I’m really glad I decided to do the Adjonyoh shito sauce—it’s brilliantly good and it made the salt cod cakes from Grant’s book just the best, I mean, so memorably good.
I did feel that despite 10 hours or so in the lemon/lime marinade, the Yassa Chicken was still not as flavorful as I expected. I broiled it rather than grilled it outside, so that might have been an issue.
The shito sauce was the kind of cooking process I expect when I’m making a reduction like a mole sauce, just with some really different ingredients, but the outcome was more complicated and interesting in many ways than a mole.
I ended up making the plantains as a kind of puree rather than something closer to mashed potatoes or fried bananas/plantains (both of which I like and have done) and that worked pretty well. Not quite Grant’s recipe but close in spirit.
So of course the book stays here, but it’s definitely sparked my desire to dive into some more recent acquisitions in this culinary domain—next week, I think, I’ll use Marcus Samuelsson’s The Rise, which I’ve had for a bit but haven’t really used yet.