Fish Saturday

On Saturday morning I managed to get daughter 2 to ballet for 9am.  Afterwards as the rain hammered we embraced Stroud Farmer's market.  I love the organic fruit and veg in Shambles Market.  I miss my Riverford box and this comes close.  Also in the Shambles Market is a great fish stall,  David Felce and daughters.  With Elizabeth David in hand I chose lemon sole fillets for dinner, whilst standing in the pouring rain I thought it was the day to tick off a fish soup recipe too so I bought some prawns and cod.
When we got home wet through it was time for breakfast, another ED tick, eggs mollet with tinned sardines.  No sooner had we finished breakfast than it was time to cook lunch.  A Nimois soup.  A broth  was made from some carrots, tomatoes a stick of celery, the cod, the prawn shells and a stick of fennel. These were all boiled up together.  A paste was made from breadcrumbs and prawns, crushed together in a pestle and mortar.  The sieved broth was then added to this gradually, with a finish of cream transforming into a deletable soup.
Then for dinner the sole in a cream and onion sauce, (delicious despite burning the shallots),  with home grown kale.
As we sat down to watch the second part of Ghandi I felt disappointed I hadn't achieved more on Saturday, but the food was great and Ghandi even better.

Friday night bliss

It's a friday night and it's been raining cats and dogs all day.  The husband is still not home from work, children to bed, husband still not home from work.  Husband appears, dusted with flour: he's been baking.
Dinner time.  We open wine, red a 2004 bottle of bordeaux, "were we meant to keep that?", "drink it", worth it.  What's for dinner?  Veal escalopes (18 more veal recipes to go).  Escalopes de veau cauchoise, in little more than five minutes I produced the nicest dinner I had eaten all week.  The escalopes were seasoned with salt, pepper and lemon juice.  A peeled apple was diced.  1oz of butter was melted in a pan the escalopes were fried on each side,  the diced apple was added, a heated glass of brandy( calvados or whisky is apparently better)  was ignited and added and finally 1/4 pint of cream all cooked for a couple more minutes.  I braved the rain to pick our first lot of kale, steamed on the side, friday night bliss.