La petite biscotte

Does it happen to you sometimes that late in the evening you think all of a sudden, “I really feel like eating cookies”? Of course it’s always in those moments that you don’t have any cookies left, neither in the pantry nor in the freezer. Then you start contemplating if you should really get up and make a batch and after half an hour of yes/no/maybe you make up your mind and go for it.

While frantically searching for anything that could fit into a cookie, I stumbled upon a jar of peanut butter, sugar, eggs, flour, almonds and… and that was about it. I was so disappointed when I saw that I had none of the usual ingredients like chocolate chips available, but at that point I was already past caring and the need for a cookie was starting take control of the logical part of my brain. So I went ahead and made some peanut butter cookies. When C. (my husband) tasted them he was like:

“… hmm … Interesting”. -_-

Uhm yeah, we all know what that means, but hey, at least I really didn’t feel like eating anything anymore after that cookie

What can we learn from this? Firstly never give in to midnight baking temptations unless your pantry is really well stocked. Secondly always keep some emergency cookies handy.

This morning I decided to cook one of my favorite dishes to make up for those atrocious cookies: Thai chicken curry with coconut milk. This was a great opportunity to use up some of those chili peppers we had bought last week, this time however in a MUCH lower quantity. The result was absolutely amazing and this is one of those fast dishes that completely blow people in your house away just by the way it smells. Anyway, hubby is always happy when he smells curry.

Thai Chicken Curry with Coconut Milk

• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 chili pepper (depending on how hot your peppers are, use a little more or less)
• 1 carrot, cut in bite-sized pieces
• 2 chicken breasts, cut in dices
• 1/2 cup frozen peas
• 1/2 cup green beans
• 1 tsp grated ginger
• 2 tsp curry powder
• 1 can of coconut milk
• 1 tsp sugar
• oil for cooking (peanut oil for example)
• optional: lemon grass

In a large saucepan heat 2 tablespoons of oil. When the pan is really hot (and that means piping hot) add the meat and cook it from all sides until it starts to get brown. Add the onions and the other vegetables and cook everything over medium-high heat for about 4-5 minutes until the chicken is cooked and the vegetables as well (they should still be al dente though).

Add the spices as well as some pepper to taste and pour the coconut milk into the pan. Sir well and reduce the heat to a very low simmer. You must be careful with coconut milk and heat as it can somewhat disintegrate if cooked too long. Add the sugar and salt the curry to taste.  Remove from heat after about two minutes.

Serve with hot rice. Serves 3-4. Enjoy

Spring is approaching and normally markets should start to feature all sorts of asparagus. Since I absolutely love this vegetable I was looking for it a few days ago when I went to the supermarket, with a specific recipe in mind that I’ve always wanted to try. So while perusing the selection, I stumbled upon the most amazing jalapeños I had ever seen - a full basket of shiny chili peppers that simply begged to be taken home and cooked. But no, I told myself, I was there for the stunning, fresh asparagus they were supposed to have!

After searching for it for what must have been five minutes, I finally found five lots of it, tucked away behind all the potato-baskets where no one could possibly find them. Actually that was quite fortunate for the asparagus as it was so dried out and shabby that it looked like little bundles of straw. Quite amazing actually when you think about it. You set out to cook seasonal/local vegetables that should be available in abundance right now but instead, in this little supermarket in one of the most remote places of Provence, we had the choice between jalapenos, shiitake mushrooms and flown-in papayas :p

Anyway Mexican food is great and we weren’t going to complain. When we came home from University today we started cooking right away and whilst my husband loves to taste everything I’m chopping on the cutting board, he glanced at me rather dubiously when I asked him to taste how hot the jalapenos were. But you see, the great thing about men is that they’d never openly admit that something is too hot for them (lucky for me :p). So when he finally took a bite he told me it was quite hot but said that I should go ahead and put in two of them! And that’s what I did.

Suffice to say that the chili completely owned us. But still, with our eyes and noses running and our mouths literally burning we still chomped our way through the bowl because it was simply too good.

This is a quick recipe for a low-fat chili - something you can make for your whole family when you come home from work as it really only requires a little chopping in the beginning. The short cooking time is also one of the reasons why we chose ground beef, which doesn’t need to stew as long as chunks to be tender.

30-Minute Chili Con Carne (low-fat)

• 350g low-fat ground beef
• 1 onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 pepper of each color (red, yellow, green)
• 2 tomatoes
• 1-2 green chili peppers
• 3 Tbsp tomato paste
• 200 ml tomato purée
• 250 ml quality stock, either beef or chicken
• a pinch of sugar
• 1 can red beans
• pepper, salt, thyme, sweet paprika
• 2 Tbsp olive oil

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Finely chop the onion and the garlic and heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the onions and the garlic and cook them for several minutes until they become transparent.

In the meantime dice the peppers and the tomatoes and finely chop the chili peppers.

Once the onions have cooked long enough, add the ground beef and use a wooden spatula to break it up while cooking it. After about 3 minutes add all the vegetables you’ve chopped before as well as the spices (minus the salt).

Add the chicken stock, the tomato purée and the tomato paste and let everything simmer for 30 minutes, uncovered, over medium-low heat. Stir occasionally.

Season to taste with salt and pepper and add the sugar to cut the acidity of the tomato. Also fold in the red beans, then take off the heat.

Serves 4. Serve with grated cheese, onions, tortilla chips, corn bread etc.

Oh, what a horrible picture… better ones to come soon - promise!

Contents:

• Japanese rice with chicken, carrots and aburaage
• Steamed brussel sprouts
• Finely shredded thin omelette
• Polenta crusted chicken

Today is a sinister day indeed as I decided to let go of the dear camera that has so far accompanied me on my culinary adventures. Unfortunately it’s been a while since I noticed that the camera was ailing. The pictures, as you probably have noticed, are completely blurred and I simply don’t manage to arrange enough lighting in the room for the camera to stop taking my movements into account. Even pictures that I take outside are not as sharp as I’d like them to be but I have to say that I’m not the least bit surprised. After all, I had bought the thing for 99 Euros at a department store and at the time I didn’t even think about using it for food photography. So yes, I decided that it was high time to stop disappointing myself and my readers with blurred pictures and as far as my investigations go, I found out that my dear husband is maybe going to offer me a new camera for my birthday on March 14 but pssst, it’s all top secret still!

The bento that you see above was assembled rather quickly as I’m still struggling to get enough time to even cook properly. What’s great about it is that you can prepare it with a minimum of dishes. I used the rice cooker to make the chicken/aburaage rice and I added the steaming container on top to cook the brussel sprouts at the same time. Apart from that I only used a frying pan for the polenta crusted chicken which I managed to coat and fry while the rice was cooking. You might wonder what aburaage is and sadly it’s one of those things you can only find in bigger Asian supermarkets. Basically it’s deep fried tofu slices which are often canned and preserved in a sweet-savory sauce (it’s those brown little bags that are used for Inari sushi). You can sometimes find them in shops that are specialized in Japanese ingredients but don’t be surprised if they ask 4-5 euros for a little can, but hey, once in a while…

I won’t add a recipe for the polenta crusted chicken because it’s really just chicken coated first in flour, then egg, then polenta (then fried). But when you choose the corn flour (or polenta) for this, be sure to choose the one with the smallest grains and be sure to cook it in enough oil, else the grains will be too crunchy.

Japanese Rice with Chicken, Carrot, Aburaage (Inspired by Bento Boxes, Japanese meals on the go)

• 2 cups uncooked Japanese rice, washed
• 1 small carrot, julienned
• 100g of aburaage, julienned
• 100g chicken, diced
• 3 Tbsp soy sauce
• 2 Tbsp mirin
• 1/2 Tbsp sake

Put the rice into your rice cooker and add the soy sauce, mirin and sake. Add enough water so it reaches the usual 2-cup mark. Place the other ingredients on top of the rice and turn on your rice cooker. Once the rice is cooked stir in the ingredients from the top and add seasoning to taste. Serves 4, sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds for example.

When I was little, my mum used to make a gratin with spätzle, cauliflower and broccoli. Even though she used a ready-mix to make the sauce for the gratin, I couldn’t get enough of it. But which kid can actually get enough of spätzle?

Unfortunately I couldn’t make any spätzle because I didn’t have eggs left, but I used pasta instead and it tasted (almost) just as good! To replace the ready-mix sauce I made a thin sauce béchamel and flavoured it with an onion and a little stock powder.

One reason why I love this gratin so much is that it’s a delicious way of eating broccoli, which is an incredibly healthy vegetable. Its health benefits beat the ones of most other vegetables. I generally think that it’s quite important to find an alternative to the 2-3 sad florets of cooked broccoli, which we typically serve with our roast dinner. Actually I think that the broccoli feels mistreated and sad, having to share the plate with a big mean piece of meat!

Ingredients

• 500g broccoli, cleaned and cut in florets
• 500g cauliflower, cleaned and cut in florets
• 2 little carrots, cleaned and cut in slices
• 250g pasta, cooked
• 300ml of this sauce béchamel (infused with an onion)
• 2 tsp stock powder
• salt & pepper
• 125g of grated cheese, I used gruyère

Preparation

Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan and add salt. Turn the heat to medium. First add the cauliflower and let it cook for about 2 minutes, then add the carrots and let both cook for 2 more minutes. Then add the Broccoli and let everything cook for 4 more minutes.

Drain the vegetables from the water and put them in a gratin dish. Add the cooked pasta.

If the sauce béchamel isn’t seasoned yet, season it and add the stock powder. Keep whisking as you don’t want the sauce to develop a skin.

Heat your oven to approximately 180°C. Pour the sauce over the vegetables and the pasta and mix everything well. Sprinkle with cheese and bake in the oven until golden brown.

Serves 4

When my mother in law returned from Canada she brought back the most amazing maple syrup. You could literally drink it with a straw the whole day and you wouldn’t get tired of it. Apparently there is a great difference between store-bought maple syrup that we can find in local supermarkets and real maple syrup which is produced traditionally in smaller quantities. The difference is as striking as comparing Blue Nun to an expensive Cabernet Sauvignon (I was told).

Well this maple syrup does taste amazing and I’m actually trying to use it in savory dishes because I’d very much like to get away from the habit of drowning pancakes in maple syrup and only using it for desserts. I was actually inspired by a cookbook from Canada which describes how to marinate fish or any other type of meat with maple syrup before cooking it.

When I tried those recipes I wasn’t all that satisfied because you couldn’t really taste the maple syrup (there were other flavours in the marinade which were simply too strong, like Dijon mustard). So I decided to use the syrup with a neutral soy sauce to create a glaze on the fish. My husband was amazed by the subtle taste of maple syrup on the salmon. The combination with soy sauce made this quite a yummy take on teriyaki. And the best is: the whole dish, whilst looking quite sophisticated etc, was done in less than 25 minutes!

Ingredients

• 2 pieces of salmon (can be frozen)
• 3 Tbsp of soy sauce
• 1 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup
• 1 zucchini
• 2 carrots
• 5-6 cherry tomatoes
• salt, pepper
• vegetable oil

Preparation

1. Wash the carrots, zucchini and the tomatoes. Peel the carrots. Using a vegetable peeler, slice the carrots and the zucchini in thin stripes (like large pasta). Cut the cherry tomatoes in a half.
2. Mix the soy sauce and the maple syrup in a bowl. Stir to dissolve the syrup completely.
3. In a pan, heat up a Tbsp of vegetable oil. Once the oil is hot, turn the heat to medium and put the salmon in the pan. When the fish is about half cooked, turn it.
4. Heat up another Tbsp of vegetable oil in a second pan. Put the vegetables (beside the tomatoes) in there and let them cook on medium-low heat.
5. When the salmon is just about cooked, add the soy/maple mixture and turn up the heat a little. Let the fish cook in the liquid (tilt the pan a little if needed) and using a spoon keep pouring the liquid over the fish. Towards the end, when the liquid has almost evaporated, turn the fish another time and continue cooking it until it has that golden brown/glazed look on both sides (be careful though, the sugar from the syrup burns really fast if there is no liquid left anymore). Remove from heat.
6. Toss the vegetables a little and finish cooking them. Add the cherry tomatoes. Season to taste and remove from heat.
7. Serve the salmon pieces on a little pile of the vegetable pasta.

Serves 2. Enjoy

Whatever the occasion, crêpes are simply always popular. They can be made quickly, in large quantities and can serve as savory dish as well as dessert. The crêpes in the above picture are filled with ham, grated cheese and mushrooms.

Some people confuse crêpes with pancakes but they are actually very different. Crêpes are almost as thin as a sheet of paper and mostly they are way bigger in size than a pancake. They are almost always served with a filling.

Now I’m often told that making crêpes is very difficult and that the result varies a lot. Common issues are:

• Clumps in the batter
• Batter sticks to the pan easily
• To prevent this a lot of oil/butter is often used
• Using a laddle, it is very difficult to dispense the batter equally over the frying pan so the whole surface is covered
• Crêpe breaks when one tries to flip it

Luckily I’ve gone through a lot of trial and error (while eating a lot of crêpes :D) and I discovered an amazing method that will allow you to make perfect crêpes, easily, every time.

Ingredients

• 3 eggs
• 400 ml milk (lukewarm)
• 1 cup water
• 1 tsp salt
• 250g all purpose flour (perfect would be very fine flour which is made for liquid batters)
• 4-5 Tbsp vegetable oil

Preparation

1. Mix eggs, milk and salt in a Blender. Gradually mix in flour and vegetable oil. Blend well until you see no clumps anymore. Now add some of the water until the batter has the consistency of thick pouring cream. Scoop off the foam if there is any. Keep the batter in the blending container.
2. Use a paper towel to coat a flat skillet with vegetable oil (if you have a crêpière, even better). Heat up the skillet over medium-high heat. Wait until the pan is hot.
3. Remove the pan from the heat by lifting it. With the blending container quickly pour in as much liquid as you need to cover the whole surface. Pour back excess batter into the blending container.
4. Put the skillet back on the heat. As soon as you see that the crêpe is golden brown at the bottom, flip it. If your crêpe breaks easily, the batter was probably too liquid. Add a little more flour to the batter in that case.
5. If you are preparing a savory crêpe, add cheese and other fillings now on one side of the crêpe. Fold it in a half and make sure it’s golden brown on both sides. Remove on a plate.
6. Continue this way. Maybe you’ll need to reapply a little oil at some point but usually the oil in the batter is enough to keep them from sticking.

Useful Tips

• You can add a little butter too the batter to improve the taste.
• You can make the batter 2 days in advance and refrigerate it. Just bring it back to room temperature before cooking when you want to use it (and reblend a little).
• You can seperate crêpes with wax paper to keep them from sticking.
• Crêpes can be refrigerated in a plastic bag for 3 days.
• Crêpes can be frozen in a plastic bag for 3 months.
• To reheat crêpes, place them in an oven on a cookie sheet at 170°C.
• Ideas for fillings: Grated cheese, ham, mushrooms, all sort of vegetables, a fresh egg (yolk), Gorgonzola or Goat cheese. Sugar, cinnamon, chocolate, ice cream, nutella, fruit, marmelade, jam, peanut butter, maple syrup etc…

Oh boy the past few days have really been busy here in Aix en Provence. University was closed down because students throughout the whole country organise strikes against a law that would give full autonomy to universities (hence allowing selection of students by making them pass an entry exam). Many are fearing that this might lead to a full privatization of the university system (tuition fees etc). Anyway, all of this is quite new to me… I couldn’t imagine that a strike could block a whole university (or several actually) :p

So when you are in a stressful time you need to cook quick meals. Any form of pasta is handy but what kind of sauce can you make easily without fussy ingredients? Well of course, tomato sauce… But actually this is the first time since ages that I attempted to cook a tomato sauce. Usually the taste was always too bland or too acid and I preferred eating plain pasta. But I found an awesome recipe in a German cooking magazine, featuring one of my favorite German cooks, Tim Mälzer. I loved the sauce because it had a slightly sweet taste, didn’t include annoying onion or garlic pieces but was still very flavourful. Ricotta cheese goes incredibly well with this because it softens the taste of the sauce and rounds it up nicely.

Ingredients (Adapted from Essen & Trinken, Für jeden Tag - Nr.10)

• 1 onion, halved
• 1 clove of garlic, halved
• 400g of tomato dice (can) or tomato purée
• 1 Tbsp butter
• 50 ml water
• salt, pepper
• 1 generous pinch of sugar
• 4 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp dried basil or 2 Tbsp chopped fresh basil
• 100g of ricotta cheese, drained

Preparation

1. Put the onion, garlic and tomato dice/purée in a pan. Add the butter and the water and season with salt, pepper and sugar. Let it cook for about 30 minutes at medium heat. (Stir once in a while)
2. Remove the onion and the garlic pieces. Add the olive oil and the basil. Adjust seasoning if needed.
3. Serve on the pasta of your choice (goes really well with Gnocchi too). Sprinkle with ricotta cheese.

Serves 2. Enjoy.

Ahh I’m about to reveal the recipe for one of the most delicious things on this planet. Poulet “à l’africaine” or African style chicken is a dish that my mother in law used to make for us whenever my husband’s aunt (who is married to a Togolese) and cousins came to visit. I always enjoyed those moments, not only because it’s great fun being with them and listening to their stories but also because I got to know this dish.

I am actually not entirely sure if this recipe is truly African. It’s made with peanut butter which gives it an amazing, “exotic” flavour. If you are thinking right now “what in the world is exotic about peanut butter???”, then let me tell you that it’s veeeeery exotic for someone who grew up in Germany :p Germans don’t really eat peanut butter and until a few years ago you could only get it in specialized shops. I didn’t know what I was missing! Today was actually the first time I bought a jar of peanut butter and I spent 10 minutes smelling, tasting a little spoon, smelling again, tasting… it was that fascinating! It’s a new type of flavor that I wasn’t used to but that I liked instantly.

If you don’t like couscous you can serve the dish with rice or pasta but I really think that couscous complements this exceptionally well. The sauce itself is made from ingredients that most of us always have at home. Easy and rather cheap to make but tastes amazing!

Ingredients

• 2 chicken breasts
• 1 onion
• 1 clove of garlic (optional)
• 400 ml tomato purée
• 250 ml water
• 1/2 tsp chili paste (if you like it really hot, use 1 tsp)
• 3 big tsp peanut butter
• oil (sunflower or peanut)
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 1/2 cups of couscous

—————-

Preparation

1. Chop the onions and the garlic finely.
2. Heat up 1 Tbsp of oil in a casserole.
3. Cut the chicken breasts in dice.
4. Add the onions and the garlic to the casserole and cook them for 1-2 minutes on medium heat until they are transparent.
5. Add the chicken and cook it for 3 minutes approximately or until it has a golden brown color. Add the chili paste and cook for 1 more minute.
6. Add the tomato purée and the water. Bring to a boil and let the sauce simmer for about 20 minutes.
7. Meanwhile prepare the couscous according to instructions.
8. Add the peanut butter and let it melt into the sauce. Add seasoning to taste.

Serves 4, enjoy

Let’s face it: as a student you sometimes open the fridge and there is nada :p Only the jar of marmelade and the egg looking at you like “dude, marmelade omelette sucks so give up right away and order pizza”.

Living on a tight budget does suck, however it’s exactly in those moments that you’ve got to be creative if you don’t want to end up eating crackers. So what did I have left exactly: Flour, 1 egg, melting cheese (gruyère), onion, +some cans and usual pantry stuff. Then the flash of insight hit me, why not make spätzle! Spätzle are self made egg “pasta” that are incredibly popular in Germany, especially in the south (they are also very popular in Austria, Switzerland and Alsace). I grew up eating those and I still love them. It’s often baked with cheese and some even add fried onions. It’s godly stuff really and very easy to make… well that is if you follow Yakumo’s 3 rules to making spätzle:

• The traditional way of making spätzle consists of pouring the spätzle batter on a cutting board which you hold over a saucepan with boiling water. You then need to rapidly cut off pieces of the batter with a knife. As you might have guessed already: this requires a lot of training and if you work too slowly half of your spätzle will be mushy. Spätzle batter sticks like hell too (fun, fun). Luckily nowadays technology saves us from all that pain and lets us create perfect spätzle quickly without stick-fest. This technological wonder comes in the form of a piece of metal with a lot of holes: Norpro Stainless Steel Spaetzle Maker :p It’s that easy!

• Normal spätzle batter is made of eggs, flour and salt (+ oil maybe). Nothing else. This naturally means that you need to add a large amount of eggs. Whilst I’m convinced that eggs are healthy, I still think they should be consumed in moderation. Beside, I don’t always have 5-10 eggs lying around. You can actually reduce the amount of eggs and substitute with water. Of course the less eggs you put the less the spätzle will taste of egg but in my opinion 1egg-spätzle taste delicious already. I’ll still tell you the original recipe so you can make “authentic” spätzle, should you wish to.

• If you fry onions to accompany your spätzle, cut the rings equally big :p Like the tart that I am I cut mine pretty unevenly… needless to say that some rings were slightly burned while others were just nice and crispy and some weren’t cooked at all. I could have guessed so before but hey, I’m here to make mistakes so you don’t make them ^^

You are probably wondering right now why the heck I’m getting so excited about eating some form of pasta :p Well spätzle do not exactly taste like pasta. They have a very distinct flavour that goes so well with their particular texture. That and they are very cheap and quick to make. You can use up the rest of eggs or cheese that you have, you can even add some spinach to the batter to color the spätzle… they make a great main course if you bake them with cheese but they are fantastic as a side dish with meat or with a vegtable gratin as well.

Ingredients

How I made my batter:

• 250g flour (I used whole wheat but you can use all-purpose too)
• 1 large egg (you can add more eggs, however you must add proportionally less water then)
• 1 tsp of salt
• 1 Tbsp of oil (do not use olive oil, the taste doesn’t really fit here, use sunflower for example)
• 125 ml of water (+/- some, depending on the flour you use)

For an original spätzle batter, you’d need:

• 250-270 grams wheat flour
• 5 large eggs
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 Tbsp oil
• up to 50 ml water

Other than that:

• 1 large onion
• a little flour
• 1 Tbsp of butter
• salt and pepper to taste
• 4 Tbsp of melting cheese (I used gruyère)

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Preparation:

1. Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan and salt it.
2. Cut the onion in equally sized rings.
3. Mix the ingredients for the batter and whisk them well until you’ve got no lumps left. The batter must have the consistency of a frozen yogurt or a very thick pancake batter that sticks to the mixer and is heavy.
4. Use the batter with your spätzle device according to manufacturer’s instructions to make the spätzle. Just be careful to work as quickly as possible once the batter is over the hot water. If you take too long, the batter will just cook/harden on the device and you won’t be able to push any spätzle through anymore.
5. Once the spätzle are in the water they are cooked very quickly, as soon as they swim on the surface of the boiling water they are done and can be drained through a sieve.
6. Keep the spätzle warm and heat about 4 Tbsp of oil in a casserole. Dust the onion rings with flour and put the them inside the hot pan, do not salt them yet and let them (deep-)fry on medium-high heat until they are golden brown.
7. Put the onion rings on kitchen paper to dry and remove the frying oil from the casserole. Salt the onions if you like.
8. Add a little fresh oil and heat the casserole up again. Now add the Spätzle and fry them until they take on a golden brown color. Add the butter and the cheese and let it melt nicely. Season to taste.
9. Remove the spätzle from the heat, serve them on a plate and garnish with onion rings.

Serves 2-3, enjoy

It’s the second day of my Gordon Ramsay test cooking. As I posted yesterday, I’m going to try out three recipes from the cookbook “Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy“.

I was particularly intrigued by this dish because of the Ratatouille. As you might have read already, I’m living and studying in Aix-en-Provence, a beautiful town in the heart of the Provence region, about 30 kilometers away from Marseille. If there is one dish from Provence that almost everyone knows, it’s Ratatouille. This vegetable stew originated in Nice but it is eaten almost everywhere in France.

(One of Cezanne’s paintings of Mont St. Victoire, the mountain that
reigns over Aix-en-Provence. The famous painter was born in Aix.)

About the dish itself: I loved the combination of Ratatouille and fish. The dish felt very light and it was relatively easy to make. The only criticism I have is for the Ratatouille itself. In the recipe the vegetables are cooked very shortly (about 5-7 minutes) which is good if you want to keep the vegetables a little crunchy, but which isn’t so great if you leave the skin on the aubergines. Of course it probably depends on what kind of aubergine (eggplant) you use, but the one I used had a quite thick skin and when the dish was done it was hard to chew the aubergine pieces. Apart from that I might add a little tomato purée the next time but that’s optional.

(The recipe is adapted from Gordon Ramsay’s cookbook “G.R. Makes it Easy”)

Ingredients

For the rustic ratatouille:

• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 tomato
• 1 yellow pepper (or 1/2 red pepper and 1/2 yellow pepper)
• 1 courgette
• 1/2 aubergine
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 handful of basil leaves, roughly chopped
• 1 tsp of balsamic vinegar
• salt and pepper

For the fish:

• 2 nice sea-bream fillets (buy them fresh with the skin on)
• 2 Tbsp of olive oil
• salt and pepper

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Preparation

1. Wash and cut the tomatoes in quarters. With a sharp knife slide along the flesh to deseed them. Finely chop the flesh.
2. Wash and deseed the pepper(s). Cut them in 1cm dice.
3. Wash and cut the courgette in 1 cm thick dice.
4. Wash the aubergine and cut it into 1 cm dice. If the skin is very thick rather remove it.
5. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan. Wait until it’s hot.
6. Cook the garlic and the onions (on medium heat) in the pan for approximately 2 minutes until they are soft.
7. Add all the vegetables to the pan and cook everything for about 5 minutes while stirring every now and then.
8. Add the basil and the vinegar, season to taste.
9. Remove the ratatouille from the heat and keep it warm.
10. Clean the bream fillets, be careful to remove all scales and with your finger drive along the line in the middle of the fillets. If you feel any bones, remove them with a pincher.
11. Lay the fish on your cutting board, skin-side up. With your hand squeeze the fillet together a little so the skin gets stretched. Now cut into the skin leavin less than a cm of space between each cut. Salt the fish on the skin side and be careful to put salt inside every of the “lamelles” you created.
12. Heat the olive oil in a non stick frying pan.
13. Once hot (and really let it get piping hot first) put the fillets in the frying pan, skin side down.
14. Let the fish cook like that on medium-high heat and don’t touch it. Give it time until 2/3rd of the fish is cooked. (3-4 minutes)
15. Turn the fish once, letting it cook for about a minute on the other side (check if it’s done completely).
16. When it’s done, turn it around on the skin side and remove the pan from the heat.
17. Put half of the ratatouille on a plate and put the fish on top, skin-side up.

Serves 2, enjoy