friederike's Reviews
16 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 16Sort by: Title 
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Real Fast Food
By Nigel Slater
Penguin UK - 1993
Baked Cod with Butter Sauce : page 69
Very nice in taste, but more complicated than really necessary, and I don't really see this qualify as 'Real Fast Food'.
It took me at least 45 min to get the food on the table. Half of this might have been my fault, as I thought it would be fastest to first boil the potatoes, then in the meantime prepare the runner beans before looking at the fish. I ended up having to keep the side dishes warm until the fish was finally done. But actually, I would have expected the fish to be done much faster, or at least that the recipe would give an indication of how much time you'd need.
Also, I had a problem with the quantity and the required size of the baking dish. The recipe requires 'one glass of white wine' - but how much is that? I would expect something like 125 ml, but I know that in some places, you'll be served a glass full to the rim with wine, which is about 250 ml. The recipe does give a clue, albeit a vague one: at the very end, after baking and then reducing, you should end up with approximately 8 tbsp (=120 ml) of sauce. At that point, the sauce should have been reduced by two thirds, which means that originally it should have been 360 ml of sauce; this includes the 50 g butter (~ 50 ml) you added in the very beginning (for the ease of calculating, I'll ignore the fact that some liquid will have evaporated during the 15 min spent in the oven). So, for the purposes of the recipe, expect one glass of wine to be 310 ml, if not more. Wow.
The problem I had with the size of the baking dish is that I didn't realize immediately how much wine was needed. The recipe requires 'a shallow baking dish', so I chose a shallow baking dish which fit the fish snuggly, and added what I thought was a good amount of wine - the wine covered the fish completely. This set me off thinking, as the fish would have cooked in the wine, instead of baked, and it was only then that I realized that I was supposed to add even more wine (see above), and that the point wasn't necessarily to use a shallow baking dish, but one that was large enough that the fish wasn't covered by the wine. Geez, why didn't you say so?
So no wonder it took me so long to get this dish done!
In the end, there is a much faster way to do it, even if not quite as sophisticated. According to the recipe, after you've baked the fish in the sauce of white wine and butter for about 15 min, you'll take out the fish, keep it warm (try doing that without lettng the fish get either cold or dry!), reduce the sauce by two thirds, and then add more butter to give it a better consistency. It would be much faster to fry the fish in butter (or, if you really must, bake it in a very small dish, with just a little butter and white wine), while you make the butter sauce in a separate pan on the stove at the same time. Don't forget to scrape the fish juices into the sauce at the very end! This is what we did on the second day, and it was just as nice.
I will admit that the sauce was just very slightly acidic, which is most likely because I used a bottle we've probably had in the fridge since Christmas (this sounds bad, but it was a good wine and had actually kept quite well) - with a newer bottle, you probably won't have that problem. And it it's actually nice enough to serve it to guests!
I also really liked the combination with boiled potatoes and runner beans; the sauce probably works just as well with salmon, leeks and boiled potatoes.
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Black Olive Butter : page 74
Quite nice, but it needs to be way stronger saltier than you'd expect. I used about 55 g black olives, 40 g of butter and two anchovy fillets, and I think I should have used at least one or two more of the latter (and I'm normally always very, very careful with salt!).
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Fusili with Olives, Anchovies and Capers : page 119
Just not my taste. Quite salty.
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Similar to the Spiced Chicken with Brown Butter in that we used a grill pan instead of an oven grill (although I don’t expect that to make any real difference), and that the spices didn’t really do anything to the aubergine – we omitted the basil though, as we didn’t have any. Slightly disappointed, it sounded like a great dish.
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Grilled Salmon with Basil Butter : page 74
Quite okay, but it very much depends on what you serve it with. The first night, we served it with runner beans and potatoes. The basil butter went very well with the salmon and the beans, but the combination with the potatoes didn't work that well - it felt as if it lacked a sauce. The second night, we substituted the potatoes for tagliatelle - this definitely was an improvement.
We still had about a third of the basil butter left over, so two days or so later, we fried cod and oven-dried some small tomatoes with olive oil and oregano, and served this with the basil buttered tagliatelle - really, really nice!
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A nice variation on the salmon-with-watercress-theme (see my Watercress Crème Fraîche Tart for more of the kind), and a welcome change to our usual uninspired salmon steak with leak and potatoes (though delicious too). It was somewhat difficult to get the seasoning of the sauce right. We doubled the amount of sauce to use it with pasta.
Edited to add:
I have a new 'grilled salmon steak with veggies and potatoes'-theme favourite: Grilled Salmon with Lemon Courgettes!
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Mushroom Crostini : page 158
Really delicious, and really easy. We prepared it slightly differently, with two finely chopped cloves of garlic for about 250g mushrooms (estimated), and with the addition of a tiny bit of lemon juice. We used fresh oyster mushrooms grown by my colleague and harvested the day before. The perfect weekend brunch.
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Very delicious, although it really screamed 'Add some cream!' Unfortunately, though, we didn't have any. We prepared this dish with mint instead of basil, which was very delicious and we could easily have used more of it. Also, extra garlic would have been nice but not really necessary. All in all a very nice, very light dish and super quick to prepare!
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Porc au Poivre : page 250
We planned to make Pork and Pears (p. 252) for dinner tonight - instead, DB enthousiastically started to prepare Porc au Poivre, and we only noticed when it was too late. This is why we needed to substitute nearly every other ingredient - onions for shallots, white wine for red wine, and sherry for cognac. Nevertheless, it was very delicious and really quick and easy, and DB believes that using red wine and cognac will make it taste even better. You will have to watch out with the pork chops, they can become tough easily. If possible, try to make more sauce if you can.
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Pork Steaks with Lemon and Sage : page 249
A few good ideas, a few lesser so. We really liked the crust which was formed due to the flour panade, the combination of sage and pork was excellent and in good balance, and it was extremely quick (use frozen sage for extra convenience).
BUT... the sage would not have been noticeable at all if we had followed the recipe to the letter. Furthermore, by the time the steaks were done the butter was burnt and not suitable anymore as sauce. Instead, we decided to melt extra butter with fresh sage, and this was an excellent idea (and remiscent of the Nutty Butter Sauce with Sage). We left out the lemon, as this didn't seem right, and we didn't miss it at all.
Serve with boiled potatoes and a green salad, prefereably rocket (not pictured).
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Pork with Pears : page 252
A very nice dish! The taste of the pork was nicely complemented by that of the pears (comparable to the classic combination of pork with apples), but also slightly overpowered (though that might be less of a problem is you use only the required amount of pears). Again, just as in Porc au Poivre you could do with more sauce. Serve with potatoes and a green autumny salad (lamb's lettuce, or anything combined with nuts). Oh, and mushrooms, chanterelles if possible!
Edited on 10 July 2011 to add:
In picture: Pork with slightly unripe pears, served with a salad of tomato and rocket - rather wait for autumn if you can, it's worth it.
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Salmon steaks with dill butter : page 76
Nice, though unexciting. Could have used more dill for my liking. A good weekday dinner, as wester writes. Serve with floury potatoes.
Slater mentions that this used to be their option for costumers "who didn't want a rich sauce" - with 25g of butter per person, it's not exactly a light sauce either, but all in all it's okay.
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Spiced Chicken with Brown Butter : page 218
Slightly disappointed. BF grilled this chicken to perfection in our grill pan (in contrast to the required oven grill method), but the spices just didn’t stick. Only occasionally you’d taste a hint of spices, but that was it. For the rest it was just plain chicken. Not my style, I expect flavours to intermingle.
We served this with Grilled Aubergine with Lemon, Basil and Cracked Coriander – another disappointment.
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Spinach with Blue Cheese and Pasta : page 152
I've loved Spinach with Blue Cheese and Pasta since my early student days when I was a regular consumer of ready made meals. Timing is crucial for this recipe, as you won't want the sauce to cook for too long until the pasta is ready. I used 300ml single cream, as stated, which proved to be too much. This made it turn into somewhat of a soup, but what the heck - I love the dish, and this recipe is one of the easiest and most straightforward I have ever found. Just remember to adjust the quantity of single cream.
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Tarragon Chicken : page 220
I was looking for something to make tonight when I noticed this recipe - it's precisely what we've been making for years. It's not very special, but it's nice, fast, and super-easy; in fact, it's one of the first dishes I was taught as a kid. Serve with rice or potatoes and a salad.
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Trout in a Fresh Herb and Lime Crust : page 80
Very delicious, even if you don't get completely right.
Because I couldn’t find trout, I bought two fillets of Catfish (Pangasius) instead, a fish that, as I found out, needed more cooking time than a trout (which might be down to the fact that catfish fillets are larger, apparently…).
Also, I didn’t really manage to get a crust, I probably used too much butter and/or lime juice (I never measure those things precisely; I must have used less lime juice anyway because I only had two in place of the required three). So, next time I’ll definitely reduce the amounts of liquids.
Be careful not to use too much parsley, as the taste of parsley is far stronger than that of dill, and beware of the intensity of the lime juice as well.
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