Jun 28 2008
A Couple Recipes
Last night I made Flounder Florentine - using whiting instead of flounder and using collards instead of spinach. I thought I’d explain it because it was pretty simple and Michael said it was good.
To start, I boiled water with a vegetable bouillon cube. You could certainly use meat stock if you choose. Then I rinsed and cut a bunch of collards (probably 5 or 6 stems) - I cut out the middle stem and then rolled up the leaves and chopped them. I think they call this chiffonading them. It’s the easiest way I’ve seen to chop up collards. The collards boiled for fifteen minutes in the veggie stock.
While boiling the collards, I took out four of the frozen whiting fillets and set them into a glass dish to thaw out in the oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Then I grated half a cup of Parmesan, set a cup of soy milk into the microwave for a couple minutes (until it nearly boils) and threw a small saucepan on low heat and put in three tablespoons of butter. I melted the butter and then threw in three tablespoons of flour. You may worry at first about chunks of flour, but if you constantly stir the mixture, it will thicken and smooth out. I stirred it over the heat until it was a very pretty yellow color. I would have cooked this roux longer if I was making a white sauce for veggie sausage biscuits, but since I was adding Parmesan, I didn’t want too much color in the roux.
I took it off the heat to add the nearly boiling soy milk, and mixed that over the heat until it gets the thickness I wanted, then I took it off the heat again to add the Parmesan. While I mixed that off the heat, I added salt and then pepper and garlic powder - which are both entirely unheard of in a florentine sauce. Finally, I added all my collards (after draining them in a colander for a few minutes) - probably a cup or two cooked - into the sauce and mixed it in to make sure it got entirely covered in sauce.
The fish came out of the oven, I threw a little bit of butter in the pan (1 Tb or so) so the fish wouldn’t stick and then piled the sauce on the fillets. They cooked for a little over ten minutes at 375 until they flaked with a fork. Then we salted them (I notoriously under-salt, Michael loves salt way more than I do) and each of us had one fillet along with a whole wheat roll.
I have to say this is entirely not traditional, but I really loved the garlic, and the collards. So often I use frozen spinach doing a dish like this and it doesn’t retain any texture. The collards were tender but they still had a little bite to them.
Secondly - the other day I told Michael I wanted Pimm’s. It’s a british liquor, reminds me of the time I spent in England and of Summer. He went looking for it at our local liquor stores but none of them had it in stock right now. So he created a riff on it using 1 part gin, 1 part red vermouth, 1/2 part orange curacao. Using 1 part of the alcohol mixture with 3 parts fizzy lemonade (in our case, diet lemon lime soda), he then added orange, lemon, lime and strawberries to the cup. It tasted fresh and summer-y and hardly like alcohol at all. We each had two and then I stopped drinking and Michael continued with wild blackberry Korean wine and also North Korean Pyongyang soju. We have a local liquor store with Korean employees and they tend to carry a lot of really nifty Korean alcohol.
I tasted the Soju mixed with warm water and it was very good. Sweet tasting before and after taste, but almost no middle-taste. This one lacked complexity, but it was definitely a good drink for getting drunk.