~ 22nd February 2018

Massaman Chicken Curry

Writing this update now, after receiving such helpful feedback on r/plating, really bites. I feel like a lot of the takeaways from those posts could have been applied to this dish if only I'd gotten to them earlier.

A lesson that's always hard to internalise - asking for help yields great results and no one ever wishes they'd waited a little longer before asking.

Anyway, let's start off with what I'm tackling today

Ok so the two best action points I could pull from the advice I got from r/plating were:

• Cut stuff into smaller, more delicate pieces
• Think more about colour and contrast

So now you see why I really wish I'd read that advice before plating this meal:

The cuts of meat are fine for a massaman (although I normally associate the curry with beef which always looks better in a cube than chicken), but depriving them of their context just highlights how huge and indelicate they are.

Again, large chunks of veg? Great to eat in the curry, terrible when removed from the curry context. I'm wasting the colour it can bring by keeping it all together

With some simple knife work, I could have really improved this plate. I think it might be time to step things up and bring a small kitchen knife into the equation. If I'm going to keep destructuring these curries (which might be the wrong approach anyway) - I need to engage a little more with the shapes and sizes involved.