Crispy, brown skin – tender white meat. My wild sea bream with haricot beans and parsley sauce is a light dish, and it is simple. Very simple. Just a couple of beans served with butter and parsley. Beautiful fillets of fish, dressed with a zesty and fresh parsley sauce. Not much effort goes into making this dish that will bring colour and freshness to your table. Summer can’t come soon enough.
A surprisingly light, almost airy, sauce spooned over succulent and tender poached fillets of salmon, served with soft and flavoursome cucumbers. This dish has the potential to become my all-year favourite. It is the perfect meal to serve on a hot summer day. Or for a fancy dinner to impress some important people. The best bit is, that although seemingly complicated my poached salmon with warmed cucumbers in a white cream sauce requires almost no work apart from hollowing out cucumbers and stirring a sauce and is done in little more than 15 minutes. This is classy feel-good-food like it should be.
When time is scarce and you are hungry, a quick snack is often the only option. Luckily, summer is around the corner and offers a variety of quick and easy, healthy and delicious meals. For me nothing expresses summer on a plate better than a few luscious and sweet, ripe and deeply red tomatoes. And in combination with my grilled herring fillet, they make for the perfect summer lunch. A crisp bread, spread thickly with ricotta, scattered with grilled tomatoes and basil, topped with tender and rich herring fillets, my red herring is a summer snack as it should be. Light and delicious, robust and very clear-cut. And the best bit, making it won’t take longer than 5 minutes. But the result will be ever so rewarding.
It’s funny how things change. When I was a child I used to hate my grandmother’s creamed beans. Now, quite a few years later, they remind me of all the shared meals and just the very thought of them is making me look forward to coming home again. Green beans in a bechamel sauce are a classic dish of my home region. But they are also rather heavy. For this week’s post, I have decided to go for something more fitting to the season. My lemon salmon with creamed bean pasta is a fresh take on an old classic. Instead of a heavy bechamel sauce, I slightly dress the beans in a smooth cream sauce, that tastes surprisingly light. For further lightness, I slice the beans thinly, to serve them as you would the greenest pasta. An addition to this most amazing green bean pasta I serve a succulent and tender salmon fillet, infused with butter and lemon. There is just nothing better for a special spring lunch. Well, maybe a large glass of white wine with it all.
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Winter is back in Groningen and I have been longing for a hearty summer meal for quite some days now. Just to lift my spirits and feed my soul and body (I can’t believe I just wrote that). When I think of summer I think of Italy and Spain and the lovely fish dishes I had there. As a student I have neither the money nor the time (yes, studying is hard work) to just book a flight and visit the coast of Gibralta, just to fight my winter depression. But I do have the time and the money to create my own little summer treat. Fish with tomatoes is one of my favourites and my panseared mackerel filet in a tomato sauce just has it all. It’s cheap, nutritious and taste heavenly.
I hate fish. Well, maybe hatred is too strong a choice of words. And maybe it’s also not quite accurate: I hate badly done fish. And yet I always end up ordering some, hoping to be, just this one time, positively surprised. But I never am. Never. One might think that after dozens of strange sea-food pizzas and an equal share of bland, dull and utterly uninspired pieces of fishy fish I would finally come to my senses and just stop ordering them all together. (Much like my boyfriend has been commanding me to do for the better part of the last two years, as he just cannot stand my constant post-restaurant-nagging). However, I don’t and I would like to believe that it is hope, optimism or some kind of misguided faith in a culinary messiah that are driving me (I don’t want to suggest, by the way, that your faith in your kind of messiah, if you choose to have it, was misguided – all the power to you), but really it seems more like a culinary chastisement. But every now and then, I come across this beautifully crafted and divinely delicious piece of fish that is worth all the trouble and anger. And if any fish was ever able to right all the wrongs, it would be the soft, delicate and subtle trout. And if any recipe was ever to do justice to the majestic trout it would be my oven-baked trout with earthy beetroot, potatoes and an airy crème fraîche dill sauce. Read the rest of this entry »
cookingbrains 