What is more exhilarating than a clear, balmy day in May? The annuals you planted in April are beginning to take over flower beds. The grass has become a carpet of deep green, and feels soft to your bare toes. The days are warm and the nights are still refreshing, and we begin to plan for summer.
Our menus and recipes for this month are based on our love of fish or seafood and all things fresh. Late spring and summer bring vegetables and fruits to the market from all parts of the country. If you live near farmland then you know the joys of farmers' markets and warm corn just picked from the field.
The first menu uses this fresh corn to counterbalance an Asian-style dressing on greens and asparagus. This is topped with a grilled white fish. We are using halibut, but flounder, snapper, roughy, grouper, or even tuna can be substituted. For dessert, the first sweet watermelon is cut into cubes and topped with lemon zest and a small amount of sorbet.
(for the recipes, click on The Recipes or click on the individual recipe above)
The second meal combines two of our favorite warm weather foods -- French potato salad and grilled salmon to which we've added a piquant Tomato Vinaigrette. Since the meal's one we'd likely fix after watching the local softball team game, we opted for a quick dessert, too -- beautiful fresh strawberries with a variety of special sweet dips. Dinner couldn't be easier -- or more delicious!
(for the recipes, click on The Recipes or click on the individual recipe above)
Our third menu is a result of being at the market when they were unloading a shipment of beautiful red snapper. A quick trip back to the produce section and I had the beginnings of a memorable meal. We often cook fish in parchment paper. Not only does the puffy bundle of fish and vegetables look wonderful coming to the table in its brown-tinged package, but the parchment perfectly cooks fish without drying it out. Of course, you can also use aluminum foil to form your package.
With the fish and its lovely melange of julienne vegetables, we'd serve a bowl of perfectly steamed rice, basmatti most likely; but you could also use another aromatic rice such as Jasmine or Wehani. Dessert and salad are one -- a beautiful combination of fresh berries, tossed with a bit of raspberry yogurt and topped with vanilla wafer crumbs.
(for the recipes, click on The Recipes or click on the individual recipe above)
The last of our quad of stellar meals starring fish or seafood is Cuban by origin. One of our favorite restaurants in New York City, Victor's Cafe, frequently has a similar dish on its famed Cuban menu. There they serve the dish with a portion of steamed white rice alongside -- if you have the carbohydrates to spare, you could add 1/3 cup of cooked rice to your plate.
The slightly sweet fresh spinach salad adds the perfect flavor contrast to the spicy shrimp. Since we can buy spinach that's been already washed, it only takes minutes to get the salad ready -- no need to rinse the spinach in several changes of water, one will do.
For dessert, we offer a super recipe for Sandies, a cookie recipe from the newly released Dining with the Duchess, Making Everyday Meals a Special Occasion by Sarah, The Duchess of York, and Weight Watchers (Simon & Schuster 1998). We were sent a copy to review by our mutual publisher. We found a lot of interesting, quite workable recipes in this cookbook that one to dine like the calorie-conscious Duchess. However, we caution you to pay close attention to the nutritional data and make prudent substitutions as needed in order to comply with your own diabetic meal plan. In the recipe for these cookies, for example, we substituted spoonable brown sugar substitute for brown sugar and were delighted with the results. As the Duchess says in her note, the addition of the ground wheat and barley nuggets does indeed give the hint of nuts, both in flavor and texture, without the fat. We'll be making these cookies for our next afternoon tea with friends, and in a few months we will share another recipe from this unique collection. If you're in a hurry, we've put the book in our book store under "other recommended books of interest."
(for the recipes, click on The Recipes or click on the individual recipe above)
