This is the 8th submission for the PnP Freshly Blogged challenge. We were tasked with making a dish from the following items:

• Sedgwick’s Old Brown Sherry
• One whole free range chicken
• A bulb of Garlic
• An onion
• A lemon
• 6 potatoes
• 2 chorizo sausages

To add a twist, the dish had to be inspired by art. I chose Kandinsky as my inspiration because his art often involved taking simple shapes and arranging them in a cool way, and he had a condition, known as synethesia, that allowed him to literally see sound. I thought it would be fun to use shapes to try to find a way to show taste, not just food. I found a painting of his that worked as the perfect blueprint, called The Black Circle:

For my dish, I made each circle on the plate a different flavour. A caremelised lemon, gravy made from the juices of the roast chicken and sherry, creamy parsley potato puree, deep-fried potato crisps, a slow-roasted and steamed chicken terrine with beads of balsamic vinegar reduction and, lastly, a lemon sherry jus.

I have to say that I have whole new respect and adulation for professional chefs. They plate up a million perfect dishes every day, under much duress and do so with more finesse than I can ever hope to have. For me, to get this one single plate right, it took a stupid amount of time and attempts. Stupid. Thanks to physics, things dribble. They ooze. They acquire personalities and ambitions and start moving and spreading in directions other than to where I had planned. I ended up with a pile of white, smudged plates stacked high as each one got progressively stickier and I got increasingly more violent with the vinegar.

Plating attempts continued quite late into the night only for the poor lighting to result in a shoddy pic. Had to scrap it all and redo the following morning. That vinegar was my sodding nemesis!

I used cookie cutters, shooter glasses, egg rings, upturned cups and another lemon slice for the circular rind in order to coax the food into the circular shapes. Also tried bottle tops, the rings that seal bottle tops to the bottle and swearing. I found swearing to be the most effective tool in preventing me from smashing the plate.

Anyway, if you would like to find out more and to get the recipes for all those blobs, and perhaps vote (which I would be hugely grateful for) you can follow the link here: http://freshlyblogged.co.za/recipe/kandinskys-chicken/