Recipe: Pescado con Salsa de Flores de Calabaza (Fish with Squash Blossom Sauce)

Every Thursday on the Good Food Blog we share a recipe from our archives.

Nancy Zaslavsky who leads cooking tours to Mexico and has written a number of Mexican cookbooks, including A Cook’s Tour of Mexico, first shared this recipe forFish with Squash Blossom Sauce with us on June 21, 2003.

Keep reading for the full recipe…

Pescado con Salsa de Flores de Calabaza

(Fish with Squash Blossom Sauce )

Serves 6

This easy dish is all about summer’s golden squash blossoms, which you can find at Mexican markets and farmers markets from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Just about any non-oily fish will work, whether fillet or steak, pan saut-ed, broiled, steamed, baked or grilled. After the sauce and fish are on plates I like to scatter minced red ripe jalape-o chiles, cilantro leaves and a squirt of Mexican lime, as final flavor sparkles.

1 pound squash blossoms (about 25), pumpkin or zucchini

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

1 medium white onion, minced

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 cup fish, chicken or vegetable broth (low-salt canned or frozen is fine), plus extra

1 cup Mexican crema, sour cream or cr-me fra-che

1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Cooked fish of your choice, 4 to 6 ounces per person

1 red ripe jalape-o or other similar fresh red chile, minced (and seeded for a mild dish)

2 Tablespoons coarsely chopped cilantro leaves

2 Mexican limes

1. Wash and drain the squash blossoms. Snap off the stems and break off the spiky sepals at the base of the flowers. Spread open and tear out the hard pistil in the center of each blossom and discard.

2. Heat the oil in a saucepan. Saut- the onion and garlic until golden. Pour in the broth. Cook over medium heat 2 minutes. Remove the saucepan from the stove and let the ingredients cool for 3 minutes. Slowly stir in the crema.

3. Grab a handful of blossoms and place them in a blender or processor container with 1/2 cup of the crema mixture. Blend. Stop blending and add another handful of blossoms and more of the crema mixture, pushing down on the ingredients and blending again. Repeat, adding more broth or water as needed until all the blossoms are pur-ed. Pour the pur-e into the saucepan, and season with salt and pepper. Keep warm.

4. Cook the fish of your choice. Ladle sauce onto the center of 6 plates. Top with a piece of fish. Sprinkle the fish with about a dozen tiny specks of red ripe jalape-o chile. Scatter cilantro leaves on top. Squirt with fresh lime.

copyright, Nancy Zaslavsky 2003