Red mullet is a very special fish, and this recipe makes the most of it. I usually serve it with a tomato vinaigrette (a vinaigrette dressing gently warmed (not cooked!) in a pan with peeled, seeded and diced tomatoes).
Category: Main Course
Grilled duck breasts with apples
Quick, easy, delicious, and low-fat. What more can you ask? Serves 4.
Grilled chicken with chilli, lemon and mint
This is a smoky little number adapted from Nigel Slater. Very tasty, but if you cook it indoors I recommend opening all the windows and disabling any smoke alarms you may have. Mr Slater recommends a soothing pile of buttery couscous with it — in my experience it’s a good idea to have some yogurt and cucumber salad on hand as well.
Gigot aux haricots
A classic French dish, very sustaining.
Friginat
This is a Languedoc speciality traditionally made the day the pig was killed. Nobody keeps pigs these days so it tends to come out on special occasions (although it’s not particularly expensive to make). As with most traditional dishes, everyone has their own ideas on exactly how it should be made. Steve went to the charcuterie the other day and asked for some pork and pig’s liver to make friginat with. The charcutière told him firmly that what he was proposing to make was not friginat, it was fricassée. Friginat is made only from the neck of the pig, she said. Our two Languedoc cookbooks, with three recipes between them for fricassée and friginat, do not make matters clear. Anyway, since the pig’s neck was not available, Steve went home and made fricassée more-or-less according to the charcutière‘s instructions. This is not fricassée as in cream, chicken and mushrooms, but a pork, liver and kidney stew. It is a surprisingly refined dish, very tasty and much less rich and stodgy than cassoulet.
French-style curry
This is nothing like real Indian food, but it’s very nice nonetheless, and easy to do.
Dora’s pigeons in red wine
Simple to do, and delicious.
Daurade au four bis
Another recipe picked up and adapted from Marmiton.org. A high score on the effort versus results scale — if you spread the potatoes and tomatoes out on a large, solid, baking tray they caramelise nicely, leaving a small quantity of syrupy juices and giving the dish an excellent flavour.