french fridays with dorie: almond flounder meunière
This week, French Fridays with Dorie brings us another recipe that is seemingly fancy, hence difficult, and turns out to be “elegant and easy”. Almond flounder meunière is a cross between sole amandine and sole meunière, made with flounder instead of sole, obviously. Doesn’t that sounds super French.
Lucky for me, flounder was on weekend special when I went to Whole Foods. $8.99 a pound. How fortuitous!
I loved the technique of brushing the fillets with egg yolk before dipping it in a mixture of ground almonds, flour, and lemon zest. It was easy and much less messy than dipping in multiple bowls.
Butter gets browned in the skillet before briefly sautéing the fish on both sides. The browned butter didn’t really do anything for me. And, even though I thought I was using plenty of butter, there really wasn’t enough to spoon over the fish as instructed.
The end result was wonderful. Delicate fillets of flounder with the nutty crust, topped with a squeeze of lemon, chopped parsley and some toasted almond slices. With some brown rice medley and sautéed spinach on the side, it was a perfect meal. I made it on Sunday, but it was easy enough to make on a weeknight. The only disappointment is that I made enough for two, we polished it off, and there were no leftovers.
There’s not much else to say about this one, except to give it thumbs up.
Check out how the other bloggers made out with their French fish here. We don’t post the recipes, but consider getting your own copy of the book, Dorie Greenspan’s book Around My French Table. Maybe you’ll even want to cook along with us on Fridays. You’ll have fun, I promise.
tuesdays with dorie / baking with julia: hungarian shortbread
Have I mentioned how much I love my cake dome? Along with that comes the enjoyment of making anything that I can store, prettily, on my counter, in the cake dome. This week’s selection for Tuesdays with Dorie / Baking with Julia, the new bi-weekly baking group I’m taking part in, fit that bill. Enter, the lovely Hungarian Shortbread.
I’m a huge fan of the more traditional Scottish shortbread, simple yet rich, tasting purely of its short list of ingredients. I wasn’t sure how this recipe would stack up.
Hungarian shortbread was a completely different animal than what I’ve had before. In addition to the usual butter, flour, and sugar, the recipe called for egg yolks and baking powder. This changed the texture completely. It was more like a dense cake than a cookie.
The technique was unusual as well. The dough was frozen briefly to firm it up. Then you grate it into the pan. This makes for a fluffier crumb.
Two layers of dough sandwich a tart jam in the middle. The recipe in the book included instructions for a homemade rhubarb spread, but I found a jar of rhubarb-raspberry fruit spread in the pantry, from Austria, no less. That seemed perfect to fill my Hungarian shortbread.
I’ll mention that I had a mental block to making a single pan of something that used a full pound of butter. I compromised by making a half recipe in an 8-inch square pan. No less rich, but less of it to eat. Surprisingly, I still needed to bake the smaller pan for the full 40 minutes to bring to golden brown.
I loved the look of the oodles of powdered sugar on top. Some melted, which gave it the look of a crumb cake, and I added an extra dose for fun when the cake cooled.
The suggested size for the finished cookies was 3 inch squares, which, besides not working out evenly for an 8-inch pan, seemed huge to me. I started with 2-inch squares, which I served when my friend April came over for tea. I ended up cutting the rest diagonally into triangles, which seemed like the perfect-size to me.
While these won’t take the place of Scottish shortbread in my heart, but I did like this fancy treat. I’ll definitely make it again. As an added bonus, it’s the right sort of recipe for using up the assorted jars of jam and jelly on my pantry shelves.
If you’d like the recipe, please visit this week’s hosts: the multi-talented and very funny Cher (a fellow Dorista from the Friday group) at The not so excited adventures of a dabbler… and Lynette at 1smallkitchen.
A Plateful of Happiness 