Asparagus and salmon croustade with chive beurre blanc

Asparagus and salmon croustade
Asparagus and salmon croustade

I’d be happy just to eat all of the new-season’s asparagus steamed or grilled with some butter or some parmesan – maybe with some hollandaise, some truffle oil or a squirt of lemon juice. But every now and then it’s nice to gussy things up a bit, so here is a downright swanky way with one of my favourite vegetables.

Don’t be scared of either the filo pastry crust or the beurre blanc. Both can appear to be quite intimidating ingredients, but filo (which you can buy ready-made at the supermarket) is actually very, very easy to handle; and if you follow the instructions below you’ll find the beurre blanc a breeze to make.

To serve 4 as a main course or 6 as a starter you’ll need:

Croustade
10 sheets filo pastry
150g unsalted butter
700g asparagus
500g salmon, or a mixture of salmon and another firm white fish
1 teaspoon tarragon
2 shallots
Salt and pepper

Beurre blanc
225g unsalted butter, cold from the fridge
2 shallots, sliced
1 bay leaf
3 peppercorns
5 tablespoons white wine
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar or sherry vinegar
1 teaspoon creme fraiche
4 tablespoons snipped fresh chives
Salt and pepper

Start by infusing and reducing the wine and vinegar for your beurre blanc. In a small pan, combine the wine, vinegar, the sliced shallot, the bay and the peppercorns. Over a medium heat, reduce the contents of the pan until you have only a tablespoon of syrupy liquid left. Remove the pan from the heat, discard the bay and peppercorns, and reserve the shallots.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC (350ºF) and steam the fish for ten minutes.

While the oven is heating, assemble the croustade in a metal baking dish about the same size as a single sheet of filo. Melt the butter and brush the bottom of the dish with a layer, then place the first sheet of filo on the buttered surface. Brush the top of the filo sheet with butter, add another layer of filo and butter the top of that, until you have built a stack of five buttered sheets.

Flake the steamed fish into pieces and chop the asparagus spears (discarding the woody ends) into pieces about the length of your thumb. Scatter the fish flakes and the asparagus over the filo. Dice the shallots from the beurre blanc mixture with the fresh shallots, and scatter those over too, along with a little salt, plenty of pepper and the tarragon.

Layer the remaining five pieces of filo, buttering each one as you go, over the top of the asparagus mixture. Use a knife to score the top sheets gently into squares in the size you want for serving. Put the croustade in the oven and bake for 35-40 minutes, until the top is crisp and a dark gold colour.

About 15 minutes before the croustade is ready to come out of the oven, make up the beurre blanc. Chop the cold butter into pieces about the size of the top joint of your thumb (there are lots of finger measurements in today’s recipe). Stir the creme fraiche into the wine and vinegar reduction you set aside earlier, and put it over a medium heat.

Drop three of the butter pieces into the reduction, and whisk until they are half-melted. Drop another three in and continue to whisk until the original three pieces have melted completely, then add another three. Continue to add the butter pieces three at a time, whisking hard, as the ones you have put in before melt, until the butter is all incorporated. Remove from the heat and stir through most of the chives, reserving two teaspoons to garnish. Taste for seasoning, adding extra salt and pepper or a little lemon juice if you think it needs it.

Use a sharp-edged spatula to divide up the croustade along the marks you made earlier, and spoon some of the beurre blanc over each serving with a little sprinkle of chives. Serve immediately.

South-East Asian salmon curry

If you made a batch of the curry paste to cook the prawns earlier this week, you’ll still have half of it in a little bowl in the fridge. This is a very easy dish to cook, and many of the ingredients should already be sitting around in your storecupboard. Swap the green beans for another appropriate-feeling vegetable if you fancy, in keeping with the “what’s in the fridge” nature of this one.

My salmon was bought and frozen before Christmas. It was going to be made into gravadlax before I realised that the fillet I’d bought had, for some reason, been pre-skinned. A skinned salmon fillet’s a pest to cook with if you’re not doing something very simple with it – too much moving around and it’ll flake into bits. So a gentle poaching in a rich curry sauce is an ideal method for a fragile piece of fish like this. If your salmon has the skin on still, so much the better. Don’t bother to remove it before cooking.

To serve 4, you’ll need:

One large salmon fillet, about 2lb (900g), defrosted if frozen
Curry paste (see recipe)
1 large onion
2 large potatoes, chopped into 1in squares
50g green beans
1 can coconut milk
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 heaped teaspoon Madras curry powder
1 cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
1 large handful fresh mint
1 large handful fresh coriander
Juice of 2 limes
Salt and pepper

Chop the onion into medium dice and fry it with the bay leaves, cinnamon stick and curry powder in a large pan until translucent. Add the curry paste to the pan and cook, stirring all the time, for five minutes. Pour over the coconut milk and tomatoes, and stir through the potatoes. Bring the mixture to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes without a lid, stirring occasionally.

Stir in the chopped beans and slide the salmon into the dish, making sure it is covered with the bubbling sauce. Put the lid on and continue to simmer for 12 minutes.

While the salmon is cooking, chop the mint leaves. When the time is up, stir the lime juice into the curry with salt and pepper to taste. Serve over white rice, scatter the herbs over each serving and get stuck in.

Smoked salmon hash

A quick and dirty breakfast dish. This is just perfect for Sunday mornings in bed with a tray, the papers and a very good friend. This hash is all made in one pan, salty from the salmon, studded with tart capers and stickily sweet from the sweet potatoes. A good squirt of lime juice to counter that sweetness and a spoonful of herby crème fraîche – who could ask for more?

If you do plan on making this for breakfast, it’s worth chopping the potatoes and making the crème fraîche the night before so you can operate on autopilot in the morning without having to go anywhere near sharp knives.

To serve two (with some leftovers – we like leftovers round here), you’ll need:

3 large sweet potatoes (make sure these are the ones with golden flesh)
3 large shallots
250g cold-smoked salmon
1 handful chives (plus a teaspoon to garnish)
1 handful parsley (plus a teaspoon to garnish)
½ handful tarragon
200g crème fraîche
2 heaped tablespoons rinsed capers
Juice of 2 limes
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 eggs
Salt and pepper

Start by making the crème fraîche. Just stir in the chopped herbs, keeping some aside to garnish the finished dish, 1 tablespoon of the capers, 1 raw chopped shallot and the juice of a lime. Set aside in the fridge and stir before serving.

To make the hash, dice the peeled potatoes and cut the remaining shallots into slices. Fry in a large pan over a medium heat in the butter and olive oil mixture, stirring regularly, until the edges of the potato pieces are caramelising and turning a golden brown.

Check that the sweet potato is cooked through (poke with a chopstick to test for softness) and tip the salmon and remaining capers into the pan. Toss with a wooden spoon until the salmon is all opaque, then sprinkle over the juice of the remaining lime. Check for seasoning. Spoon the finished hash into serving bowls, dress with the reserved herbs, add a tablespoon of the crème fraîche and top off with a fried egg.

Miso-glazed salmon

Miso-glazed salmon
This Japanese way with fish requires you to think ahead by a couple of days. Once you’ve slathered it with its thick sauce, the salmon needs to cure and marinate in the fridge for at least 48 hours, by which time its flesh will be delicately infused with the flavours from the den miso. Once it’s out of the fridge, it’s simplicity itself to prepare under the grill.

Marinading fish in den miso is a delicious, traditional treatment. Japanese grocers in the UK often offer fish ready-smeared and packed under plastic for you to cook when you return home. A den miso marinade is also used in Nobu’s utterly gorgeous black cod. I’ve never managed to find any black cod for sale, but salmon is just great here – try sea bass fillets too if you can get your hands on some.

To serve two, you’ll need:

2 one-person-sized pieces of salmon fillet, skin still on
200g shiromiso (white miso)
2 tablespoons sake (Chinese rice wine is good here if you have no sake)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons mirin

Most UK supermarkets seem to be stocking miso, sake and mirin (a sweet rice wine) these days, although the alcohols will be with the foreign foods section, not in the booze section. If your supermarket doesn’t carry miso, have a look in your local health food shop. I’ve noticed that for some reason, they almost all sell a good variety of Japanese kelps, soya sauces, and miso.

Put the miso, sake, sugar and mirin in a bain marie and simmer the mixture (which is now den miso) over boiling water for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the colour darkens. Remove the den miso from the heat and set aside to cool.

Put the salmon in a small bowl and pour over the cooled marinade, making sure everything is well-coated. Cover with cling film and leave in the fridge for between two and three days, turning the fish daily.

Grilled salmonWhen you are ready to cook the salmon, lay it with the skin side down on a rack over tin foil. Grill under a high flame for about four minutes, until the miso is caramelising and bubbling as in the picture. Turn the fish so the skin side is uppermost and grill for another four minutes, watching carefully to make sure the fatty skin doesn’t catch and burn.

The fish will be sweet and silky with a crisp and caramelised skin. Serve with rice and a green vegetable.

Honey-mustard dill sauce for smoked salmon

Before we get onto the recipe, some family boasting is in order. Mr Weasel had his viva voce yesterday, and was let out after two hours fierce examining with no corrections to his thesis. This means that in June, he’ll become Dr Weasel at a ceremony for which I get to wear a hat. Well done, sweetheart!

Onto the food.

Evelyn Rose is an English cookery writer who specialises in Jewish family recipes and entertaining on a large scale. This recipe is from her The Entertaining Cookbook, published in 1980, which I seem to find myself drawn back to on every large family occasion. She has a calm and deft ability with cooking for large groups, and all the recipes I’ve tried have been foolproof. I use my mother’s copy, which she’s had for twenty years; most of its pages are falling apart now, and the cucumber salad page is splattered with two decades of the best sugary Swedish dressing in the world. Sadly, the book seems to be out of print now, although I have spotted second-hand copies online for around £40. Fortunately, I am frequently to be found in second-hand bookshops, so it’s likely I’ll find a cheaper copy some time before I get too old to read.

Update: I finally found a copy of the book in late 2007, at the tender age of 31, for a mere quid on good old eBay.

This dill mustard is far better than the stuff from a jar. It’s my favourite accompaniment for smoked salmon; try it with salmon, some buttered rye bread and a small salad. Evelyn Rose says it keeps in the fridge for a month – here, it’s never hung around long for enough for me to test that assertion. The ingredients list may sound a little unorthodox, but I promise you it’s the nicest honey-mustard dill sauce you’ve tried.

To make a small bowlful (enough for ten people or more) you’ll need:

4 rounded tablespoons mayonnaise (I used Hellmann’s)
1 level tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 level tablespoon clear honey
2 teaspoons soya sauce (I used Kikkoman)
White pepper
2 teaspoons chopped fresh dill (or more to taste)

Just mix all the ingredients together in a small bowl until everything is well-blended, and chill for a few hours before serving so the flavours mingle. I prefer freshly ground black pepper in this recipe, and usually use far more dill – two of the regular-sized supermarket packs, or about five tablespoons when chopped finely.

Smoked salmon kedgeree

Kedgeree is one of those curious dishes to come out of colonial India, with European ingredients (in this case smoked fish, usually haddock) alongside Indian spices and rice. There’s an Indian dish called Khichri which is a close cousin of our kedgeree, made from rice, lentils, onions and spices.

Here in the UK it’s a (now rather uncommon) breakfast dish. When I was a kid, our neighbours used to invite the whole street round for a New Year’s breakfast, in which kedgeree played a starring role. Kedgeree is a good idea if you’ve a lot of people staying in the house; you can prepare it the day before and microwave it for a very rich and delicious brunch.

This kedgeree is a bit more delicate than the traditional smoked haddock version. It uses barely cooked smoked salmon and fresh, sweet and juicy king prawns, and instead of strong onion, I’ve used spring onions. The salt used in curing the salmon is sufficient for the whole dish; you will not need to add any extra.

It’s important that the rice is chilled before you cook; if it is warm or hot, the grains are prone to break up and become mushy in cooking.

To serve four, you’ll need:

100g basmati rice, cooked and chilled
10 spring onions, chopped
1 inch of ginger, grated coarsely
1½ tablespoons Madras curry paste (I used Patak’s)
10 raw, peeled king prawns
1 pack smoked salmon, torn into shreds
1 egg per person
½ pint chicken stock
¼ pint double cream
1 handful coriander, chopped
1 knob butter

Carefully slide the eggs into boiling water and boil for six minutes; the yolk should still be soft, and the white just set. Peel, halve and set aside.

Stir fry the ginger and spring onions in a wok until soft, then add the curry paste and prawns and stir fry until the prawns have turned pink. Add the rice to the wok and stir fry. After five minutes, add the stock and salmon, and continue stir frying until the salmon has turned opaque.

Remove the wok from the heat and add the cream and coriander. Stir well, and serve with a segment of the soft, creamy egg.

This dish is inextricably associated with New Year in my head, so I served it this evening with a glass of toasty, nutty champagne. Delicious.