Walleye à la bordelaise… or more than a dish.
I truly believe that certain dishes are telling a story. I am sure that all the cooks and foodies of this page have one or several dishes that remind them of somebody, a parent, a friend… or something, a happy event, or a sad one… Proust would call this a madeleine… and I have plenty of madeleines.
But this dish is special, not by itself, very simple, very basic, just a seared walleye fillet with a shallot / Bordeaux wine sauce… But here it is. I was born in Bordeaux, France, and Ardis, my wife is from Sandusky, Ohio. She got me into the walleye, which is a fish I didn’t know till I moved in Ohio. But there is a fresh water fish from the same family, the “sandre”, in those rivers near Libourne where I was fishing as a kid. “Sandre à la bordelaise” is a local specialty. Hence the idea of the “walleye à la bordelaise”… telling the story of how Ardis and I met more than 40 years ago and how, against all the odds, a fish from the Lake Erie and a bottle of Bordeaux reconnected many years later…

Or a little variation as on the top picture: add some mushrooms to the shallots (here dried porcini, and the rice was flavored with the mushroom soaking water).
Your madeleine is downright Proustian. Lovely story, beautiful dish!
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