Last week Thursday it was my turn again with cooking, and I was far too late again; at 6 o’clock Buzz would come home, having had an extra difficult day because of application talks, and at 5 o’clock I still hadn’t had the faintest clue of what to do, nor the ingredients I would probably need.
I quickly reached out for Nigel Slater’s Real Fast Food – if there was anything I needed now it was exactly that. I opted for fish, because we hadn’t had any fish all week, and I was delighted to find a recipe that wouldn’t require me to go to the fish monger and wouldn’t need any special ingredients either. For dessert, we were about to repeat Valentine day’s Flambéed apples when we decided to try it with any other fruit we had in house – grapes in our case. And to my great surprise, it worked!
Catfish with a Lime-Crust
4 large trout fillets (or other white fish)
2 tbsp. fresh breadcrumbs
(2-)3 limes
4 tbsp. fresh mixed herbs (parsley, dill, tarragon)
25 g butter
salt (and pepper)
Preheat the oven to 200°C (I always forget that if I don’t mention it in the very beginning).
Grind or grate an old bread roll for the bread crumbs, if possible. Grate two of the limes and add the zest to the bread. Finely chop the herbs and add them as well, then place on a flat plate.
Melt the butter in a pan and add the juice of 1-2 of the limes. Press one side of the fish fillets firmly onto the herbs so that they will stick, then place them on a baking sheet, herb-side up, I suppose, and spoon over the butter and lime.
Bake until the fish is done (should be 6 min for trout but can be longer!), and serve. Nigel Slater chose crispy green beans for accompaniment, I opted for broccoli. Go for some Caribbean vegetable accompaniment to make it a bit more special and get that summer feeling.
Notes:
Because I couldn’t find trout, I bought two filets of Catfish (Pangasius) instead, a fish that, as I found out, needed more cooking time than a trout (which might be down to the fact that catfish fillets are larger, apparently…). Also, I didn’t really manage to get a crust, I probably used too much butter and/or lime juice (I never measure those things precisely; I must have used less lime juice anyway because I only had two in place of the required three), as the crust was too soggy to be crispy. So, next time I’ll definitely reduce the amounts of liquids.
Be careful not to use too much parsley, as the taste of parsley is far stronger than that of dill, and beware of the intensity of the lime juice as well.
Serves 2; adapted from Nigel Slater’s Real Fast Food.
Flambéed Grapes
Basically, this recipe is identical to that of the Flambéed Apples, with the apples replaced by, well, grapes, and no Calvados.
a bunch of grapes
Caster sugar
some Rum
Ice Cream/ Crème Bavaroise
Pick and slice the grapes. Melt some butter in a pan, add the grapes and cook for a short while. When you think they are ready, sprinkle caster sugar on them, add the rum and ignite. Small grapes will take the shape of contact lenses, might be a nice idea for a Halloween joke later this year.
Some tips for flambeing: Some alcohols, such as certain brands rum, contain just about enough alcohol to make flambeing possible. To help the process, make sure the food you want to flambé is hot, and preheat the alcohol in a ladle above a flame before igniting.
Serve with ice cream or Crème Bavaroise (we had Speculaas-Ice cream, ice cream with bits of spicy cookies mainly eaten around Christmas and Sinterklaas, making it a typical winter dish – excellent!).
Serves 2; adapted from Hedwig M. Stuber’s Ich helf dir kochen.
