Sardines

On Wednesday my friend and me decided to cook together. I felt like eating fish and I still had a memory of delicious sardines from my trip to Portugal. So I went to a Moroccan fishmonger and got sardines that looked really fresh. The man also told me how to cook them in the oven.

Serves 2

10 sardines
2-3 potatoes, sliced very thinly
4-5 tomatoes, partly sliced and partly cut in wedges
bunch of fresh coriander leaves, chopped
2-3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 lemon
olive oil

Take an oven dish and put a layer of sliced tomatoes at the bottom. Add a layer of sliced potatoes. Add pepper & salt and sprinkle garlic and coriander leaves over it. Then put the sardines on top and add tomato wedges and some more garlic, coriander and pepper & salt.
Cut one third off the lemon and squeeze this over the dish. Cut the remainder of the lemon in slices and add them on top. Sprinkle 1-2 tbsp olive oil over the dish. Last but not least add some water, there should be about 0,5 cm in the dish. I wouldn't have thought of that but the fishmonger told me.
Bake in the oven at very high temperature (200 °C or more) for 20-40 min.

This is what the sardines looked like before cooking

and on a plate

We finished the whole dish and licked our fingers!
Afterwards we just about managed to squeeze in a little bit of lettuce

Note: The fishmonger told me that if you cook sardines in the oven, the insides need to be taken out. If you grill them, it's not necessary. He also said that I could substitute the potatoes for carrots. He advised against cooking courgettes with the sardines.

Fish curry

For mother's day my cousin and me invited our mothers over for lunch, together with our brothers and sister.

My cousin made a mozzarella and tomato salad which I forgot to photograph. She made a delicious sauce to go with it: she fried pine nuts in olive oil and added soy sauce in the end.

I made a fish curry, from a simple recipe that someone gave me years ago. You can get most of the ingredients in an oriental supermarket. Taste the dish to adjust the quantities.


Serves 4

1 can of coconut milk (400 ml)
same amount of water
800 g fish fillet, cut in pieces (I used haddock)
lime/bergamot leaves
fish sauce
thai basil leaves
fresh coriander, washed and chopped
thai aubergines
1,5 tbsp cane sugar
juice of 1-2 limes
1 tbsp green curry paste
2 onions, chopped
sunflower oil or butter

Fry onion in curry paste in sunflower oil or butter.
Add everything else, bring to the boil and let the dish simmer for 15 min.
Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

I served this with (Tilda) basmati rice.

My mother brought beautiful flowers from her garden.


For dessert we had strawberries of course

with vanilla ice cream


and tiramisu. My mother made it and my cousin B. grated the chocolate on top. As you can see, he got fed up in the end ;-)