Can you believe it? I’m actually on time for a Whisk Wednesdays post! We’ve now moved on to a section on frying/sautéing. I think last week was the first time I intentionally decided to skip a recipe — we were supposed to make deep fried whiting, and I’m just terrified of deep frying. I don’t have a deep fryer or a scatterscreen, and I just know I will end up with hot oil all over myself and my kitchen. (I meant to post one of my backlog of cooked-but-not-up-on-the-blog-assignments, but as seems to be happening a lot lately, things got away from me.) Anyway, I’m glad to be back this week for Sole Belle Meunière.

According to Le Cordon Bleu at Home, this translates literally to “sole cooked the way the beautiful miller’s wife cooks it,” which basically means floured and fried. It’s served with sautéed mushrooms, and a nut-brown butter sauce, with a bit of lemon juice added to the sauce to perk it up.

I think this was by far the fastest LCB recipe I’ve made yet, and I think I only slightly cheated by using one pan! (Of course, it was shortened also by the fact that I bought sole fillets instead of buying whole sole — which I don’t think I could’ve found anyway — and filleting it myself.) The fish was pretty simple, but it got a nice crispy crust from the flour, and of course, all the butter and the light lemony-ness added to it. The brown butter sauce and sautéed mushrooms made this feel fancy, but it was actually a pretty quick meal — a great way to have a nice meal during the week and still sit down to the table before 9. (Ok, I admit we barely made that cutoff tonight but still — you get the idea.)

We served this with some creamed barley with spinach from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, a cookbook which, incidentally, I highly recommend. I’ll try to put our take on that up soon, as it was very tasty as well.

And of course, check out how all the other members of Whisk Wednesdays fared!

P.S. Please excuse the continued crummy photos — Nikon is repairing our camera (it now says “In Shop” instead of “Estimate” — I think this is a good sign!), so we are down to using Matt’s iPhone. It’s marginally better than my camera-phone, but that’s not saying much! Hopefully in the next couple weeks our camera will be returned to us — knock on wood!