Salmon - Retro Food For Modern Times

Tag: Salmon

24
Apr
2023

Lunch in Provence – April 2003

categories: 20 Years Ago Today, Delicious, Magazines

Bonjour les amis et bienvenue dans mon déjeuner inspiré de la Provence et d’avril 2003. My inspiration for this menu came from the April 2003 issue of Delicious Magazine. Initially, the topic was “So Frenchy So Chic” but as the menu evolved, so did my interpretation of it. Not for us the hustle and bustle of a Parisian bistro. Today we are taking it slow and enjoying the fresh air and rustic pleasures of lunch in the countryside. With a tiny bit of Asian influence thrown in. It is not totally unfounded either, after all, back in the day, the French has colonies in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and parts of Thailand.

Let’s set the scene, shall we? Lunch is being served outside on a long table sheltered from the sun by the branches of the same olive trees that are providing your entree. The air is scented with lavender from a nearby farm and somewhere nearby a little brook is babbling away…

Maybe something a little like this!

Our April 2003 Menu

Eagle-Eyed readers will notice that for the first time ever in these 20 years ago today posts that we are not opening with some sort of beverage. Instead, we are closing out with one. This is because the starter I chose, the Braised Olives and Almonds was the most purely “French” course whilst the only cocktail in the book was very Asian in its ingredients. The two didn’t really work together so I thought moving the cocktail to the end of the meal would work better!

Braised Green Olives With Roasted Almonds

These were so more-ish! And so easy to do! I could happily munch on a bowl of these any day of the week! And I know we are holding out for the Sakitni at the end of the meal…but a glass of lovely French cider (Maybe a pear cider to match with the dessert) or some Provence Rosé would make this perfect drinking food!

Braised Green Olives and Roasted Almonds Recipe:

Glazed Salmon with Lime Beurre Blanc and Tomato, Ginger and Basil Salsa

This was really delicious and I liked the method of cooking the salmon in foil. I had not tried this before as normally I pan fry or grill my salmon. This was a more delicate way of cooking it. I also used salmon fillets which made this so much easier to cook as a weeknight meal. I simply placed the lime leaves under the salmon, the lemongrass by its side, and the lime on top. Whilst we’re at it…I used regular red sweet chilli sauce instead of the yellow one suggested in the recipe. I don’t think I have ever even seen yellow sweet chilli sauce!

Glazed Salmon with Lime Beurre Blanc and Tomato, Ginger and Basil Salsa Recipe:

Pear Tart with Ginger Custard

I did not make this one – the purpose of these Twenty Years Ago Today recipes is not for me to cook the whole menu, even though sometimes I wish I could! It is about seeing if a particular magazine from the past can fulfill a brief. I don’t love pears so this is not something I would make BUT, I felt the Pear Tart fit in nicely with the French Country theme and the ginger custard echoed the ginger in the salsa that went with the salmon

Pear Tart with Ginger Custard Recipe:

Sakitini

To close out our French country meal we have a very Asian-inspired martini – sake, a lychee instead of an olive, and ginger which has been present in the main and the dessert. This is a sweeter style of martini rather than the dry style most people would drink so it ,is a nice if somewhat unusual, way to round out a meal.

Sakitini recipe:

My Nigella Moment – Chocolate Raspberry Pudding Cake

For first-time readers, this refers to the moment at the end of Nigella Lawson’s cooking shows when she sneaks back to the fridge to have another bite of something delicious. In the context of these Twenty Years Ago posts, it is something contained in the magazine that does not fit with the overall menu theme but I’m sneaking it in either because I made it and it was really good, or I just didn’t have time to make it but it was the most appetising thing in the mag!

Again this month, this was a really tricky one. There were two recipes that I wanted to cook. In the end didn’t do either, possibly because I spent so long vacillating between the two that I ran out of time to do either!

The first was a Brownie, Raspberry and Drambuie Trifle. I mean…OMG…how good does that sound? BUT the second was a Chocolate Raspberry Pudding cake from the lady herself! And how could I resist not Nigella-ing Nigella? Plus, I have made this recipe from How To Eat several times and it has never failed me. It is my go-to recipe if I ever need to bake something that I know will turn out well!

Chocolate Raspberry Pudding Cake Recipe

This was certainly the most challenging menu to pull together as there was nothing in the magazine that seemed specifically French. I felt it came together pretty well even though I had to tweak the theme a little bit! We’ll save So Frenchy So Chic for another day and leave this one as So Frenchy So Rustique! Whatever we call it, April 2003 provided some delicious food which is what it’s all about!

Have a great week!

15
Apr
2020

Bridget Jones’s Salmon

categories: Film Club, Fish, Salmon

Hello friends! I made Bridget Jones’s Salmon as a nod to our latest film club event. We are continuing to meet through iso. Only now we meet via Zoom. It is a nice way to catch up and see each other. And I am running out of things to watch so having a film club choice is always good!!! Last meeting was my choice and the random category I drew was Rom-Com. Now I am not a big fan of said genre so it actually threw me into a bit of a panic!

My first and initially only choice was Two Days in Paris, which is a film I absolutely love! Plus I thought, by having a couple that are together at the start, it subverts the whole boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl which is one of the things I find so formulaic and boring in most rom-coms. Plus, you know…

Paris 😍

And Adam Goldberg 😍😍

And Julie Delpy 😍😍😍

Have you seen it? It hits so many of the things I love I feel like the makers tapped deep within my psyche to find all that was good. And then turned it into a movie!

Turns out though that 2DIP is not currently available on any of the streaming services or for rental on the Googs, or YouTube. And of course, my fine upstanding friends and I would never stoop to illegally downloading films (🙄) so as a choice it was null and void. Which left me here…

Until I remembered Bridget Jones! I loved the book and the film! I was a bit worried though because I thought at half of film club would hate it. But, even though parts of it have dated horribly, everyone really enjoyed it. There is something about living in iso that I think makes people crave the familiar and watching Bridge was like wrapping myself in a warm and comforting blanket!

If you are looking for entertainment, I can heartily endorse you watching Bridget Jones Diary. It was the perfect antidote to the bad news and gloom of the daily news.

I can also heartily recommend Yotam Ottolenghi’s Bridget Jones’s Salmon!

In the spirit of not going out to buy items I did not have and not wasting ingredients I do have I made two substitutions to the original recipe in my version:

I had no celery so I left it out altogether
I had no currants so I subbed in some barberries I found in the back of the cupboard. And yes, I am the weirdo that has barberries in the back of their cupboard. I am actually very sad because the little shop I used to buy them from has closed. I am treating the ones I have left like gold until I can find somewhere else that sells them!

When Life Give You Lemons…

So, in response to the virus and a big drop in revenue, my work has cut hours for most people. So as of now, I am working four days a week. I feel absolutely no rancour in relation to this decision which I honestly think was done to save jobs. It sucks because I am one of those lucky people who actually love what they do, and I was actually had more work to do in response to the changing conditions.

But my loss sweet readers is your gain because I have been wanting to post more on here for ages. Having that one extra day where I am not working means I will have more time to spend doing this. I also am in the process of making list of all those things I said I would do “if only I had the time” and I am going to get cracking on that. I fully intend to make my additional day off a blessing and not a curse!

Stay safe, stay indoors and take care. And let me know what Rom-com you would have chosen!

30
Sep
2012

Retro Food For Modern Times: The Busy Woman’s Fish and Spinach Challenge

categories: Fish, Macadamias, Salmon, Spinach

Most of the time, I can make a snap judgement as to how awful something will be just by reading the recipe. Take, for instance, the Oyster Soup mentioned in the previous post. I don’t actually have to taste it to know it will be repulsive. I can mock a lot of things without having to hand over cash for the privilege. Sometimes though, the line between good and evil is not so easily drawn. So it was with the Busy Woman’s Cookbook recipe for Fish Fingers in Sauce Verte.

I have a soft spot for fish fingers. They were a staple of my childhood and even now, particularly if I come home a bit boozy, fish fingers are a guilty pleasure of mine. So, I wasn’t entirely averse to giving this recipe a try.

The result:

I had a dilemma with how exactly to eat this though. The recipe is not particularly helpful. Serve sauce with fish fingers it says. How? I’d made two fish fingers so I tried it two ways.

Of the two, the dip was preferable as the slather made the crispy crumb coating on the fish fingers go soggy. In all honesty though, selecting one of these as being better than the other was a little bit like choosing between being punched or kicked in the face. Given the choice, you may prefer one over the other but neither would always be a better option.

As mentioned, I was unsure about how the Fish Finger dish might turn out. And the idea of the challenge was born – put a borderline recipe up against one with similar ingredients that sounds ok. Compare the two.

A search of my cookbooks lead me to a different fish with spinach sauce recipe – Fish with Spinach Hollandaise – from another AWW cookbook – The Best Seafood Recipes.

Incidentally, the Fish Finger with Sauce Verte recipe did not make it into The Best Seafood Recipes. Quelle surprise. Also, I used salmon in my version of the Fish with Spinach Hollandaise sauce recipe, because I had some in my freezer.

The result:

I compared the two recipes on 5 parameters: Taste, Ease of Cooking, Overall Look, Cost and Nutrition.

Taste

The retro food did not compare well. The fault was in the Sauce Verte. The next sentence is something I have never actually uttered before. Here goes.

It would have been better without the wine.

Wow. I’m still here. I thought for sure a bolt from the blue would have struck me down for so flagrantly defying my prevailing ethos. The combination of wine and lemon made the sauce too sour, a little bit bitter and combined with the spinach made my teeth go a little furry. It was not pleasant. The wine would have been much better just being drunk, preferably in copious amounts prior to eating the Fish Fingers in Sauce Verte.

The other surprise was that the sugar in the Fish with Spinach Hollandaise really worked! It somehow brightened the sauce up and I think also worked well with the toasted macadamias. The nuts were great and added some crunchy texture into the modern dish.

Fish with Spinach Hollandaise won this round easily!

Ease of Cooking

One of the problems with cooking fish is that it can be hard to get it just right – ie not overcooked. For that reason alone, the Fish Finger dish won this challenge.

They were both very quick, with the sauce being able to made whilst the fish was cooking. One note though – the Fish Finger with Sauce Verte recipe states to cook the fish fingers for 20 minutes. I cooked mine for under ten and they were fine.

Look

Let’s start with the sauce. Only one of these can really be called a sauce Verte. The other is more of a Sauce Not So Verte.

Aesthetically, the Fish with Spinach Hollandaise was far more pleasing to my eye. I loved the combination of the bright green sauce and the pink salmon. I thought this was a really pretty looking dish and it won this round hands down.

Cost

Fish Fingers and frozen spinach are cheap. Salmon and macadamias are not. Lets move on.

Nutritional Value

I’m not a nutritionist but I’m probably not wrong in suggesting that fresh salmon and spinach are better for you than frozen spinach and fish fingers. I’d also hazard a guess that macadamias are more healthy than whatever the hell they crumb fish fingers with. Even with the butter and sugar I think the modern version wins out.

The Busy Woman’s Fish Finger recipe did not fare as badly as I thought it would. Personally if I had to rank the parameters, I would probably place taste and nutritional value towards the top of the list but I also recognise that sometimes cheap and cheerful is exactly what you need. Even under these circumstances I would not make the Sauce Verte again. It was not good. The remainder of the box of fish fingers is in my freezer and when the time is right will be eaten with this busy woman’s preferred combination of mayonnaise and tabasco!