Free-styling

This week I went off-piste a little.

I did follow a recipe for one of the weekend's experiments - houmous without the tahini. Personally I prefered this to the tahini'd version as you could taste the chickpeas and spices much more clearly without the sesame. I'll definitely do it that way in future. It was another recipe from the Claudia Roden book I borrowed from the library - its proving a great success!

Then after that I came over all over confident, with mixed results:

We had fish for dinner on saturday. Sole to be precise. Now, I thought it would be a good idea to pimp my sole a little.

So, I decided to make a sort of pesto with a handful of parsley, a couple of mint leaves, a squeeze of lemon, a few blanched almonds and a crushed garlic clove. Pounded it all together (good for the stress-levels!), spread it on the sole, the rolled the whole thing up and steamed it.

I felt like a culinary genius.

"I can do this" I thought.

"Lets have sauce too."

"Not just any sauce...I'll freestyle a hollandaise type of sauce."

"How hard can it be...?"

Oh yuck.

Too much lemon.

Too much white wine vinegar.

Not enough butter.

So sharp it made me wince.


(The fish with almond pesto was good though, so at least we didn't starve that night.)