I’ve gone and done it again.
I’ve been food shopping today. The cupboards are chock-a-block with groceries, the fridge is heaving, the freezer will barely shut and I have absolutely no idea what to do for dinner tonight. Happens every time….
I’m not sure if it’s because I’m spoilt for choice or if I just can’t be bothered!
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We went to Intermarché today and as usual spent many a lingering minute drooling over the tarts and gateaux in the bakery department. The patisserie selection is stunning here. Beautifully presented, shiny, colourful, fruity, light and healthy looking. From apricot flans to cherry tarts to the classic apple tart. Sometimes with a custard/crème anglaise base, sometimes a compôte base. Always with meticulously and perfectly placed fruit, that has us ‘ooh’ing’ and ‘aah’ing’ and pointing and salivating!
In fact, so inspired was I, that I came home, shunted the children off to footy and riding and made one of my own.
It was lovely, well received and so easy to make.
Brief description follows:
Line pastry base with cheats’, ready-made pastry, bake blind in hot oven for 5 to 10 minutes. Cover pastry base with a generous few dollops of apple compote, arrange, very neatly and precisely (for that extra dash of authenticity) peeled and sliced apple slices, sprinkle on pre-prepared crumble mix and flaked almonds, sprinkle with sugar and put in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes until browned.
Serve hot or cold with pouring cream, squirty cream or ice-cream. Delicious!
Suddenly, our tomato’s are ripening….all at the same time.
So, in an effort to use them up, I have been bottling, pureeing, slicing and serving with cheese…etc,etc. It would be easy to become a bit sick of them, but they are so tasty…reminiscent of Spanish tomato’s eaten on holiday, with real, juicy tomato flavour, that they are a joy to eat.
Here is a recipe for Sunny Tomato Tart…tonights dinner…
Ingredients:
Shortcrust pastry…(I cheat and use ready-made…can’t be bothered to make my own!)
2 tlb’s Creme fresh
2 tsp’s Dijon mustard
Fresh Thyme
Tomato’s
Olive Oil
Method:
Set oven to hot….200 degrees centigrade. Line flan dish with pastry and smooth over creme fresh and Dijon mustard mixture. Sprinkle with thyme.
Thinly slice tomato’s and arrange on top, (probably a few more than I managed here!) drizzle with olive oil and cook in the oven until it resembles the photo above.
Good,that used up two tomato’s, what can I do with the other 10 kgs?
Ok, I know, we should all eat more fish….2 to 3 times per week apparantly.
Who are they trying to kid?! I don’t remember eating much fish whilst growing up…fish and chips being the exception.
Even now Mum will turn her nose up at fish, with the usual…’Too many bones’ remark. And as the food provider in our house, for the most-part, I would conclude that fish was never a staple of my diet.
And so it remains! I know it sounds stupid but fish is too damned fishy! It just tastes too fishy and why eat cod, for example, because it doesn’t taste fishy? May as well eat meat or cardboard or white chocolate! And it’s true, there are too many bones….
So tonights journey into the above recipe…(I can’t be bothered to type it again!) was different, yeah, unusual, yeah, novel, roight …to quote Kath and Kim. In fact 3 times a week…I’m closer to 3 times per year!
It was very nearly a disaster too, which would have been a travesty, to say the least. For one, I don’t want to break my record, 3 recipes, 3 successes and two, if this hadn’t worked I may never have attempted a fishy dish again!
Problem number one….make a rosemary and anchovy sauce in the pestle and mortar…whoops! Pestle and morter is now in France, 400 miles away. I never used it, which is why it is where it is! I did manage to cobble it together using the Moulinex and the back of a wooden spoon though.
Then I took the salmon out of the oven too early and it was a bit under cooked! I know you can eat raw fish, the Japanese seem to thrive on it, but a combination of raw and cooked? I wasn’t sure, so whacked it back in the oven for a while. I put the purple sprouting broccoli back in too, which meant that the lemon in the sauce intensified.
And there we go, it was actually really rather lovely in the end. I still have no idea if Yvonne pinboned it, there were certainly no bones in it. It tasted of lovely salmon, not too fishy! It was a really ‘meaty’ fish that I wasn’t too nervous to sink my teeth into. The rosemary and anchovies and lemon were super….d’you know, if Keith Flyod were to read this he would be very worried by now!
Final comment 4 successes out of 4! I will be entertaining soon, soirees and dinner parties, I can see it now!!
I went to Sainsburys yesterday to get my little piece of fish for my next recipe.
I found what I wanted at the fishmonger department…a piece of organic, un-dyed salmon from the wilds of an intensively farmed loch, somewhere off the Isles of Harris.
Yvonne, the fishmonger on duty was very helpful, and proved great at offering and cutting the right sized piece of fish.
I then asked her if she could ‘pinbone’ it for me. I explained that this is what Jamie Oliver had recommended. Yvonne, suitably unimpressed turned to me and said, ‘Jamie Oliver, he don’t know what he’s talking about!’
Of course…… that’s why Yvonne is fishmonger at Sainsburys on the basic wage and Jamie Oliver is a multi-millionaire….. it’s all perfectly clear!
What’s not clear is whether Yvonne did in fact pinbone my piece of fish, I forgot to check. I will no doubt find out later tonight….
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