Wild Creamy Aromatic Sauce For Fish or chicken

If anyone ever tells you that bechamel sauces go with fish, don't listen to them. It's too heavy, claggy and generally a bad combination, I've never even made a fish pie with the stuff. 

So what's the alternative? 

A simple reduced cream.

Ingredients

250ml Double cream

1 Vegetable stock cube 

2 Fillets fish/meat of your choice

3 tender sprigs Rock Samphire 

3 sprigs wild Fennel

1 tablespoon chopped parsley

1/2 tsp dijon mustard 

Salt to taste 

Juice of 1 lemon 

Knob of butter 

Method

1. The best thing to do here, especially if you want to serve this sauce with poached chicken or fish, is to use the poaching liquid as a base for your sauce. For my poaching liquid I used about 500ml water, lemon juice and salt and poached the cod fillet for about 5 minutes. You can then remove your fish/meat and set aside. 
2. Next you want to add vegetable stock cube to the liquid and dissolve, then a small knob of butter and a decent amount of cream alongside your foraged aromatics. For this recipe I used wild fennel and rock samphire. There's two ways of doing this- either chop up finely and add to cream sauce near the end or leave whole and cook for a while in the sauce to extract the flavour. I did the latter but it's really up to you.
3. Reduce sauce until it is glossy and coats the back of a spoon.
4. Take off the heat and stir 1/2 teaspoon of dijon mustard and a some chopped parsley into your sauce.

*yarrow, sorrel, scurvy grass, wild garlic and sea purslane also work well as alternatives but it depends on what you're cooking it with- sorrel and wild garlic go well with chicken, sorrel and yarrow goes well with fish and scurvy grass has a mustard-y tinge and sea purslane has a salty crunch so can be quite versatile. You can experiment with your own flavours.