How to Serve Firinda Mercan
So now it's time to make that delicious curly salad that I was talking about. Now curly salad is great with fish. It's also great as a garnish. So what we’re going to do is instead of using the whole salad since we only have one piece of fish, we’ll just salvage some leaves and use it as our garnish. Then what’s left is just going to be the perfect amount for our salad. As you could see, you just garnish the plate and then we’ll place the fish on top. You want to cut off the ends and you don’t need to fine chop with this either, just like a nice chunky chop. In Turkey, we have different salads. We have salads with spinach and arugula and any time you get fish, you always get some sort of salad next to it. We even make a salad out of beans called piyaz salata which also goes great with fish.
I like to use a red onion and half is okay because we don’t have that much lettuce and just slice it going down, very fast. Give it a nice fast chop and just break it apart with your fingers. Now when you toss it later on with the dressing, it's going to beak apart as well, so you don’t have to get too technical over here. Just a little bit on top and when we make our dressing, we like a very lemony dressing because lemon brings out the flavor of the salad. I love to add cherry tomatoes because it just gives great color and they taste great. You just want to throw some up on top. You don’t even have to chop them. I love cherry tomatoes. So just keep using them as much as you can.
Now, it's time to make our dressing. So I have two freshly squeezed lemons over here and I always like to use fresh lemons. In a Turkish house, you always use the freshest produce like even sometimes, you even grow your own vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes you have your own tomatoes and cucumbers. Some people even got lettuce especially my mother-in-law, she has lemon trees. She has lemons all the time. I love it because I love very lemony salad dressings.
You just want to take extra virgin olive oil and put in maybe like two or three tablespoons. Now make sure you have more lemon juice than the olive oil. You don’t want the olive oil to overpower it. You want the dressing to be really lemony that when you take a bite of the fish, it kinds of bring out the flavors together. We’ll just add a little bit of salt. Mix that together and then you could just pour it over our green salad. You see how fast that was? So fast, so easy, little bit of fresh pepper and now here is our perfect complement to the fish that we’re making. I'm just going to get it out of the oven and get ready to serve.
Our fish is really nice and well-done now. You could see it's even browned on top a little like I said before. That means it's cooked all the way through and it's really nice and crispy. So now what you want to do is take a spatula. Now is the time to be extra careful because you don’t know if it's stuck to the aluminum foil or what. You have to be very gentle in getting it out so it doesn’t break apart because the beauty of this fish is leaving it whole on the plate.
So now you may want a spoon to help you with the other end. Take it and just lay it flat on the curly lettuce and we love to just garnish it with some fresh lemon. We’ll cut them into halves and then into quarters. Just cut off the ends, go downward and again because we love to squeeze fresh lemons. We even squeezed a little just now. But usually when you go to a restaurant, you’ll always have fresh lemon wedges. When I go, I even ask for an extra lemon. I tell them to bring me extra lemon. Usually, you’ll even have the salad on the side of the fish. You can even just throw in some cherry tomatoes in there. This is even going to go great with our soup, red tomato soup and the red snapper. We got red cherry tomatoes. It's just red and green all over.
So you saw how easy this fish dish was. It's really fast to make. It goes great with soup and salad. Now, we’re going to get ready to do delicious dessert.
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