An Exclusive Recipe From Eat Beautiful By Make-Up Artist Wendy Rowe

An exclusive recipe from EAT BEAUTIFUL, the new book by make-up artist WENDY ROWE which is published today …

Sardines 0005

Make-up artist Wendy Rowe has worked with the world’s most beautiful faces, from Sienna Miller to Victoria Beckham; she did Beckham’s make-up for last month’s Cannes red carpet, and is Burberry Beauty’s creative consultant. Her book Eat Beautiful outlines her skincare and make-up advice, focussing on caring for your skin from the inside out, together with plenty of recipes for eating your way to great skin. Here’s a great summer skin-enhancing recipe to try:

Sardines on buckwheat flatbreads

SERVES 4/ 280 CALORIES PER SERVING

  • 4 tbsp buckwheat flour, plus extra for dusting
  • Raw coconut oil, for frying
  • 4 fresh sardines, gutted and cleaned (ask your fishmonger to do this)
  • Handful of fresh parsley, finely chopped, plus extra to serve
  • Juice of ½ lemon
  • Salt and freshly ground black pepper

TO SERVE

  • 1 watermelon radish (or a handful of red radishes), sliced into thin circles
  • Lemon wedges

I keep tins of sardines in my cupboard to have as a simple snack – great on toast with a sprinkling of sea salt and cracked black pepper. While they’re lower in mercury than other sea fish, it’s important to buy wild-caught sardines and opt for those packed in water or oil, rather than brine – you can always add the salt later. Even better, buy them fresh from your fishmonger. Bursting with flavour, they need very little to enhance them – just a few herbs and a squeeze of lemon.

  1. Place the flour in a bowl with 2 tablespoons of water and knead together to make a dough. (Buckwheat can be quite sticky so you may need to add more flour.)
  2. Roll the dough into a tube and slice into four sections. On a work surface lightly dusted with flour, roll each piece out into a flatbread about 3mm thick.
  3. Heat a little coconut oil in a non-stick frying pan over a medium heat, add a flatbread and cook on each side for 2–3 minutes or until browned. Transfer to a plate and cook the remaining flatbreads in the same way.
  4. Meanwhile, cook the sardines. Melt 1 tablespoon of coconut oil in a frying pan and add the sardines, parsley and lemon juice. Season with a little salt and pepper and cook over a medium heat for 5 minutes on each side or until cooked through (see tip below).
  5. To assemble, place slices of radish on top of each flatbread, top with a sardine and serve with extra parsley sprinkled over and a wedge of lemon.

TIP The only downside of cooking fresh sardines is that they will stink your house out! To avoid this, simply cook outdoors on a barbecue.

Extracted from Eat Beautiful by Wendy Rowe (Ebury Press, £20stg). Photography by David Loftus

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