Dover Sole – My version of some great SOUL food!
Who does the cooking in our house?
That’s a question I get asked all the time from friends and visitors of my web site.
The truth is we both enjoy cooking but have different cooking styles and approach it in our own individual way. I like to improvise and create a meal after looking at a bunch of recipes while my wife likes to pick one recipe and follow it from start to finish.
Typically, I start by choosing the ingredients (usually what I have on hand in the refrigerator) and then looking through my cookbooks for ideas. My wife selects a recipe, creates a shopping list, and goes to the supermarket to purchase what she needs. Funny how ones cooking style reflects ones personality.
Is one method better than the other?
Of course not. Whichever method works for you is the one you should use. And there’s no reason not to try both.
When we cook together for friends, I ask my wife to organize the meal so I don’t forget any key ingredients or leave out a course and she lets me be creative with the sauces.
In our everyday lives, I find it a lot more enjoyable cooking with a partner than going at it alone. It provides us some great time together catching up on the day’s events before we need to focus all our attention on our daughter Nell.
Recently we had a friend over for dinner and my wife chose to prepare Sole Meuniere. She found the recipe in The New Basics Cookbook and made the meal from start to finish while I was upstairs with my daughter Nell in front of a computer watching Pooh figure out a way to get honey out of a tree.
The meal was so good I had to add it to the web page. The recipe calls for lemon or grey sole, but she used Dover sole because that’s all we could find.
Meuniére (muhn-YAIR) is French for “miller’s wife” and refers to the cooking technique used. In this case, fish is seasoned with salt and pepper and then dredged with flour and sautéed in butter.
Finished with thinly sliced lemon for brightness, this is a simple and classic dish that I bet your whole family will love.
Sole Meuniere Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 lemon
- 4 fillets of Dover Sole 6 to 7 ounces each
- salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
- flour for dredging
- 5 tablespoons butter unsalted
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 4 tablespoons fresh parsley chopped
Instructions
- The prep is easy for this one. Get all your ingredients together and chop the parsley and you are ready to go.
- Cut the lemon into quarters lengthwise. Then slice each quarter wedge crosswise into paper-thin slices. Remove any seeds and set aside.
- Season the fillets with salt and pepper and dredge them thoroughly in flour.The cookbook suggests putting the flour in a paper bag, adding a fish filet and shaking it.Kind of like the Shake N Bake idea for those of you old enough to remember. Shake off any excess flour.
- Heat 4 tablespoons of butter and oil in a large sauté pan (fry pan, skillet) over medium high heat. When the butter stops foaming, add the fillets.
- Cook, turning once, until golden and cooked through. Should take about 5 minutes.
- Lower the heat and swirl in the remaining tablespoon of butter and the lemon slices.
- Sprinkle with parsley and season lightly with salt and pepper.
- Spoon the sauce over the fillets and server immediately.
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