Simply scrumptious: lemon sole with chive butter

Sometimes, I crave simple, clean flavours. After a heavy weekend, being spoilt rotten, by Monday night I would have happily eaten nursery food

But on reflection, I decided that what I wanted most was the delicate flavour of white fish.

I know you shouldn't buy fish on a Monday, but I decided I trusted our local supermarket to only sell us something fresh, and sent the husband to investigate while I was at work. He returned with two lovely lemon sole fillets, some new potatoes, and some broccoli. This became a delicious 15 minute meal.

 

While the potatoes were boiling, I chopped about a teaspoon of chives, and mixed them, a tiny squeeze of lemon juice and a pinch of salt with an ounce of soft butter. Or Lurpak Lighter Spreadable, as I hadn't been organised enough to get butter out ahead of time. I rolled the butter in clingfilm and put it into the fridge to solidify into a log, so I could cut pretty rounds from it. It didn't solidify much in ten minutes, but if you do this in advance it does work. This was enough for a generous amount each for two people.

I then boiled the kettle for the broccoli and prepped it, heated up a large, heavy frying pan for the fish, and slashed the fish skin to help it crisp.

Then, after the potatoes had been boiling for ten minutes, I put the broccoli on to boil for five minutes and popped a large knob of butter (real stuff, this time) into the frying pan.

When the butter had melted, I put the fish in, skin side down, and held it down with a spatula for the first minute so the skin crisper and didn't curl.

Then I left the fish to cook, skin down. With fish it's easy to see if it's cooked - I watched as the flesh turned from translucent and slightly pink to opaque and white. When just the very top of the fish was still to cook, I flipped the fillets and cooked flesh down for a minute, before serving everything up, with the chive butter on top of the fish (although I may have dunked the potatoes and broccoli in it to).

The simple, almost creamy taste of the lemon sole, the sharp chives, the in-season potatoes and the broccoli, all went together perfectly.

And although I fried the fish in butter, I'm still rating this one as 'healthy', as the lemon sole was only two propoints, which gave me some wiggle room for butter and a huge stack of potatoes.