutch. I was stuck on the idea of lotus soup, so I asked her how she would treat this soup to remove the pepperiness. Instead, she asked me why it has to be a lotus soup. When I couldn't reply, she suggested a tomato consommé instead. A consommé is a clarified soup. Basically, it's a type of clear soup, and it can be made with most vegetables. For example, tomatoes. 

First, you make a basic tomato sauce - nothing too special. 

Put some tomatoes in the oven for a couple of hours with some onions and garlic and slow-roast them until they're cooked, then blend them into a sauce with whatever other flavours you want to add. Here's where it gets interesting. Take some more tomatoes (roughly 1/3rd of the weight of the tomato sauce) and blend them with egg whites. For every 250 grams of uncooked tomatoes, use around 3 egg whites. 

Then, pour this blended mixture into the sauce and simmer it for 15-20 minutes. DO NOT STIR THE MIXTURE AT ALL, LET THE EGG WHITES FORM A LAYER ON TOP. These egg whites essentially act as another layer to strain the sauce through. You scoop this top layer onto a fine muslin cloth and then pour the soup through it, which basically captures all of the solids and leaves a clear liquid below. It's super cool to think about.

Lotus root: Now I had to use lotus root somewhere, so again the same aunt helped immensely. During our call, she also mentioned nadru yakhni - a style of cooking lotus root in curd and spices that is popular in kashmir. I adapted the recipe a bit. Firstly, I boiled the lotus root a bit to soften it up. I prepared the spices as is common in this type of dish, but instead of cooking the curd, I just mixed the spices in and kept it cold. Then, I dropped in my sliced lotus root and let it sit. The lotus root absorbed this flavour, so when I decided to fry it, it got a beautiful, crispy outside with a juicy, well-spiced inside. 

Making it look like a pond: Lily pads, fish eggs, algae. Three of the things that came to my mind when I was thinking about a pond. Lily pads are not hard to make. Take a small cookie cutter and just slice circles out of raw spinach leaves. I'd also recommend putting the lily pads under a heavy glass or bowl to try to flatten them out. 

The algae/foam should have been easy, but it wasn't. I thought the only way to make a light foam was with soy lecithin, so I tried over and over again to make a nice foam. It DID NOT WORK. On D-day, I finally got some sense and decided to think of other options. Luckily, I saw a nitrogen gun in the cupboard. That gave me a great idea - 2 parts Tomato-ginger puree to 1 part cream, and put it in the gun. IT WORKED. The resulting foam was light, voluminous and had much bigger bubbles than anything I'd tried before. 

Fish eggs are a little more difficult. Although black caviar is very well known, many fish eggs like salmon roe are actually orange. Therefore, I decided to do a carrot caviar. 

Basically, here I puréed carrots with a bit of lemon juice. Then, I boiled this purée with a bit of agar agar powder - as much as you would use to make jelly out of the purée. However, instead of setting it, I took a dropper and sucked up the hot liquid. Then, I dropped little droplets of it into chilled oil. The oil sets it immediately, allowing for the caviar to stay separate even if little beads touch. The more agar agar you use, the quicker it sets, and those few milliseconds can actually make a difference. 

From there, I rinsed them in a bit of water to remove some of the oil and then tossed them in some salt to give them flavour - not too much, because I wanted the carrot flavour to shine. 

Not to say that it was all easy: I'm not a professional chef, so I had my share of messes. While blending the tomatoes and egg whites, I forgot to hold the lid down, and it sprayed all over the kitchen and my clothes. While making the foam, I tried 7 recipes using soy lecithin before I finally moved on from my idea and looked at other alternatives like heavy cream, which actually was a much better choice from the get go. When I bought the lotus root, I didn't realise that out of the 3 pieces I bought, 2 were spoilt. I had to manage with 1 piece, leaving me with no margin for error at all.

One of my big fails wasn't even characteristically a fail. It was just an idea I tried that didn't work. I'd seen a tip by heston blumenthal about consommes, so I decided to try it out. He suggested that freezing a soup works better than even making a consomme. Now I figured that if I were to stack freezing and making a consomme, I'd get an even better result. This did not work. There was no negative effect of doing this except for the wastage of around 8 hours while it melted, but that wasn't too much of an issue. My point is that trying this didn't hurt. It didn't help, but it definitely didn't hurt, which is what I love about cooking! There's so much scope to learn, to experiment, to create on your own. 

A couple of recipes I referred to - 

Tomato Consomme: https://cedardownfarm.ca/recipes/summer/sweet-chili-tomato-soup/, https://www.thespruceeats.com/tomato-consomme-recipe-435949

Nadru Yakhni - https://maayeka.com/2012/11/nadru-yakhni-lotus-steams.html#recipe