This morning, I received my first box and here's what's in it:
Today's dish was a fillet of plaice with potatoes and a salad of green beans. Here is what it is supposed to look like.
After getting all the ingredients out, I started preparing the dish by following the recipe provided. The first step was the bring water to the boil. That part provided no problem whatsoever. While the water was in the kettle, I washed the potatoes, which was also pretty easy. The recipe then told me to cut the potatoes in quarters (although I cut the 2 bigger ones in eight pieces), and to fry them in a covered frying pan for 25 minutes with a sprig of thyme and salt and pepper to taste. This left me with a bit of a problem. Am I supposed to just leave it there for 25 minutes, and probably let it burn, or am I supposed to stir from time to time? Just to be safe, I chose to stir from time to time.
In the meantime, I cut off the ends of the green beans and cooked them in the water I just boiled. Pretty straightforward. Then it was time to prepare the dressing for the salad and a sauce of Turkish yoghurt. The dressing was a mixture of extra virgin olive oil, white wine vinegar, honey, mustard and salt and pepper to taste. The yoghurt sauce was a mixture of Turkish yoghurt, mustard and salt and pepper.
With that done, I had to wait for the potatoes to be cooked as I needed the frying pan for the next step. After the potatoes were ready, I quickly rinsed the frying pan ready for the next step, roasting the sunflower seeds. With that done, it was time for the plaice. This bit didn't go too well. I followed the instructions to the letter. I heated half a tablespoon of olive oil in the pan and gently placed the fillet of plaice in it. I left it there to fry for 2 minutes and then turn in around for another two minutes. At least, that was the plan. Instead, as soon as I placed the fish in the frying pan, it immediately stuck itself to my non-stick frying and remained stuck there. After two minutes, when I was supposed to turn it, it was still stuck. I scraped whatever was left of the fish and tried to cooked that, ending up with something that can best be described as scrambled fish.
With that done, it was time to bring everything together. I finished off the salad by adding a salad mix to the green beans and the dressing. This was put on plate along with the potatoes, the plaice and garnished with the roasted sunflower seeds and the yoghurt sauce. The end result looked like this:
To explain, the green bean salad's on the left and the potatoes on the right. The unidentifiable white blob in the middle is what's left of the plaice. So, how did it taste? To start off with, I don't like fish, unless it's covered in batter, deep fried and served with chips, so this was already a bit of a challenge for my taste buds. The potatoes were pretty okay. The yoghurt sauce was a bit on the sour side for my liking, but still edible. The plaice was pretty much tasteless, as I forgot to season it. The salad was actually pretty good. The dressing gave a good taste to it and the roasted sunflower seeds gave it a bit of crunch, which was nice. All in all it was on okay meal. It probably would have been better if the fish didn't go wrong and I seasoned it properly.
Tomorrow's dish is turkey gyros in Lebanese flatbread with Turkish yoghurt and rettich salad. Sounds pretty okay to me, even though I never had rettich before. So, see you tomorrow for another episode of my experiment.
