Salmon with Crème Fraîche and Peas

I have said it before and I will say it again: one of the best things about all this cooking is when you find you enjoyed food that you thought you really would not.

I am not a big fish fan… this may seem surprising when I have cooked dishes with tuna, monkfish, shellfish and haddock but they have, for the most part, been fried or baked not boiled. I have had issues with boiled fish mainly because my nanna loved boil in the bag fish with parsley sauce and the smell used to really make me cringe.

However, since I have conquered so much this is a minor one to give a go to.

Ingredients (serves 4):

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 leek, thinly sliced
• 250ml chicken stock
• 100g reduced-fat crème fraîche
• 300g frozen peas
• 4 skinless salmon fillets
• a pinch of dried chives

Heat the oil in a large lidded non-stick frying pan and cook the leek for 10 minutes so that it has softened. Pour in the stock and then, after simmering on a medium-low heat for a few minutes, add the crème fraîche with the peas and the salmon.

Stick the lid on (not literally) and simmer for 12-15 minutes then serve with the chives sprinkled on top.

Adapted from here

Verdict: Delicious, and when you consider what it actually in it then it will come as no surprise. What I loved most about this dish (which I served over some microwaved rice) was the creaminess that could be found in the salmon fillet itself as you bit into it.

Since we are using reduced-fat crème fraîche there will always be a slight issue with of it separating out as it cooks. I found that as long as you did not bring the pan to boiling point and simmered the salmon on a low flame in the latter stages of cooking that you can keep separation to an absolute minimum.

Calorie Count: 380 per serving

Day 74: Herb-Crusted Fish Fingers

Today’s Exercise: 32 minutes on Wii Fit, 13,000 steps

Welcome back to this two-part recipe for fish fingers, chips and beans.

When setting out to make this you need to be aware of how much fish costs, especially in the amounts needed for this recipe, so during this recipe I will generically refer to ‘fish’ so as not to openly show support for one species. The original recipe called for lemon sole which is quite expensive and is such a nice bit of fish that I was actually told by the parental not to get it as ‘it would be a waste’. This from the woman whose idea of cooking with fish is having it baked with lemon and butter.

So if you have access to lemon sole by all means find and use it in this recipe. For everyone else other alternatives to this include pollock, plaice, cod, flounder and orange roughly. If you have to buy cod try to make sure you get it sustainably farmed since it is an endangered species after all. The best thing to do is to do what I did; go to the fish section of your local supermarket and find fish that goes off the next day. You can get a decent amount of fish for anywhere between 25-50% off and as long as it doesn’t look like it is about to kill you then buy it. Still, be careful with this method since this is how food poisoning can occur (as my mum found out the hard way when she got some cheap mussels from Marks & Spencer’s, not a pretty time for either of us).

Ingredients (serves 4):

• 50g stale WeightWatchers white bread, crusts cut off
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 2 tbsp fresh dill, roughly chopped
• 2 tbsp fresh chives, roughly chopped
• 2 tbsp fresh parsley, roughly chopped
• 500g skinless fish fillets
• 2 tbsp flour, seasoned with salt and black pepper
• 1 egg, beaten
• vegetable oil, for shallow frying

In a small food processor put in the stale bread and pulse until you get coarse breadcrumbs. To this add the lemon zest, herbs and a pinch of salt. Pulse this until you’ve made fine green breadcrumbs.

Now cut your fish into thick strips about 3cm wide. Dust all the strips with the flour. Make sure that each strip is coated in the flour and shake off the excess. Dip them in the beaten egg followed by the breadcrumbs. Do this for all the fish fingers and you are ready to cook them.

Now fry these up in a frying pan containing oil at a depth of about 1cm. Do a few at a time for 1-2 minutes at a time. Keep these warm in the oven when they are done so that you can make the others.

Adapted from here

Verdict: Truth is. Because of the large amount of fish and chips involved in the last two recipes I decided not to open that tin of beans. None of us missed them though as the marriage of these herby fish fingers and the oven baked chips was absolutely heavenly.

I was a bit overly zealous when breading the first batch of  fish fingers meaning that by the end they were barely covered… whoops. Still though it didn’t matter one iota as the fish itself was light and flaky and delicious. All in all this was a good experiment and I think it has earnt me enough brownie points to go off into the wacky recipes for a week or so.

Calorie Count: 274 per serving

Day 67: Nectarine, Tomato and Rocket Bruschetta

Today’s Exercise: 36 minutes on Wii Fit, 11,500 steps

I am just a sucker for punishment sometimes. I allow my Wii Fit free rein to toy around my exercise regime today, a first, and it makes me do juggling and steprobics! Ugh! Seriously! So I told it to stuff that and went back to my regular yoga and muscle exercises. Further proof that I am a glutton for punishment is that instead of my traditional lunch of low-fat sandwich meat on WeightWatchers bread with some peanuts of a small pack of crisps (don’t laugh it’s yummy) I opted to make something a bit different. This is all after I had spent 30-45 minutes in the kitchen this morning wrestling with kidney beans for tonight’s dinner (the recipe for which is now typed up and ready for a time when I am not making anything new).

I have been a fan of bruschetta since I was 7 when my mum took me on a trip to Umbria with some of her friends. The routine would be sight-seeing (mostly churches, blerg) and a lot of driving. In the evening we would seek out a place in whatever town we were in and have dinner. Being young I was horrendously unadventurous opting for garlic bread and either Bolognese or Carbonara. However, I did try various types of bruschetta and fell in love. Today’s recipe is a very weird version that has been concocted using a recipe for salsa found online. Don’t worry if you can not find yellow tomatoes as red ones taste exactly the same.

Ingredients (makes 10 slices):

• 2 nectarines, cut into small cubes
• 1/2 cup rocket, coarsely chopped
• 1 1/4 cups mix of yellow and red tomatoes, diced
• 1 red chilli, finely chopped
• 1 tsp dried chives
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 1oz reduced-fat feta cheese, crumbled
• 1 french stick/baguette, ends discarded and diagonally cut into 10 pieces

Mix the oil, vinegar, tomatoes, nectarines, rocket, chives and chilli together in a bowl and set aside. Toast the baguette slices under a grill for about 2-3 minutes per side, or until golden brown.

Spoon the mixture onto the toasted bread and top with some crumbled cheese.

Adapted from here

Verdict: This recipe takes the prize for the most colourful I have made for this blog. It just looked like an explosion in a greengrocers which was then topped with feta cheese. Delicious. I was a bit hesitant at first about whether the nectarines combined with the tomatoes would make for an overpowering sweetness but this was not the case. The sourness of the vinegar and the salty hint from the cheese acted as the perfect counterbalance to this, as well as the slight bitterness from the rocket. This is best enjoyed when the bread is still nice and warm.

Calorie Count: 184 per 2 slice serving

Day 9: Enoki Mushroom Pancakes

Today’s Exercise: 31 minutes on Wii Fit, 12,000 steps

This time last week I had to make a substitution of oyster mushrooms for enoki since there was no way in hell that Morrisons would ever do them. However, over the weekend we paid a visit to Bluewater (how I love it so) and went to the John Lewis foodhall and there they were large as life the white citadels that are enoki mushrooms.

It’s a little bit pathetic I know but finding them made me so excited that not only did I have to buy them but ALSO had to find a suitably delicious sounding recipe. Allegedly the best way to eat these are raw but I have never been the biggest fan of raw mushrooms so when I stumbled across a Korean cookery blog with a hot recipe for enoki mushrooms… well there was no contest really.

Ingredients (serves 2):

• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 pack of enoki mushrooms, roots cut off and washed
• 1/4 onion, very finely chopped
• 4 stalks of chives, finely chopped
• 1 small carrot, finely chopped
• pinch of salt and pepper
• 1 tbsp all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp sesame oil

Add the flour and sesame oil onto the mushrooms then roll the mushrooms to thoroughly coat them. In a separate bowl mix the egg, salt, pepper and the remaining vegetables. Lay the mushrooms on the top of this mixture.

Pre heat a frying pan and then spritz with a few sprays of low-calorie oil. Use a tablespoon and a fork (or better yet chopsticks) to scoop the mix onto the frying pan. The point of the fork/chopsticks is to ensure the proper positioning of the mushrooms in the pancake mixture. Then cook the pancake on a medium heat for about 2-3 minutes per side, then serve.

Adapted from here

Verdict: They were okay, but there are a few things that I need to say about them. Firstly there was way too much onion in this which overpowered the taste of the mushrooms, in essence they could have been any species of mushroom so the use of enoki must be either traditional to the dish or for the sake of decadence. Also, because of the positioning of the enoki mushrooms, being laid on top of the mixture, there was a fair degree of difficulty in constructing the food on its way to the frying pan.

Overall, the dish is something I am not likely to make again because it seems a waste of enoki mushrooms. I tried some raw and they were absolutely delicious. Truly, the best mushrooms that I have ever tasted with a subtly sweet taste. I am likely to try and find these mushrooms again to use in salads but never again in pancakes. But that is why I started this blog, to try out new things. Like how I used chives in this recipe having never liked them before.

Calorie Count: 150 calories per person