Pan flounder in an asiago sweet cream sauce. (Feat: Orange bell pepper)

I made this tonight, and it is EPIC.  So I share.  Be mindful that because of the way I cook, the only real fixed amounts are the amounts I know.  I approximate heavily when I cook, always adjusting on the fly.  If you're good enough in the kitchen, you'll be able to approximate to your own tastes.  Enjoi.

 Ingredients:
Heavy cream, around 1.5 to 2 cups.
Moscato d'asti white sparkling wine.
A bay leaf
around 3/4 cup chopped/diced asiago cheese.
2 egg yolks
1.25 lbs of flounder fillet
3/4 of an orange bell pepper, diced finely.
1 small shallot - minced
1 tbsp of garlic, give or take.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
2 tbsp butter

Equipment:
12"  frying pan.
small sauce pot
electric blender
wire whisk
spatula
knife
cutting board

you

Starting things off early, get a small pot warm and put the heavy cream into it along with a double-sized pad of butter, around 2 tbsp worth.  The butter is your timer, so keep an eye on it.  Add the bay leaf, watching for the butter to finish melting.   Once it's done melting, add your asiago cheese and start stirring slowly until the cheese is melted into the cream and butter.  Lower the heat at this time, adding two egg yolks and whisking, this will help it thicken.  Add a few cranks on the pepper and some coarse sea salt to taste. Now let it get happy.  This will take around 20 minutes of semi-regular stirring over low to medium low heat.  Use this time like I did and do the prep work you procrastinated on earlier.

Get your flounder ready once the sauce is happily simmered.  You should be seeing it thicken up by now.   From here, you want to put some EVOO in a large (mine's 12")  frying pan over medium heat.  Add your orange bell pepper once the oil shimmers and let it start to wilt in the olive oil.  Once it's started to get soft, or after you get bored (around 4 minutes), throw in the shallot and garlic, and keep agitating the mixture until the garlic is very aromatic and the shallot is browned up.   Stop and pull out your blender if you haven't already, and pour the mixture into the blender.  Blend until smooth.

Once your mixture is smoothed out, get it back in the pan.  Add the flounder atop it, and crank the heat to just below medium, letting the mixture brown up under the flounder.  Now, resist the urge to mess with your meat and let the flounder cook through to just over halfway.  Flip your fillets once they start to become opaque on the top.  Sear them, and place them aside on a plate.  Be careful, they'll try to fall apart on you.

Deglaze your pan with  the white wine and let it simmer for a minute while you fish the bay leaf out of your white cream sauce.   Now, add the sauce to the pan, and either whisk, or combine using the spatula.  Either way, you should end up with a fair and lightly oranged mixture.  Add the fish back to this mixture, turning your heat down another notch, but keeping it just above medium-low.  You'll want to simmer the fish for a few minutes in the sauce to finish the cooking.  This keeps the fish from drying out.

Poke the fish with a spatula to check to see if it flakes, and to check to see if it's cooked through.  Once both qualifiers are met, choose the person you don't like and set that fillet on their plate.  The rest goes to whomever.



A few notes:

Moscato D'asti is a sweet wine that's a great dessert wine, and an awesome table wine.   It's bubbly, but it's not so bubbly that it's relegated to special occasions.

I served this with butter roasted purple potatos and asparigus, and mixed some of the asiago cheese in with the butter for the cooking process.  Roasted the potatoes first at 325 for a good twenty minutes before adding the asparagus and cranking the heat up to 400 for fifteen minutes.

For dessert, I served a chocolate coffee mousse, which was fun, albeit whipping the mousse up was time consuming.  I need more practice with the hand mixer and my mousse recipes.

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