liffey’s blog food wine and fun

This is an Italian recipe from the cookbook: The Silver spoon. This book is great, it are 2000+ of the best Italian recipes, name a vegetable, meat or fish and you'll get 10 recipes with each of them.

This is a recipe of sea-brass, not the filet's but the whole fish.

Place them in a baking dish on baking paper, make your baking paper big enough to cover the dish as well.

Place a whole branch of Rosemary in the fisg and some sliced garlic.
Sprinkle union, parsley and seasoning on the skin and lemon.
finish the dish by sprinkling a glass of dry white wine over the fish and cover with your baking paper, close your package well and place in the oven for 15 minutes on 200 degrees.

I served it with carrot appelmint mousse, appelmint is a kind of mint with a little taste of apple, really nice, see the picture for the looks :-)

I served this brass with a RED wine. A German wine from Eduard Schuster from 2005, which was a beautiful summer in europe which gave some really nice wines.
This wine is from the Spätburgunder, elsewhere known as pinot noir. Is is a nice summer wine with not to much alcohol (11,5%).
It starts fresh but goed really quick to a nice sweetness with light red fruits like raspberry and strawberry. Is is like a heavy rosé, or a very light red wine, really nice with this dish with all the garlic and herbs.

So the weekend starts with a good breakfast, actually i am going to serve them this night on the dutch beach at 04.00 am...

Nice time for some delicious scones i would say!

Those are really good and easy to make, so give yourself this lovely classical breakfast.

300 gr of flour
8 tablespoons of raisins
some salt
50 gr of sugar
85 gr of butter
1 egg
1 egg yellow.
1 egg white.
2 tea spoons of baking powder.
120 ml milk


Mix everything together except the milk egg and eggyellow, mix those apart.
Save the eggwhite as well.

After mixing add your egg and milk, keep your egg-white apart.

separate the big dough into 8 little ones and rub the egg white on top, make nice round.

Place them on 200 degrees in the oven and serve with (homemade) jam and whipped cream.

40 minutes work and a really nice breakfast!

Weekend!
Time to spend some minutes in the kitchen.
To start this cooking weekend i made a rucola pesto. A simple recipe and good taste with fish, chicken and cheese, so several possibility's to pimp your dinnerdish or lunch this weekend!

Shopping-list:
20 gr pine-tree pits (What the h*ll is english for that?) roasted!
40 gr of Rucola
Some sundried tomatoes (2 or 3)
50 gr of pecorino
extra virgin olive oil
Some salt.

Mix them all together with your kitchenhelp, cover with some extra oil and save in the fridge. This is usable for at least 2 weeks, and believe me, you have finished it way before :-)

I found this recipe somewhere else on the internet. in the original recipe was a piece of garlic added, but i am not so keen on garlic because it doesn't leave much space for other ingredients, much to dominant. In stead of the garlic i added the salt.

Cucumbersoup is light and fresh, espaccially when you pimp it with mint!

Slice 2 cucumbers in the lenght and remove the seeds.
Cut into small pieces.

Chop an union and stew in butter for two minutes. Add 2/3 of the cucumer and let simmer for 10 minutes.
Add 1 liter of chicken boullion and let simmer for another 30 minutes.
Add 200 ml of greece yoghurt.

Serve in deep plates and finish with some fresh chopped mint and small bits of Cucumber.
I served it with smokes salmon on french bread.

I opende a bottle of Argiolas Costamolino 2007.

It has a fresh start with a nose of mint and aniseed.
It starts a bit spicy with a long bitter end.

Another pretty good combination :-)

Here a nice starter, easy to prepare and impressively tasty!

First of all you'll make the sage almond pesto.
Take two hands full af sage and about 70 gr of almond. Cut it in the foodproccessor, add a good pecorino and olive oil to make smooth. This pesto will be useable for weeks.

The salicornia is shortly baked in butter (about 1 min).

Wrap some smoked ham around the coquille and cut in thin slices. Place upon the warm salicornia and serve the pesto beside.
Sprinkle some oile oil over the coquilles.

This starter needs a fresh wine, I choose for a wine frome the loire, known for the freshness in the white wines.

This wine starts really fresh but with this silty dish it gets sweetness with it, a good combination.
Sauvingon blanc 2006 Touraine, les hauts lieux.

My Garden is not big, pretty small actually, but it has 3 square meters with fresh herbs, those are essential for me when i am cooking. Fresh herbs have so much more flavour then dried, and some, like coriander have a completely different taste.

What is in my garden? Sage, a really lot, i have a recipe of sage pesto, that is one to follow this weekend for me.
Basil of course, green and some red.
Thyme.
Koriander.
Parsley two types.
Dill, for all the frsh fish this summer.
Terragon, one to discover for, i will experiment a lot with terragon this season.
chive for butters and meals.
Sweet majoram.
Savory.
Oregano.

Srping is the perfect season for good lamb.
I mixed fresh thyme (a lot) with 5 tabelspoons of honey.
The butcher took the bone out of the leg, and i filled the hole with the honey and thyme.
I Spread the other half of the honey/thyme all around the outside and seasoned it as well.

I fried the outside in a hot pan for about 10 minutes, all around.

I placed the Lamb in a oven platter.
The difficult thing is to cook this very SLOW.
The temperature came never above 100 degrees celsius. I used an oven temperaturemeter in the oven because the oven itself is not very accurate on low temperatures.

After 3 and a half hour the inner temperature reached 87 degrees and the lamb was ready to eat.

I took those pictures just after i finished the cooking. It took 10 minutes, and then the meat was perfectly rose on the inside! But you don't see that on my pictures, i took them to early.
The meat was lovely smooth, thyme and honey everywere with a well seasoned crust, beautiful!

Then the wine.
I opened a Ca' de' Rocchi monteré ripasso 2005. This is a  valpolicella superieure.

It had a great heavy smell of fruits, very sweet and nice, the ripasso means that the grapes are dried for nine months, and i could find that in the smell. The taste is long but never heavy, the complexity of the smell can't be found in the taste, that might be a pity but i really enjoyed this one and won't bother to open another one. Because of the smoothness of this wine it went very well with this piece of lamb.

This is a nice recipe for a tasty salad.

Ingredients:
4 paprika, different colors.
20 strings of chive.
honey 1/2 TS
Mustard 1 TS
cognac 2 TS
oliveoil 4 TS
red wine vinegar 4 TS
1 piece of garlic.
Black olives (i used Kalamatas).
Salt and pepper.

Place the 4 paprika's in the oven, 180 degrees of 30 minutes.
Get rid of the skin, and cut in small strokes.

Mix the other ingredients and place the parika strokes in the vinegrette.

Cover and place in the fridge for a few hours.
I served it with fresh baked bread en a rose.

So as i like music, i like vinyl as well, and the last hype was to make some good sleeve faces.
So last day we took our camera, and shot some sleeve faces.

What do you think?

greets

wouter!

I guess you will find a good recipe for this classical salad.

We used the following ingredients:
Patatoes
haricots vert
tomato
sjalot
red wine vinager
mustard
oliveoil
egg
anjovis
olives
sweet union
different types of lettuce (use tasty ones so don't make a choice for the ice berg lettuce...)
fresh basil
fresh  coriander
pamasan cheese
Salt and pepper.

Make a nice dressing from the sjalot, olive oil, red wine vinegar and mustard.
Mix the other ingredients (some cooked, some not :-) and add the dressing.

Place the salmon on top (baked...) and finish with the parmasan.

Enjoy with a nice white wine or rose.