Sole Belle Meunière (and More) : Lesson 11 : LCB at Home

Here's the pictures and commentary.  I'll omit recipes this week becasue by now you have the book, I'm sure.

Petits Légumbres à la Greque : Marinated Vegetables with Lemon and Coriander

The essence of this vegetable "salad" was to cook and then cool all the vegs in a wine, olive oil, water, coriander and black peppercorn marinade, separately - - and then serve them separately too.  It came out very well - quite tasty. But it was too many vegetables for 6 people; I'm guessing the book's got a misprint on the amounts in this recipe.

Here's two pictures because there were so many bowls of them:

Mushrooms, artichokes, asparagus,  pearl onions

Leeks, carrots, cauliflower

There were way too many veggies for the table, cut the quantity on carrots back to a half pound [1/4 kilo], use a 1/4 head of cauliflower, 1/2 kilo [3/4 pound] mushrooms.  That, and we added asparagus, which was not in the official recipe, becuase they looked so tasty in the shop.

Sole Belle Meunière : Pan-Fried Sole with Nut-Brown Butter and Mushrooms

This is delicious but my plating was a little sloppy; therefore the picture's confused too.

This would have looked great on a long, rectangular plate; with the filets slightly overlapping, the mushrooms ranged along one side of the plate and the lemons on the other... something like that.  But it's not.  What I've got instead is a round plate and...there's a simple pan-fired sole, decorative lemons on it, a lemon / butter sauce over the sole and some fried mushrooms to top all that; dropped on some lemon wedges too.

The fresh Dover sole was salted, peppered, dredged in a dusting of flour and then fired in a very hot pan in butter and oil - maybe 2 minutes a side.  Simple, delicious. We also did a couple of Basa filets (that's a sort of catfish-like fish) exactly the same way (those, of course, took a bit longer to cook 'cause they're much bigger and thicker) - - those were also delish; more highly praised than the sole as a matter of fact.

Dover Sole is quite hard to come by, fresh.  Use frozen or some other fish works just as well.

Cygnes Chantilly : Choux Pastry Swans

The other pastry swan picture was better (see: Vegetables : Sole : Pastries : Lesson 11 : Le Cordon Bleu at Home) but I don't want to repeat it.

These are filled with Chantilly cream (whipping cream).  The fun was to construct these at the table after dinner (the choux body was baked and the necks baked but we hadn't assembled the pieces into swan shapes yet).  The whole group pitched in and cut choux, trimmed wings, filled the bodies, stuck on the necks and wings.  Then ate them.

When making the necks a couple of neck shapes snapped (broke) while being freed from the pastry sheet.  These were glued back together with a dab of egg-glaze on the broken ends of each piece and stuck back in the oven for 2 minutes for the egg to "set" and adhere the two fragments together.  Saved!  Another approach would be to make about 15 neck shapes for each swan body the you have.  Allow for failures.  Also, grease the pastry sheet really really well.

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That's it for last week's dinner.  Short(ish) and fast because I don't have time to do three entries for the meal;  I wouldn't get them finished before starting on the next set.  Gradually getting further and further behind.  Better, I think, to have the pictures and commentary than the recipes anyway.