Here in England, we play a game called cricket. Basically, the bowler hurls the ball toward the batter who tries to play away a fine leg. He endeavours to score by dashing between the creases, provided the wicket keeper hasn’t whipped his bails off. Games can last for up to 5 days, so the players break for tea in the mid afternoon, during which they traditionally eat cucumber sandwiches. Today England are competing in a rare final (well they will be if the bloody rain stops!) and so what better occasion to break out this very summery looking DIY type open sandwich thingy? There may not be any cucumber involved but the picnicy element is very cricket friendly.
One element of the sandwich was a salad containing fennel, mint, and slices of lemon. It bore a worrying resemblance to the Mafia-esque salad that accompanied the Prawn Linguine I made a few months ago. Fully aware that making it the same way I did last time and expecting a different result would basically be the definition of insanity, I took the controversial decision to follow the recipe, sliced lemons and all. It also featured tomatoey-garlicky ciabatta toasts, mashed beetroot, houmous, proscioutto and sardines - there was a lot going on but not a lot of actual cooking involved so was fairly confident I could pull this off.
As it turns out the only difficulty was the sardines - for previous fish dishes I have used a non-stick frying pan but this one calls for the griddle. Removing them from the griddle required both tongs and fish slice and by the time they were on the board they looked nothing like the perfectly formed sardines in the book. In spite of this I thought presentation-wise it was up there with the best and taste-wise it wasn't bad either. The yoghurt based houmous was fantastic (I don't think Lolz realised there were cumin seeds in there) and the salad was infinitely better than last time. Everything just seemed to click.
Lolz gave the dish 9/10. Difficulty rating 3/10.
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