I haven’t yet written a recipe where I advice not to do it. Well, that is an original contribution to the fine art of cooking. So, I will write one.
Garlic potatoes certainly are good and please do them. I stole a Finnish recipe for them from the Internet. Take a kilo of raw potatoes, peel them, cut them into very thin slices with a sharp knife, put the slices to cold water for some time to lose starch. This is what you normally do, but in this recipe you still wash the potatoes in running water, dry them on a clean towel and fry them in butter with some grated garlic and salt and pepper, much of salt. Only after frying put the potatoes to an oven pan. Normally you skip washing, drying and frying, but it does give the taste. The secret of traditional Finnish cooking is to fry everything in butter.
The rest of the garlic you spread on the pan and then you pour 3 dl of 12% cream (or more percents, gives a fuller taste, or half milk and half cream), preheat the oven to 180-200 Celsius, keep for some 15 min without cover, then cover with baking paper and let be for one hour in total.
How much garlic? I used 6 cloves and did not press but grated as the recipe from the Web told to do so. Salt I did not measure: frying the potatoes you can put only some at the time and then spice them, so use some common sense. This food requires enough salt.
So, let us say, garlic potatoes are fine. Next time I try them without frying in butter and I will cut a bit thicker slices. The salad has my invention of chopping salad into small pieces. That would be ordinary salad, not iceberg or something, one salad head. Add two bunches of parsley, also chopped, and cut one cucumber into small cubed (pealed first). Mix and make a dressing with 4 spoons of olive oil, 2 teaspoons of xylitol (or sugar, or honey), juice from half of a lemon, ½-1 teaspoon of salt, 2 garlic cloves squeezed. Mix. That’s about it with salad. Salad dressing always has oil, lemon juice or vinegar, something sweet, something spicy, so there are just that many variations and all work. This is also good.
Then the one I do not suggest. It is cooked eel. It is not that cooked eel is bad tasting. It can have a bit mud taste, but the recipe that I used covered it well. The recipe is as follows. Skin and clean the eel, about 1 kg eel. It gives about 800 g of meat. Cut the eel to 5 cm pieces. Melt 125 g of butter in a deep pan. Put the fish to the butter. Add one-two chopped onions on top of the fish. Spread salt and white pepper on top. Yes, and squeeze two garlic cloves on top. You can add a bay leaf, I did not. Pour white wine until the fish pieces are covered. Cook for half an hour on low heat. Then take of the fish and save the liquid. Mix 2 food spoons of wheat flour and little of white wine. On a frying pan fry this flour-wine mixture with some oil. Add the fish cooking liquid slowly mixing all the time. This makes the sauce for the fish. Pour the sauce on top of the fish pieces. The result is fine as for eating.
Why I do not suggest you should do this is that eels are supposed to be freshly killed. That means that when you buy an eel it most probably is alive and you have to skin and clean it. One kilo eel will not die from being hit on head. They are very though fish. The traditional way how to skin an eel is to hit a nail through the head top fix it, cut the skin around the head, take a good grip of the skin with pliers and pull the skin out. Only if you do this in this way, the fish is probably alive while being skinned. I suggest cutting the head off to kill it, cutting the belly and cleaning it and then doing what you have to do to skin it. When you get some of the skin out, then wrap a paper around the fish and get a good grip of the skin. Then pulling with pliers the skin comes out nicely.
Why this is not worth doing? Eel is not equally tasty as many other fish and killing live beings is not much fun, and cleaning the place after that. It is better to buy some ready filets of codfish, pikeperch or something else, I think. Eel is better if smoked, then it is not skinned and it is easier that way.
