Florentine Pancakes: with Soles, Tomatoes and Green Beans

You're warned, I invented this recipe as I had to find a way to use a left-over cooked (pan-fried meunière-style) sole. And it turned out to be really good (nay, a scumptious recipe!) and as I don't want to forget it, I'm writing it down here. Obviously, you can do it starting with a fresh sole and cooking it either whole in a pan meunière-style (as I did, that means it's floured and cooked in a pan with sizzling butter) or filleted in a hot oven with a little white wine.

Here is what my recipe looks like (I asked my husband to take a picture with his smart phone):

Hmmm, not the best of pictures but believe me, it's really good and looks very nice on the place!

Ingredients: for 4 persons

• 2 soles filletted - you should have 8 nice fillets of sole, cooked.
• 1/2 cup of cherry tomatoes, each cut in 2 or 4 (depending on size, the pieces need to be small)
• 1/2 cup of cooked green beans, cut in small bits, about the size of your tomato bits
• 2 tablespoons of cream cheese (I use Mascarpone because I live in Italy and it's a wonderful, creamy cheese - but any good cream cheese will do. Barring that, use heavy cream!)
• 1/2 small glass of white wine (this you have to see how much you need, the sauce, at the end, needs to be fairly liquid - in anyc case, not cream-heavy!)
• 2 spring onions (or any kind of onion) chopped very small
• herbs to taste - I used basilic but you can use oregano
• pancake batter to make 2 American-style pancakes per person NOTE: the batter should not be done with sugar but with a pinch of salt instead!
• grated parmigiano cheese
• olive oil and butter
• salt and pepper as needed

Method:

1. Cook the cherry tomatoes in an open pan, with a little olive oil, herbs and the chopped onion.

2. When they have released their juice, turn off the fire, add the green beans and sole fillets broken in small pieces.

3. Add the cream cheese and wine until your sauce is abundant and with the right consistency (fairly liquid)

4. Pre-heat the oven at 200° (hot!)

5. Arrange in a pyrex dish (butter it) ready for the oven: pancakes, 2 per person, interspersed with the tomato-green-bean-sole mixture.

6. Finish with the mixture on top of each pancake and sprinkle with plenty grated Parmiagiano.

7. In the oven, about 10 minutes, until the top turns golden. Serve piping hot!

Buon appetito!

PS: Obviously the recipe would work for any kind of fish or mix of fish and seafood...

The Belgian National Dish: WATERZOIE!

Image by roboppy via Flickr

There are 10 million people in Belgium and probably as many ways to make Waterzoie, the national dish! You can make it with chicken or fish or seafood, but in all cases it will have leeks as its characteristic feature. It really is a leek soup with either chicken or fish floating in it.

Sounds bad? Think again! It really is very, very tasty and remarkably easy to do if you follow my recipe - it can be quite a lot of work if you start from scratch and actually make a broth with bones and vegetables to cook your meat or fish in. We're in the 21st century and I'm not ashamed to confess that I use industrial bouillon cubes...

Another advantage of Waterzoie is that it can be prepared in advance: the perfect dish when you have guests!

So here's the recipe for 4 persons.

Ingredients

2 cups of leeks cut in julienne strips (at least 4 leeks and try to use the white part and not too much of the green)
1/2 cup white onion, likewise cut in strips
1/2 cup celery, also cut in strips
1 whole breast chicken, leave it whole or cut in two halves,   Alternative: fish or seafood 
1 or 2 bouillon cubes (chicken broth for chicken of course, and fish broth for fish, natch!
1 cup cream (since I live in Italy I use Mascarpone, but normal cream is fine and is what's used in Belgium)
1 egg yolk
Juice of 1/2 lemon (or more as needed - it has to have a sharp "tang")
Butter: one tablespoon
Flour to thicken the sauce (about one tablespoonful of flour plus one of cornflour - maizena - but you will need to adjust to the quantity of broth you have)

Boiled potatoes to accompany

Method

Boil the potatoes and while they're boiling prepare the waterzoie.

1. Cut all the vegetables, leeks, onion and celery,  in thin strips - julienne - about 1/2 inch long. Put in a wide pot, cover with water, add bouillon cube and a small amount (a tablespoonful) of butter.

2. Simmer, covered, for about 10 minutes taking care the vegetables don't burn - add water if need be.

3. After that time and as the vegetables start looking limp, add over them the chicken breasts and sprinkle a little salt over the meat. Cover and continue to simmer another 20 minutes until cooked. At that point the vegetables should be soft and the chicken cooked throughout and tender.

3a. If you use fish then you have to add it after the vegetables have cooked at least 20 minutes: the fish always cooks fast. How long that will take depends on the kind of fish you have chosen: for example, sea bass filets in my view don't need more than 5 minutes. Same with shrimps. More time is needed for lobster. Everytime, adjust the cooking of your vegetables that will always require 30 minutes to reach the right point of mellowness.

4. Now in a saucepan prepare the basis of your sauce: beat in a tablespoonful of flour and one of cornflour in 2 cups cold water and set on the fire to boil. This is how I make a "roux": I don't start by melting butter and working the flour in it. That's not needed! You can always add the butter - fresh, better for your health - at the end, when the sauce is done! Remember to beat it with a whisk so that the flour mixes well in the water and keep beating when it boils. It should boil at least 5 minutes to ensure the flour is cooked.

5. Pull out the chicken (or fish) from the pot where cooked and set aside on a warm serving dish (cover to keep the meat warm) You will serve the potatoes peeled in the same serving dish.

6. Do the sauce: pour the "roux" mixture from your saucepan (that you did in step 4) into the pot with the vegetables. Adjust the quantity of broth (I like it fairly liquid - but it's up to you, how thick a leek sauce you really want). Add chicken bouillon cube(s) or fish broth as needed so that it is rather strong tasting: it shouldn't be too bland because at this point you add the cream + egg yolk + lemon juice. Adjust with salt, pepper and lemon to taste. Once the yolk is in, be careful if you need to warm it up : you cannot boil the sauce anymore or it will turn stringy on you!

7. To serve: put the sauce (which will be very abundant!) in a soup toureen, and cut the chicken and potatoes for presentation on the serving dish.

This dish should be accompanied by full-bodied red wine if done with chicken - white wine if done with fish.

Enjoy!  You could be eating this in Brussels!

Image via Wikipedia

Pasta with Smoked Salmon: a totally different recipe and success guaranteed !

Image by nadi0 via Flickr
Most pasta recipes with smoke salmon use a cream sauce to which you add the chopped salmon. Results are often hugely disappointing. All too often, the cream sauce clogs up when the pasta cools, and as you finish your plate, you find it all sticky and gummy.

Not too surprising.

Any pasta sauce that is cream-based is guaranteed to cool off very, very fast! Another problem is with the smoked salmon itself: it is very delicate and difficult to manipulate. It doesn't suffer any heating without losing all its colour and flavour - so if you try to keep your cream sauce warm so that it remains nice and liquid, this will have the unwanted effect of turning your salmon from pink to an unappetizing white shade. It will have a flaky texture and a flat taste. In short, a disaster!

Here's a way to accomodate pasta with smoked salmon WITHOUT running into all these problems. It has a nice salmony taste and never becomes sticky when it cools down. It is in fact just as good at room temperature, so that you can easily use this recipe when you are making a buffet for friends and have to cook in advance and leave the dish standing on the table for half-an-hour or more.

Ingredients: quantities given here are for 4 persons.

- Any kind of pasta will do: fettuccine, pappardelle, penne, farfalle...Follow directions on your package and assume you'll need to cook 80 g of pasta per male guest and 50 g per female guest (I mean the dry pasta - for the fresh variety, raise the amount to 120g and 80 g respectively) 
-   One cup1/2 of ripe, red, fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped fine
-   2 tablespoons of butter
-   1 tablespoon olive oil
-   1 tablespoon grated bottarga or if you can't find it, use powdered fish broth (for example Knorr's fish broth is excellent)
-   1/2 cup (or more, to taste) of fresh, roughly chopped rucola
-   a small glass of Vodka
-   smoked salmon: 200g chopped
-   abundant pepper 

Method

The thing to remember - it's crucial - is to set aside your chopped salmon and add it to the pasta only AFTER you've mixed the pasta in the sauce and the dish has had a chance to cool down.

The first thing to do, apart from setting your water boiling as soon as you walk in the kitchen, is to start preparing the pasta sauce. It is super-easy and requires no cooking (except for peeling the tomatoes by dropping them for a minute in boiling water - in fact, I always use the water in which I cook the pasta for peeling my tomatoes, saves on pots to clean!)

You melt the butter and put all the ingredients in a serving dish and let it sit there while the pasta cooks. Neither the rucola nor the tomatoes need any cooking. Indeed, the tomatoes should be chopped as fine as you can make them, and dropped into the sauce together with their juice. In case you're wondering why I suggest adding olive oil since I've started with butter, it is simply because it ensures a creamier texture, as the oil prevents the butter of going hard on you when it cools.

Then, when the pasta is cooked (and you've set aside in a cup some of the cooking water in case you need it), you simply turn it into your sauce. If it looks dry, just add some of the water in which the pasta has cooked, nothing else and certainly not olive oil or butter. There's no need for additional grease, it would only cover up the taste! When it looks well coated and slighlty liquid at the bottom, turn in the chopped salmon and serve. Btw, with this kind of dish there's no need for Parmigiano cheese.


But do have white wine with it and let me know how you like it!