Had friends over for dinner on Sat so thought I’d do some recipes from the Rankin’s New Irish Cookery book. I’m not sure I’ve cooked anything from it before although the recipes look appealing. I needed to avoid Beef, preferably no red meat at all and no shellfish except prawns.
For starter I made the Smoked salmon and wheaten bread millefeuilles with marinated red onion. Wheaten bread easy to bake. Very difficult to slice the bread thin enough though. The marinated onion added a delightful sweet touch to the dish and essential to lift this out of wheaten bread and smoked salmon. I didn’t do the top layer as the thicker bread slices meant it was high enough.
Main was Salmon with horseradish crust and chive cream sauce. I was trying to prepare what I could ahead of time and accidentally used the horseradish and mustard mix I’d prepared for the chive sauce to coat the salmon. It wasn’t a disaster but meant the fish crust wasn’t as zippy as I’d have liked. TBH I think the chive sauce could have been prepared to just before adding chives and reheated gently when needed, this would have stopped me using the wrong mix to coat the fish. Not sure how far ahead the salmon crust could have been prepared, I must experiment.
Veg was buttered spinach and made cream potato gratin from the Rankin book. The gratin was really easy to make but the recipe had absurd amounts of cream. I couldn’t work out why whipping cream either. I used a fraction of the quantity of double cream and it turned out beautifully.
Pudding I made a basic apple cake from Darina Allen’s Irish Traditional Cooking book. Very easy pastry and pleasant apple pie. Not really a dinner party pudding though. Apple cake was very nice cold the next day.
100 Cook Books 