Springtime in Paris and simple white fish

On a recent trip to Paris, I was invited to have Sunday lunch with an ambassador and his charming wife in their splendidly gilded residence on the rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré. We spent a warm spring afternoon dining on the wide back terrace of the house. The terrace overlooked a small but elegant city garden shaded by a trio of old chestnut trees in full bloom. Beyond the back garden wall, we could hear someone lazily playing a guitar.

For lunch, we started with half a sweet, juicy cantaloupe, followed by a delicious but simple grilled filet of white fish topped with a pungent Provençal-style pesto sauce and accompanied by a silky green heap of fresh steamed spinach. We finished with more slices of cantaloupe and plate of tiny assorted pastries. While we talked, the ambassador’s wife discretely sketched our table scene in a small notebook beside her plate.

The whole dining experience struck me as what non-Parisians imagine dining in Paris to be – relaxed but elegant. Simple but classic. The menu – planned around fresh, readily available ingredients – also reminded me that food can be both sophisticated and delicious without a lot of preparation and fuss.

Back in Canada, I wondered why I didn’t make simple white fish more often for lunch – especially when fresh, thick filets of halibut were beginning to appear in local markets.

I decided to re-create a bit of Paris for myself by combining a recipe from one of my most trusted cookbooks, Anne Lindsay’s New Light Cooking, and a recipe for classic basil coulis I learned to make from Vancouver-based chef Eric Arrouzé.


Halibut with Basil Coulis
1 6-oz halibut filet (or any white fish that has been responsibly caught)
1 tsp fresh lemon juice
1 tsp olive oil
1 Roma tomato roughly chopped (optional)
1 green onion sliced on the diagonal (optional)
1-2 tbsp basil coulis

Basil Coulis
1 large bunch of fresh basil

1 cup extra virgin olive oil

4 garlic cloves, peeled and germ removed

Salt and pepper to taste

To make the fish:
Preheat oven to 400˚F. Place filet on piece of aluminum foil. Pour lemon juice and oil over the filet (along with the tomato and onion if you are including them) and add salt and pepper to taste. Fold foil up loosely and seal tightly. Place packet on a baking sheet and bake for about 10-15 minutes – depending on the thickness of the filet. Fish should flake easily when done.

To make the basil coulis:

Remove stems from basil leaves and place in a blender along with the garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil. Blend until the basil is completely liquefied and the oil turns bright green.

Note: any coulis you don’t use can be kept in the fridge for up to one week.

To serve, remove filet from foil packet and spoon basil coulis, to your taste, over the top.

Cook a man a fish. . .

For lunch today, I poked my head into the fridge and brought out some poached salmon, a few cooked potatoes, olives, tomatoes, a stalk of celery, half a red onion and a wee Japanese cucumber. While mulling over what to do with all these lovely ingredients, I was reminded of the old Chinese proverb: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

As someone who has enjoyed cooking -- and eating -- for most of my life, that proverb has become a kind of Zen koan to me, at least when I think about it in the culinary sense.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Hmm. Notice how the proverb doesn't specify how the fish was presented. Was it lightly battered, fried and served up with a big side of fries and tartar sauce? Or bathed in a silky rich sauce of lemon, butter and almonds? Grilled over an open-air fire on cedarwood? Devoured, raw, atop a sticky, sweet mound of white rice?

Now before writing me off as some wingnut alone in the kitchen with too many sharp, pointy knives, as far as I'm concerned, until you know exactly how the fish was prepared, it's hard to imagine that giving a man a fish, so to speak, is a bad thing.

One of my great joys is cooking fish, not to mention just about anything else, for other people. At the same time, there's nothing quite so enjoyable as eating something that someone else has made for me, especially if it has been done with skill, thoughtfulness and love. I guess that means I want to be given my fish and taught how to make it, too.

See what I mean? If you can figure out this culinary koan, let me know. In the meantime, back to the beautiful little Japanese cuke. How did I ever survive before these appeared in Canadian produce sections? Those monster English cukes are always too long to fit in the veggie drawer and usually start to go mushy at one end while I work my way through one over the course of a week. Japanese cucumbers, on the other hand, are perfect miniatures of their Anglo cousins and just the right size for snacking on or throwing into a salad.But enough about the mini-cuke.

Today, at least, it didn't take me long to decide what I was going to do with the proverbial fish. In this case salmon. I realized I had everything in front of me to make a Salade Nicoise - except the tuna or the anchovies, or the green beans or eggs. Oh, and I was out of fresh basil or green pepper, too. Is a Salade Nicoise really a Salade Nicoise if you don't have all the required ingredients on hand? That sounds like another Zen puzzler, but I like to think of it as an opportunity.

It's precisely when you have to improvise that cooking starts to get interesting and fun. So, ta-da! Today, cooking for myself and nobody else, I created a dish that I like to call Salade BC-coise. The BC, of course, is a nod to the West Coast and all the yummy salmon that comes from there. I made enough to keep myself fed for at least two days!

Salade BC-coise
Serves 1-2 people

For the salad:
6 grape tomatoes, cut in half
1 mini cucumber, diced
1 medium celery stalk, diced
2 Tbsp. red onion, finely diced
6-8 black olives
4-6 oz. poached wild salmon
2-4 baby potatoes, cooked and quartered
1 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
1 tsp. fresh-dried basil (or 1 Tbsp fresh basil, chopped)
Lettuce

For the vinaigrette:
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper

For the salad, in a large bowl, mix together all the ingredients except the parsley and lettuce.

For the vinaigrette: in a small bowl, combine the vinegar, salt and fresh ground pepper. Gradually add in the olive oil, whisking to emulsify.

To assemble the salad, add the vinaigrette to the salmon & veggie mixture. Add parsley and basil and toss everything to combine. Serve on top of the lettuce.