Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? This is such a brilliant and easy recipe, one I never would’ve dreamed of trying before.

Ingredients

2 sole filleted
1-2 shallots chopped
Half a bay leaf
A few sprigs of parsley
Quarter pint white wine
Quarter pint water
1 oz butter
3 tbsps flour
3 tbsps single cream
2 tomatoes skinned and diced with seeds removed
2 tbsps chopped parsley

Put the fish in an ovenproof dish with the shallots, herbs, wine, water and some seasoning. Cover with foil and bake at 180 for 15 minutes. Strain off the cooking liquid and keep the fish warm. Melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook for 2-3 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and gradually stir in the cooking liquid. Bring to the boil and continue to stir until thickens. Remove from the heat and stir in the cream tomatoes and parsley then pour over the fish.

We do eat fish quite often but I’d never bought or cooked sole before. I had kind of fallen into a bit of a fish habit and would always buy the same kind. I had forgotten to ask the fishmonger to skin this for me, but fortunately it doesn’t have to be for this recipe.

I’ve been doing a lot of tomato skinning as well since I started this book, it is dead easy! I think I did make a bit of a mistake with this; when I was straining off the liquid I was very careful and all the shallots ended up staying in the dish with the fish. I had assumed that would be ok but on eating they had a bit of a crunch. I think they are just meant to impart flavour and then get strained off.

The fish was lovely and delicate and the sauce was pure brilliant!! It was nice and thick and had such a lovely flavour, using the fish cooking liquor was such a great idea. I did make this for the three of us but on tasting the sauce I felt there was still quite a strong wine flavour so I just gave my daughter some of the fish without sauce. Me and my husband both loved the sauce and plates were scraped clean again.

This is the kind of recipe that I love from this book. The name suggest it’s something complicated but when you look at the ingredients they are all things you’d probably usually have in the cupboards anyway, the only thing I had to buy was the fish, then all these storecupboard staples create a brilliant dinner.

It’s another rubbish photo! I seriously need some help with the photos but because I’m making food for the family I really don’t have time to try get a beautiful photo.

Would I make this again? Yes yes yes