Italian Fiesta

            It’s always good to have a recipe of a dish and to keep it in front of your eyes while you cook. Sometimes, however, it’s better to enter a kitchen door with empty hands: no printed lists of ingredients, no cookbooks or culinary magazines – thus no restrictions whatsoever, just an awesome feeling of liberty and a great opportunity to bring some novel ideas into life.

            Once as I was heading towards my kitchen (the lunchtime was approaching and I had to prepare at least anything for my husband) I didn’t have an exact notion of what I was going to cook that day. I looked at a piece of fish, fresh vegetables and button mushrooms – and instantly decided that I wanted to go Italian: baked fish with mushroom sauce and gremolata, mashed potatoes with red pesto and – pasta! – some home-made egg yolk ravioli on a bed of rocket leaves. The final dish was bursting with flavours and looked stunning on a plate (it perfectly corresponded to the image I had in my mind when I started to cook). Believe me, you don’t need a recipe to bring a real fiesta to your dining table on an ordinary weekday: just follow your culinary intuition and a call of your gourmet heart and you will produce a meal that goes beyond any expectations!

Polenta Round with Smoked Tuna and a Poached Egg

          One of the most popular versions of a continental breakfast is a toast with a slice of ham and an egg. If you look at it from a different angle and turn your imagination on, you can use this classic dish (which is not very exciting in its original form) as a starting point for creating something new. You should basicly “deconstruct” the dish in your mind: divide it into parts and think of the way to alternate them. For example, you can use a hushbrown or a vegetable fritter instead of a slice of bread for the base of your toast, you can substitute ham with a piece of tofu or a roundel of grilled aubergine, you can choose a fried egg or a scrambled one, and pick any sauce, chutney, relish or condiment to go with it. 

            Today I substitute bread with a polenta round: crispy outside and soft inside, with a hint of parmesan. A nice piece of smoked tuna goes next; I top it with a poached egg (using a special egg poacher to get the perfect shape) and there’s only thing left to add – a teaspoon of pesto. My breakfast stack is ready and, let me tell you, it has a much more refined look and a more exquisite taste that the original dish!

Corn and Ricotta Cakes

        I love those mornings when you don’t have to wake up early (well, who doesn’t like them?). If it’s a weekend morning, I really don’t mind getting into the kitchen and cooking something special. But if it’s one of the weekdays (yes, I’m lucky enough to have an opportunity to sleep late in the middle of the week) I feel somehow lazy to prepare a complicated breakfast – and usually I don’t have to, since I cook something in the evening so that that the following day my husband (who still has to face a necessity of being waken up by an alarm clock) can just pop a plate into a microwave oven before he heads to work. Of course, I normally make two place of something nice – the second one being meant for me, so in the morning I can bother only with making a cup of coffee. One of my favourite options of such premade breakfasts is corn and ricotta fritters. As I’m making them a day before, I’m salivating. I look forward to the next morning when after a few rounds of suria namaskar and a refreshing shower afterwards I award myself with this treat. What a great start of a day!

Fish “Braid” with Red and Green Pesto

As I was once looking through a cooking magazine, I got mesmerized by a photo of a very spectacular dish – a three-coloured fish “braid”. I desperately wanted to have an opportunity to enjoy the look of it on my plate at home but I had a few obstacles to overcome. First, the recipe called for using salmon, halibut and zander and since not all of these types are available here it meant that I would have to go to a market in search of three fish with different shades of a flesh. That didn’t seem like a very big problem. But had I found all the types, I would instantly have faced the second – more insurmountable – problem: I would have had to fillet it! Let me make a confession here: being not ultimately perfect at knife work (I guess I need a good course of it under a strict and uncompromising supervision) I’m especially not very good at filleting a fish (the word “massacring” seems more appropriate here).

So, I was obsessed with the idea of cooking this dish for a while but I had to figure it out how to get the same spectacular result (as on that picture from the magazine) but in a more suitable for me way. Eventually I got the solution – I decided to “colour” a plain white fish with green and red pesto. To say true, I generally love fish baked with pesto and it has always been a no-fuss-yet-delicious dinner option in our house, so I knew that the flavours of the dish would be awesome. And they really were! And, most importantly, it was a great pleasure not only for the palate but for the eyes as well!