Winter Fantasy

It seemed that spring is here, but Saturday morning surprised us with snow! Lot of snow! Usually, if I cook fish, I never have a clear idea about the dish, at least not before I start. This time I had some leftover oven baked beets. Before I peeled them, I had no idea that I had a tiny little treasure in the folie. I am talking about tonda di Chioggia, that is a subspecies of the common beet. They look quite the same from the outside, but in the inside the Chioggia beet is rosa and white, if it gets cooked the whole turns rosa. It tastes slighlty sweeter than the normal beet. Both kind of beets ended up as a purée. I also had some really fresh sunchoke from the farmer's shop. I had the idea to coat the fish with thin slices of the nutty root. Now there was only a sauce missing, at least that is what I thought. I love the combination of beet and horseradish, so I prepared horseradish foam. But still, there was something else missing, something crunchy and light. The answer was right in front of my eyes: white cabbage, shredded and sauteéd in butter with pecan nuts. That's it. The fish? Well, it was again a organic see bass. So that is how this dish was born, a winter fantasy using winter vegetables on a snowy day.


Ingredients:
(based on a recipe by Michel Roux)
1 shallot
1 thyme sprig
250 ml fish stock
50 ml crème fraîche
4 tablespoons freshly grated horseradish
salt, pepper


Bring fish stock shallot and thyme to boil over medium heat. Reduce by half, add créme fraîche and cook for 5 minutes. Add horseradish, season. Sieve and mix it until it is nice and foamy.