Fish

Recipe: Couscous Tuna Salad

It’s getting hotter, finally! With this weather, some delicious salads with fish would do more then fine. Sitting at your balcony sipping on a glass of wine or a fresh home made Ice Tea, sounds good right.. This recipe is easy and quick, so you can relax more and enjoy the sunny days. You can also make variations by adding pangafilet instead of tuna steaks. My dear friend Zinaida came up with this recipe, she keeps coming up with salads/healthy food that her daughter of 4 who doesn’t like vegetables actually gratefully eats!

Ingredients:

Tuna steaks / pangafilet (one for each person)
Leaf lettuce with baby spinach (80 gram)
Goat Cheese with honey (125 gram)
Green olives
1/2 bag of couscous (a 400 g)
Pine nuts
Cherry tomatoes
1 Carrot
Olive Oil
1/2 Onion

1. Chop the carrots to small pieces and prepare the cous cous. Add a spoon of olive oil on the cous cous.

2. Move the cous cous to a big plate/bowl when it’s done. Cut the cherry tomatoes into half, add the carrots and tomatoes to the cous cous. Also cut the onion into small pieces and slice the goat cheese. Roast the pine nuts and also add them to the plate. Season the pangafilet or tuna steaks with salt and pepper, grill them for a few minutes.

3. Place the salad on top of the cous cous and mix everything.

4. There’s no dressing needed further. Just put the tuna steak or pangefilet on top of the salad and enjoy!

New York: The Mermaid Inn

My friend took me to the Mermaid Inn last Tuesday and I was already excited because of the name! Between 5 PM and 7 PM, it’s happy hour which means the oysters will be sold for 1 dollar each! Look at the pictures and stop by there whenever you’re near!

The staff was friendly, the vibe was good and the food was nice. You’ll get chocolate pudding after your dinner from the restaurant. With the bill they will give you a fortune teller fish which predicts your mood. Sitting outside and watching people during the oysters is a must!

A sneak peek of the menu:

Maenaam Thai Restaurant

When it comes to food it´s definitely something my boyfriend and I always agree on, we love Asian cuisine! Thai food is nice and it seems difficult to really mess these dishes up! I never had bad experiences with Thai food, so I had good expectations when we were trying a new restaurant called Maenaam Thai in Amsterdam. This restaurant is located at the Spuistraat, which is 2 minutes walking from the famous Dam Square. It’s also 5 minutes walking from the restaurant to Central Station. So this was an ideal place to grab food before we had to catch our train for a 2 hour ride to see my parents 🙂 Little detail: Maenaam ( แม่น้ำ ) means river in Thai.

A few pictures of our dinner:

Tom Kha Koeng

In my opinion there’s no other soup that can compete with Thom Kha Koeng. This is because I prefer soups with a coconut milk base. This soup contains coconut milk, prawns, mushrooms and coriander.

Plaa Shoe Shie

Fried fish in a red curry sauce with coconut milk and sweet Thai basil. The fish was fried pangasius fillet, normally we prefer other fish than pangasius, but this main course with white rise was tasting ok.

Phad Thai Kai

Pad Thai are typical Thai fried rice noodles. I took the pad thai with vegetables, egg, tauge and chicken. I like taking Phad Thai as a side order next to white rice.

The dish I liked most was the Tom Kha Koeng. This soup was delicious and I can recommend this as a starter. The menu is not expensive, average as other Thai restaurants I know. Starters are around 5-7 euro’s and main courses are around 14-18 euro’s. I have seen lots of vegetables sculptured into various animals like swans of flowers. But I’ve never seen an onion carved into a flower as a decoration on a plate. I found this quitte original 🙂 There are no desserts on the menu, but we had 2 scoops of vanilla icecream with almonds and whipped cream. Staff is friendly and mostly English speaking.