Sometimes you know something isn’t quite right but the little cooking demon whispers in your ear: “no, this is just fine, keep going. You don’t want to miss the Barefoot Contessa do you?”
Yesterday, when I removed this bundle of thin sheets, sans box, from the freezer, I told myself it was Filo Pastry. Even when I was separating the thawed sheets and finding them to be a bit curlier than usual, quite a bit smaller, a bit thicker and a bit more translucent, I still continued to spread melted butter over the sheets and layer them up. The normally silky texture of Filo wasn’t there and when I folded the slightly coarse sheets around the salmon, it didn’t hold in place as readily as it normally should.
At some point I yelled downstairs to Paul (who was watching Battleship Galantica) “Am I using Egg Roll wrappers instead of Filo Pastry?”
He bolted upstairs to check: “No.”
Me: “Thank God!”
Paul: “Nope, those are Spring Roll Wrappers.”
Well, thanks for that Mr Semantics!
The oven was on high, the fish was mostly shrouded in non-filo pastry. I had no other option. “I’m gonna just throw these in the oven and see what happens. You, get to work on the potatoes.”
We crossed our fingers and waited hungrily to see what would actually happen.
I figured that Spring Roll Wrappers would probably take a similar length of time to cook in the oven as Filo Pastry so after 10 minutes I tentatively peeked in the oven. They looked golden brown, crisp and not the frazzled, charred mess that I had been dreading.
In the meantime, Paul had knocked up a rather tasty (and ad hoc!) sort of potatoes Dauphinoise, using sour cream, chives and some milk, which we served with the salmon spring roll parcels. Paul had apparently made several kilos of the Dauphinoise “just in case” and also heated up some frozen peas, “just in case”.
As it turned out, the spring roll wrapping worked rather well, it was just the filling that we were rather disappointed by. Another one of those recipes that I had been dreaming of cooking for some time, taken from Tamasin Day-Lewis, was Baked Salmon with Ginger and Currants. I thought it sounded recherché enough to be really delicious. However, whilst it was quite tasty, it was just a bit too sweet for my taste buds. Paul said he would have preferred pickled ginger instead of the preserved ginger that the recipe asked for. Also, I had to substitute raisins for currants as I hate those tiny little black things.
I don’t feel enamoured enough with the recipe to replicate it here, although it is apparently a restaurant classic. Still, it looks pretty enough, don’t you think?