The Librarian and the Kitchen: May 2021

Saturday, May 22, 2021

Swordfish pie

Yum swordfish! I hadn’t had any for ages so when I went shopping and saw some I grabbed it. I wasn’t sure what I would cook with it but tonight I remembered the coriander pesto I had awaiting my ideas for it. Then it was a matter of seeing what I had in the way of vegetables and deciding whether to use phyllo or puff pastry. Then voilà!

Ingredients

2 sheets puff pastry

140 gr swordfish fillet

Small carrot

1/2 red pepper

2 spring onions

2 heaped tsp coriander pesto

3 tsp crushed ginger root

Poppyseed

Mode

Preheat oven to 180c

If using frozen puff pastry remove sheets from freezer to thaw

Julienne the carrot

Clean and chop spring onions

Roughly cut the red pepper

Crush ginger

Place one sheet of pastry in base of baking dish

Place the swordfish fillet on pastry

Spread pesto over

Add spring onion and crushed ginger

Top with carrot pieces and red pepper

Place second sheet of pastry on top

Trim and seal pastry and decorate as desired

Sprinkle with poppyseed

Bake in oven at 180c for 45 minutes

Saturday, May 8, 2021

Sardines St Clements

Yesterday coming out of the fog and lack of appetite from AstraZeneca I had a delicious lunch of chilli sardines with orange and rocket salad. What a lovely way to get my appetite back and no wonder I was excited to find fresh filleted sardines on sale today!

This is not really like the whole sardines I had yesterday but a variant of a recipe I found years ago in a book by Lorenza de Medici. The name is from the combination of lemon and orange in my recipe. I used ready-made breadcrumbs with lemon, pepper and parsley but you could use whatever you have. I ate mine with rocket and some potatoes I had previously roasted. Delicious!