Spaghetti with mussels

Lettice and I went to the market this morning. I found damsons and Kent cobnuts; Lettice found mussels. We ate them for lunch - quick, easy, delicious.

Cook the mussels as if you were making moules marinière. Cook the spaghetti. Soften a few halved tiny tomatoes in a frying pan with some oil (and perhaps a little basil). When everything has finished cooking, serve it together in hot soup plates: put the spaghetti in first, next the tomatoes, then the mussels, then the soup. Fabulous.


PS a kilo will easily do four people served this way

Mussels, from farm to plate

Yesterday, Tessa and I went to the mussel farm at Loch Spelve to buy a big bag of moules for supper. I'd never been to one before, so was unprepared for the sight of a JCB pouring mussels onto a conveyor belt leading in to the packing shed. There, six or seven nimble-fingered people were sorting the shells - picking out the small or cracked ones, letting the rest go past and into a holding tank, before being packed and sent off to the mainland. Not many of the mussels are eaten in Mull - this is a lucrative cash crop, and the family-run farm is a reliable employer in an area where jobs are scarce.
























We put the money in an honesty box (in Edinburgh, half the mussels cost twice the price) and went home. Tessa cooked them like this:

5 kg mussels
5 medium onions
5 shallots
5 cloves of garlic
100g butter
2-3 tablespoons chopped parsley
375 ml water
375 ml dry white wine

Clean and check the mussels under cold running water. Sweat the finely chopped onion, shallot and garlic in a little of the butter. After about 10 minutes, add the parsley, water and wine, and cook for five more minutes. Add the mussels, clamp on the lid, and leave to steam over a low heat so that the shells open. Shake the pan occasionally. It should take about five minutes.

Strain the mussels in a colander, letting the juices fall into a saucepan. Reduce them down, then lower the heat and whisk in the butter. You can also add a little cream if you have some.

Put the mussels into a heated tureen and pour on the sauce, plus extra parsley.

The fresher the mussels, the better the dish. But you didn't need me to tell you that. Nor that Tessa's were delicious.

Honey-seared salmon with noodles

Guest post from daughter Lettice, who cooked dinner for the two of us this evening. She's just back from three months volunteering in South Africa, and says she really missed cooking:


Just tried this recipe and it was delicious. Few things: i didn't use the bean sprouts (couldn't find them) we thought they/cold cucumber sticks/mushrooms would have been equally nice. Also the frying pan was too small, and everything went everywhere, so maybe use a deep set pan or a wok - which we have i just failed to use! The pan was also slightly too hot when i added the salmon so slighty too cooked outside/not cooked inside... just cook how you would normally cook salmon - not how the recipe says!

2 strips egg/rice noodles
2 tbsp sesame oil
2 thick salmon fillets, skinned and sliced 2 cm thick
1 tbsp runny honey
1 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp sesame seeds
1 bunch spring onions, sliced
100g spinach leaves

Cook the noodles; drain, add a little sesame oil. Toss the salmon with the honey and soy sauce. Heat a non-stick frying pan over a high heat and toast the sesame seeds until lightly golden. Remove from pan. Add half the oil to the pan; once hot, cook the salmon for 1 minute each side. Remove from the pan; keep warm. Add the remaining oil to the pan; fry the noodles, spring onions and bean sprouts. Add the spinach, seeds, remaining honey and soy mix. Toss until the spinach wilts. Sit the honey seared salmon on top of the noodles and spinach - serve.

Quick and easy fish cakes

It's funny, one day there's five inches of snow and only the spears of a few snowdrops, the next day most of the snow has gone and the wood is strewn with snowdrops. This tea glass is full of the false promise of spring: those catkins have been hanging in the hedge since December, the witch hazel is almost over, and the snowdrops - well, they're a winter flower.

But there's more and more light, so I'm spring cleaning. It's amazing how the cobwebs show up at this time of year, although I leave as many as possible, because I'd rather have spiders than flies in my house, and because it's a losing battle here - the spiders come in when the nights start to get cold in the autumn, and none of them seems inclined to go back into the garden as the weather gets warmer. Luckily, I'm not afraid of them, although I don't much like it when they drop onto my pillow. Which they do (no rude remarks about cobwebs in our bedroom, please Eleanor!).

There's a culinary side to the spring cleaning: we're eating up the larder and the deep freeze. We've been eating fish cakes, using up various tins and packets, and using my usual recipe. When I used up all the Matzo meal, I forgot to buy more, but I found that fresh breadcrumbs worked just as well.

Mostly I use this method for making crab cakes, but it works well with other fish, and saves a lot of palaver with potatoes - although if there's leftover mash in the fridge, I'll happily use that. I've used this basic recipe with both fresh crab & tinned crab, as well as with a mixture of the two, also with salmon or tuna. I've replaced the Matzo with fresh breadcrumbs. I don't bother weighing anything any more - I find that a mixture made with one egg and one lemon will support enough fish for two or three people, and that if there isn't enough fish, then a little more Matzo or a few more crumbs will eke it out, especially if there are plenty of herbs in the mix. I'm not sure I've ever used the full specification of fish.
















Fish cakes

1 egg
2 tsp Dijon mustard
the juice of one lemon
450g cooked fish - although I rarely use anything like this much
50g Matzo meal
chopped herbs (optional)

Mix the egg with two teaspoons of Dijon mustard and the lemon juice (zest, too, if you like). Add the salmon and Matzo meal and, using a fork, stir together until it's all amalgamated. When you're ready to cook, you can chop in some herbs - dill would be good with salmon, or parsley, chives, perhaps coriander. Shape into patties - these days, I use a ring, because these are a little flaky, but you really don't have to. If you want to freeze them, now's the moment, interleaved with greaseproof paper. I'd thaw them all day in the fridge before cooking them, but I dare say you could cook them from frozen (as if you'd bought the cardboard sort in Tesco). They need about five minutes on each side.

Suzie's buckwheat pancakes

I say Suzie's because she made these delicious pancakes on New Year's Eve - a steady stream of them came out of the kitchen, loaded with salmon and sour cream, spritzed with lemon juice. But actually, they're from Gordon Ramsay's Healthy Appetite ... writing the note I've had in my jacket pocket ever since was my first culinary act of 2009.

Buckwheat pancakes
for 10-12 blini pan sized, or lots of tiny ones

85g buckwheat flour
85g plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/3 tsp salt
1 tbsp caster sugar
200ml semi-skimmed milk
1 1/2 tsp melted butter OR olive oil
2 large egg whites

a small knob of butter for cooking

Mix together the dry ingredients. Make a well in the centre, then add the milk and fat. Mix until you have a smooth batter. Leave to stand for "a few minutes".

When you're ready to cook, whisk the egg whites to firm peaks, and fold them into the batter.

Fry over a medium heat for 60-90 seconds, until they are brown underneath, then flip and cook for a further minute.

Gordon Ramsay suggests serving with smoked salmon, sour cream, capers and salad leaves. Drizzle with olive oil and black pepper.

Seafood party dish served at inaugural lunch

How about this? The complete menu, with recipes, for yesterday's inaugural lunch. I'm slightly appalled at the "winter vegetables" selection - asparagus, carrots, baby Brussels sprouts, wax beans - half of which probably had jet lag. But this seafood starter sounds like a good dish to make ahead when you're having a dinner party. (Although I suspect some of the seafood will need substituting for better sustainability.)

Seafood Stew

for 10 servings

6 (1 Lb) Maine lobsters
20 medium size Sea scallops
36 large shrimp, peel, cleaned and tail removed, approx. 2 lbs.
10 (1 oz) pieces of black cod
½ cup small dice carrots
½ cup small dice celery
½ cup small dice leek
½ cup small dice Idaho potato
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon ground white pepper or black pepper
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 quart heavy cream
1 cup dry vermouth (can be made without)
10 (5 inch) puff pastry rounds

Equipment

10 (3 ½ inch) terrines/ramekins or serving dish of your choice

Directions

1. Bring 1 gallon of water to a boil; poach lobsters, then shrimp, then black cod and last scallops. After seafood is cooked, remove from water; reserve water and bring to boil.
2. Cook all vegetables in liquid that was used for the seafood, remove vegetables when tender. Allow the liquid to continue to boil until only 1qt of liquid remains. This will be the base for the sauce.
3. Bring seafood liquid back to a boil and add the vermouth and heavy cream and reduce by half,
season with salt, white pepper and nutmeg to taste. You have reached your desired thickness when the sauce will cover the back of a wooden spoon. Set aside to cool.
4. Cut Maine lobster, shrimp and scallops into bite size pieces.
5. Pre-heat oven at 400 degrees.
6. Fold seafood and vegetables into cool sauce, being careful not to mix too much as this will break up the seafood. Scoop mixture into terrines or ovenproof baking dish of your choice.
7. Cover terrines with puff pastry rounds, brush them with egg wash and bake them until golden
brown about 8-10 minutes, allow to cool for 5 minutes before serving. You can cook this 2-3 hours ahead of time and keep warm at 150 F degrees.

*All seafood can be substituted with other favourite options of your choice and availability.


Here's the link to the whole inaugural meal, with recipes - there's a rather good cherry chutney for duck breasts, and a lovely recipe for cooking sweet potato with molasses. Thanks to Lifehacker for showing me the way in the first place.

Anchovy sauce for broccoli

This is seriously good, seriously unphotogenic, a wonderful winter alternative to salsa verde. We've eaten it every night this week.

It's particularly good with broccoli, goes well with roast lamb, with lentils. If you make a stiff mix with only a little olive oil, then you can use it to spread on toast (a sort of homemade Gentleman's Relish without the butter). If you make it with plenty of olive oil, then you can use it as a salad dressing for bitter winter leaves. It's also good as a dip with carrot and celery sticks.

For years I've bought Waitrose own-brand anchovies in little tins which come in a black cardboard box. Last summer there was a supply problem, so I began to buy Connétable - lovely silvery fish with a much milder flavour.









This recipe is enough for two or three evenings - it keeps for ages in the fridge, although you may want to stir in a little more oil second/third time round. The very last scrapings from the bowl are good added to gravy or a stew.

Anchovy sauce

5-6 cloves of garlic, peeled
a tin of anchovies
a splash of red wine vinegar
olive oil

Put the garlic and fish into a food processor - I use my Magimix, but a mortar would do. When they're smooth, add the vinegar, blitz, and then add olive oil glug by glug until you get the consistency you're after.

Spoon the warm-ish sauce over broccoli as soon as it's drained and serve hot.

Inspiration for this came from Fergus Henderson of St John.



This time last year, I was blogging about Lady Westmoreland's Soup - possibly the most frugal soup in the world. See what you think!

Fish or chicken in breadcrumbs, with seeds

Here's a quick tip for sprucing up fish or chicken cooked in egg and breadcrumbs/flour. Add a few poppy seeds and some sunflower seeds to the flour or breadcrumbs ... delicious.

I shamelessly pinched this idea from Marks and Spencer, who sell fillet of cod lightly dusted in seasoned flour with sunflower millet and poppy seeds. I just don't keep millet seeds in the larder - can anyone tell me if they're worth seeking out?

Other things to do with breadcrumbs

Quick mushroom tart
Grilled trout with rosemary stuffing
Baked scallops
Stuffed cabbage
Cauliflower gratin
Another cauliflower gratin

Sardoni in saor

These Venetian marinated sardines have been on my must-cook list since I read Patience Gray's Honey from a Weed. They're that sweet/sour taste which I love, and which is so typical of Venice, and of Sicily.

It's often difficult to get sardines here, and when they're available, they're usually pretty pricey. So I was cheered to find that Venetians used to make this dish with all sorts of fish - a fine fat sole if they were rich - and that it's only relatively recently that the dish has become something you always make with sardines.

Which is why mine - you've probably spotted - were made with mackerel fillets. Cheap anyway, and then on special offer. This method preserves the fish short-term, so that it will last for a week or so in the fridge. Needs to be made at least 24 hours ahead. Suits me - it meant there was something to eat when we got back from the cinema last night after seeing the electrifying Karita Mattila sing Salome on the Met relay.

Marinated oily fish

sardines / mackerel / whatever's available
flour
olive oil
onions
red wine vinegar
some pine kernels
sultanas
a piece of candied lemon peel, if you have it*

Dredge the fish in flour, and fry until browned. Lay in a flattish dish.

Slice the onions (say, two large ones to a kilo of fish) into rounds, then fry gently in the oil remaining in the pan. When they are transparent, add pine kernels (I dry roasted mine), sultanas (I soaked mine in a little hot water, as they were a little dry), chopped peel. Pour in wine vinegar - PG says to use half a litre for a kilo of fish, but after consulting other recipes, I used a wineglass-full. Bubble this for a minute or two, then pour it over the fish. The heat of the vinegar is key to the keeping qualities of the fish.

Leave them to marinade for at least a day, turning them from time to time if you think of it.


*Patience Gray says the candied lemon peel is essential; I'm not so sure, but I happened to have some, and it certainly gives the dish an extra something.

Pasta con le sarde revisited

One of the most visited pages on this blog is my recipe for pasta con le sarde made with tinned sardines. Yesterday, I had the chance to buy fresh sardine fillets. I can now tell you that the tinned version is not only cheaper and quicker, it's also much much more delicious - softer and sweeter.

Pasta con le sarde is one of those lovely dishes you can make from spring to autumn, full of the omega-3 goodness of oily fish and the herby freshness of the three types of fennel used: bulb, seeds and wavy fronds. Actually, you can make it in winter too, only then there's only one hit of fennel, the seeds. It's a Sicilian dish, so it has that tasty agro-dolce thing with the sultanas and anchovies. Well worth a try, if you don't know it. It's my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Susan at The Well Seasoned Cook.

Fennel has a faint taste of aniseed. Thomas Jefferson was sent seeds by the American consul in Livorno in 1824; he didn't know the plant, but, once he harvested them at his garden at Montecello, Virginia, he was a convert: Fennel is beyond every other vegetable, delicious, perfectly white. No vegetable equals it in flavour.

This recipe is a simplified version of the one found in Tamasin's Kitchen Bible, which, in turn, derives from Anna del Conte.

Pasta con le sarde
for 4

a handful of sultanas
a handful of pinenuts
2 medium onions
olive oil
1 head of fennel
2 anchovies
4-6 sardine fillets, chopped
1 tsp fennel seeds

400g pasta

Soak the sultanas in a little hot water. Peel and finely slice the onion into rings. Put into a wide saucepan with plenty of olive oil and gently stew. Toast the pinenuts in a dry frying pan. Dice the fennel and blanch in water for one minute; save the cooking water. Add all these ingredients (but not the water) to the onions, and continue to cook for at least 15 minutes until everything is getting soft.

Put on a large pan of cold water. Add the fennel seeds and the anchovies to your sauce (no need to chop them, they'll cook down in no time). When the water comes to the boil, add the pasta. Then add the sardines to the sauce.

If at any point the sauce gets too dry, add a little of the blanching water.

Everything will be ready at the same time. Drain the pasta and gently stir in the sauce. Garnish with the chopped whispy bits from the fennel.


Related posts

Pasta con sarde
White pizza with fennel seeds
Braised fennel

Another cauliflower gratin

I've been trying to have at least one completely vegetarian day a week here. This is easier when Horatio is away at uni, and very hard when he's at home - a 19-year-old late-growing carnivore is apt to make a fuss if there's no meat. For a whole day.

I managed yesterday.

The eat-less-meat idea has several sources: there seems to be some real proof that less meat more veg and fruit is a healthier diet; it's cheaper; it's more environmentally-friendly (meat production is notoriously heavy on agricultural resources); there are lots of good vegetarian dishes to cook and eat.

Eating less meat and dairy produce has implicit in the changes to our diet since my husband had a heart attack two and a half years ago. If you are eating more vegetables, more beans, more fruit, then clearly there's going to be less meat, less cheese, less eggs. There are some basic ideas in a post I wrote two years ago when we began to get serious about our post-heart-attack diet. (Although it's fair to say we don't stick rigidly to it ... see my 80:20 post.)

All the same, it's only this year that I've started made a conscious effort to cut out meat altogether, if only for one day a week - and you may well think that is pretty feeble. I'd happily cut meat out altogether, but I have to tread gently in a house full of carnivores ... and, so far, they aren't complaining.

This cauliflower gratin is not for vegetarians, however, because of the anchovies. They are there to give that savoury something that we used to get from cheese. But anchovies are better in a heart-healthy diet than a cheese sauce on cauliflower that constitutes the what-on-earth-shall-I-give-them-for-dinner type of cooking that is the daily grind for most family cooks. That's if you can persuade your young to eat cauliflower at all.

We ate this with baked potatoes and roasted onions, but I sometimes make it as a side dish, in which case you can cook it ahead (let it come to room temperature before putting it in the oven, otherwise you'll crack your dish).

Cauliflower gratin

One head of cauliflower
White sauce

breadcrumbs
a tin of anchovies
lemon zest
parsley

Break the cauliflower into pieces and cook covered in a minimum of water. Drain. Meanwhile make white sauce - I use olive oil and skimmed milk, which makes a wonderfully sweet scented sauce, infinitely more delicious than one made with butter. Put the cauliflower into an ovenproof dish - you want it to be a tight squeeze. Pour the sauce all over it.

Blitz a couple of slices of stale bread (this doesn't work well with supermarket slimy sliced). Add anchovies - just try a couple if you think you don't like them, I'm such an addict that I use a whole tin - and the parsley. Blitz again. Finely grate the zest of half a lemon into the mixture, which will be sticky with oil (and if it isn't, add some). Sprinkle over the dish, and bake in a hot oven, 200C for 20 minutes.


Related links

Cauliflower gratin
One veggie day a week will save the earth

Great big veg challenge on cauliflower
The Guardian "Meat-free March" links

Prawn paste .. instead of potted shrimps

Spent the day at the Oxford and Cambridge varsity hockey matches, as Lettice's team was playing the warm-up game. It was the last game for the team, half of them leave school at the end of next term. They won, and Lettice scored a great goal.

Vegetable soup

It was snowing at breakfast, so I made soup for our picnic - an onion, softened with a couple of chopped carrots, some mushroom, then a huge squirt of tomato passata, a little water, and half a tin of baked beans. I left it to simmer for half an hour, then poured it into a couple of small wide-mouthed flasks, and it was just what was wanted at 1pm, with a few soldiers of onion bread to dip.

On the way home, I asked Lucius what he'd like for dinner, as we had to stop at a shop. Potted shrimps. When he says that, these days he doesn't mean the tiny little Morecombe Bay shrimps held together with their own weight in butter. He means this really really delicious light and easy recipe for prawn paste. We wouldn't have it any other way.

Prawn paste

Blitz 250g cooked prawns, with the juice of a lemon (I often put in the grated zest, too). When it's smooth, slowly add olive oil - four two six tablespoons. Serve with toast. There are other ideas for flavouring this at my original prawn paste post.

Scallop and chorizo salad

If we were having an 80s or 90s moment, this could be a warm salad, but now, in the 21st century, I served this hot hot hot straight from the pan. Quick, easy (as so often with expensive ingredients), the perfect supper after returning from the cinema (The Bank Job, very good, based on real life, joining up a couple of half-remembered incidents from the early 70s, involving a London bank vault robbery, a princess, a Soho sleaze merchant and Malcolm X).


Scallop and chorizo salad

Chorizo
Scallops
Rocket
Oil, lemon zest/juice

Slice the chorizo and fry quickly in a non-stick pan. When the oil has run, add oil and lemon juice, zest too if you like, and arrange the salad on plates. Add the scallops and chorizo. Mmm

Related links

Baked scallops

Grilled trout with rosemary stuffing

Cooking with decent ingredients means that you don't want to waste them, however lowly they may seem to be. Something that has crept up on me is finding ways of using up every last crumb of the bread I bake. It's the sort of thrift I was brought up to, but which doesn't work if you're eating Mother's Pride.

At the fish counter yesterday, I was very aware of Ed Bruske's gentle admonishment:

I love monkfish. However, I've stopped buying it because it is listed as "avoid" by the Monterey Bay Aquarium's "Seafood Watch" program. At least in the Atlantic off the U.S. coast, monkfish (a bottom feeder that used to be thrown overboard as trash) has been overfished. Also, the means of catching it usually involves trawling, which seriously damages the ocean floor. I wonder how your British stocks are doing.

Well, this information turns out to be very hard to access. The Marine Conservation Society has just redesigned its website, but not enough to make it easy to find the information most people would want: a list of fish that's best to eat, another of endangered fish that should be avoided. It wasn't obvious, either, where they keep the search facility they've opted for instead (why not BOTH?); you need to have heard of their sister organisation FishOnline. The search facility is not entirely straightforward to use, and I had to track back to find out what the numbers meant (is a high number good? or bad?). And all the time, a disembodied voice kept saying, I'm Kate Humble and .... I HATE websites that noise at you without your say-so. It shouldn't take an hour to find this information, and I STILL don't have any clear idea about any other species than monkfish (don't eat it).

No longer on auto-pilot, I found three fat brown trout, speckled just exactly as if they'd been caught in the burn that ran past the home field of my grandfather's Fife farm. (And, yes, I do know that there are problems with farmed fish, but you've got to start somewhere, and yesterday, I was saving the monkfish.) When I bought them, I thought I'd cook them in the Scots manner, dipped in egg and oatmeal. But then I started browsing the recipe books ...

I rejected Michael Smith's recipe (in his excellent Fine English Cookery) for trout and almonds; there was the faint reminder of dour restaurant meals taken on the last night of the school holidays before incarceration (that really is the right word) at my isolated Dorset convent boarding school. Instead, I chose grilled trout with herb stuffing from Ann and Franco Taruschio's Leaves from the Walnut Tree.

I've only recently acquired this seminal book, and this is the first thing I've cooked from it. The Taruschios ran The Walnut Tree at Llandewi Skirrid from 1963 to 2001; it was Elizabeth David's favourite British restaurant; Jan Morris says she would happily go there for a plate of scrambled eggs. The subtitle of their book tells you everything you need to know: Recipes of a Lifetime.

Here's Jan Morris's description of Franco Taruschio's cooking: With herbs from the garden behind the pub, fruits and vegetables from local growers, fish and meat from a supplier down the road, the victuals at The Walnut Tree are, like the restaurant itself, a fascinating blend of the worldly and the simple, the plain organic and the exquisitely invented. This way of cooking is exactly of the moment: the Taruschio's - like, say, Alice Waters - are trailblazers.

This stuffing is a very good example: it's similar to the sort of thing my grandmother might have made to stuff a trout, but she wouldn't have used chilli flakes (even though she was a daughter of the Raj, and knew all about curry). It can be put together in moments - but is only worth making with really good bread. And if you habitually keep or make really good bread, then you'll be on the lookout for recipes which use up the last crumbs. This is one of the best I've found.

Grilled trout with rosemary
for 3-4

3-4 prepared whole trout
2 tbsp finely chopped parsley
1 tbsp finely chopped rosemary
4 tbsp fresh breadcrumbs
dried chilli flakes
a lemon
olive oil

Mix the herbs and breadcrumbs. Add a pinch of chilli flakes, the zest and juice of a lemon, four tablespoons of olive oil, and pepper. Use this to stuff the fish. Lay them on an oiled grillpan, lightly oil the fish, and sprinkle with Maldon salt. Cook for four minutes under a very hot grill, then turn, drizzle with oil and lightly salt, grill for 3-4 minutes.

Other things to do with old bread

Baked scallops
Panzanilla
Anchovy toasts


Related links

FishOnline
MCS
The Slow Cook, Ed Bruske's blog

Moro monkfish with ginger and saffron

This delicious smokily-spiced fish and potato dish would be just as good without the fish, in fact, next time, I think that's how I'll make it. And any white fish would do, rather than overpriced monkfish, as what you're after is a contrast between the white flesh and the smoky-dark sauce - both in taste and in colour.

The recipe comes from Moro East, Sam and Sam Clark's book about cooking inspired by their allotment at Manor Gardens in Hackney, East London, now, shockingly, bulldozed to make way for an Olympic footpath from carpark to stadium.

In case you're wondering how an allotment book comes up with a fish dish, I should tell you that the inspiration for Moro East came mainly from the cultural diversity of fellow allotment holders - their produce and, most importantly, their ways of cooking. Thus Moro East broadens out from the Clark's original books on the Moorish cookery of Spain.

Introducing this dish, S&S write: shut your eyes, taste, and be transported to Morocco. For me, this food evokes Sicily (the sweet note of the sultanas in a savoury dish) and Cornwall - the taste of saffron takes me right to the Penzance bakery every single time.

One of the best things about this recipe is that it's a two-step process: I made the sauce on Thursday while I was cooking supper. It was hardly any extra trouble, and made preparing dinner last night much quicker ... a huge help as I didn't get home until nearly 7 o'clock after a busy day.

Monkfish with sweet onions, ginger and saffron
for 3

Monkfish (or not)
olive oil
3 onions
2 cloves of garlic
120g sultanas
1 tsp ground ginger
a big pinch of saffron (about 30 strands)
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp cinnamon
400 ml water
400g diced waxy potatoes

Slice the onions thinly into rounds, and fry gently in a lot of olive oil (S&S say 6 tbsp). Stir frequently. When the onions are just golden, add finely chopped garlic and sultanas. Cook these for about 5 minutes to give the sultanas a chance to swell up in the oil. Add the spices, warm through, then add the water. Simmer for five minutes. At this point you can stop. Or not.

Heat the oven to 230C. Pour the warmed sauce into a large roasting tin. Arrange the potatoes on top in a single layer. Cover with foil and put in the oven. Once the sauce is simmering, the potatoes will take half an hour. You therefore need to time the addition of the fish depending on its size. Here is the Moro East guide to cooking times: a large (1kg) monkfish tail will also take 30 minutes or so, and should be added as soon as the potatoes are hot; 2 smaller tails will take about 20 minutes ... portion-sized fillets or steaks will take only 10-15 minutes.

Smear your fish with oil, and a little salt if you like. Lay the fish on the potatoes, re-cover, and cook for most of its timing. About five minutes before the end, turn the fish over and finish baking uncovered.

I served this with plain couscous. S&S say that you can sprinkle the dish with orange blossom water ... which makes me think that another time, it would look and taste good with a scattering of orange zest.

HFW's saltfish and parsnip rosti fishcake

I haven't tried this recipe yet, but I intend to. I copied it out of Anna's copy ofHugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Fish on Boxing Day, with a black crayon onto an old airmail envelope, the only writing tools that could be found. Now I'm in danger of losing the envelope, so I'm posting to keep it safe: I'm unlikely to buy Fish until I've given away a few more recipe books :)

I've never cooked saltfish, though I've meant to ever since I ate it at the end of a long day's train journey from Brittany to Lyons to fetch my (then) 10-year-old daughter, who had been staying with friends in the French Alps. I volunteered for this break from our family holiday because I wanted to go to a museum in Paris during a two- or three-hour pause in the journey, and because I wanted to visit the Jean Moulin Museum in the old Gestapo headquarters in Lyons (I was studying 20th century French history at the time). But it was August, and both were shut. I'd also taken the wrong book: one about the history of the English landscape - singularly inappropriate when every time I looked up I saw the markedly different French landscape.

But dinner that evening was magical: in a little street restaurant, not on the tourist map, hardly any choice, and starting with a saltfish puree - oily, garlicky, almost worth the hours and hours of solitary journeying.

It used to be a trek to the next town to buy any interesting fish, but now the butcher is my wet fishmonger, and the supermarket in my village stocks saltfish, so there's no excuse - except my lingering suspicion that I'm going to be the only person in the house who will actually want to eat anything I make with saltfish. And Elizabeth David - SO discouraging about making brandade de morue at home.

Saltfish and parsnip rosti fishcake

for 4-6 as a starter, 2-3 main course

1-2 parsnips (250-300g), grated
1 small onion
100g rehydrated* hard salt fish (or 200g lightly salted white fish fillet) cut into 1 cm cubes
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
rosemary, finely chopped
1 beaten egg
oil for frying

* to rehydrate saltfish, soak for 48 hours in cold water, changing it twice daily (and HFW says that it's important to taste - I think he means the water, but perhaps someone with a copy of the book can enlighten us?)

Mix everything together. Heat the oil, drop in handfuls, squashing them to a cake 8cm in diameter and 1 cmthick. Fry gently so that they don't burn, but enough that they heat through to the middle - 5-7 minutes. Flip, brown the other side, rest on kitchen paper. Eat hot with a green salad.

Doesn't that sound good? That's why I didn't want to lose it!


Related posts:

Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food
Would you like me to give you a recipe book?

Kippers - without stinking out the house

We eat kippers for breakfast every Saturday morning, without stinking out the house, which it seems is a major factor in putting people off these delicious fish. This morning my father told me he was banned from cooking them because of the smell. So he occasionally goes to the Loch Fyne Restaurant a few doors down from his house, specifically to eat kippers.

For years and years, cooking kippers was easy for me, as an Aga-user: all the cooking smells go up the flue - which means that you can burn food to a crisp black cinder without realising until you go into the garden. But now my Aga isn't working, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have it taken out (in favour of a wood-fired oven), so I've had to solve the odourless kipper-cooking problem. It turns out to be the original, traditional & popular method in the north east of England, which is where kippers were invented (by John Woodger of Seahouses in Northumberland, in 1840). The most difficult thing about it is finding a jug which is tall enough but not too wide (otherwise you'll need two kettles-full of water), and I keep thinking that there must be a pottery, perhaps in Craster, where they make the perfect kippering jug.

Jugged kippers

Put good kippers (ie undyed, preferably from Craster, Uig, Loch Fyne) into a jug, heads down, and pour boiling water over them. Leave for at least six minutes and no more than 10. Pull them out, shake off the drips, and serve on hot plates. Pepper, a little well-strained yoghurt, some finely chopped onion (probably not at breakfast), lemon juice are all good accompaniments, and a little toast and marmalade to follow is utter bliss.

This works well, but only if you use a jug (or similar) rather than a flat dish. If you do that, the water cools too fast and you need to heat it up - which produces a smell, as well as perfectly edible kippers.



The other difficulty people have with kippers is the bones. WC Hodgson explains in The Herring and its Fishery (quoted by Jane Grigson in her Fish Book):

"Eating a kipper is quite simple if it is laid correctly on the plate to start with, that is, with the skin uppermost. With the head twoards you, lift up the skin from half of the kipper by running the point of the knife along the edge and fold the skin back. This exposes the flesh on top of the bones, and it is quite easy to remove it in fillets, leaving the bones untouched. When this side has been eaten, turn the kipper round on the plate so that the tail is towards you and repeat the process on the other side."

Jane Grigson comments: This works. It's true, it does, because we both tried it a couple of weekends ago. But it's more of a palaver than what I normally do, but, unlike Mr Hodgson (somehow, I feel he must be a man), I am not equal to the task of describing it. But it works too.

Anchovy, Garlic and Caper Sauce

I said I'd cook one last recipe from each book I give away ... today's prize book is Jane Grigson's Fish Book. I'm only giving it away because I've got two copies. I use this book all the time, not just to cook from, but also to read.

This 18th-century recipe for Anchovy, Garlic and Caper Sauce is one I haven't tried before; it's perfect for today, when Lucius may or may not be coming home for lunch, and when there's lots of oddments in the fridge that need eating up. I'm going to serve it with vegetables, rather in the manner of a cold bagna cauda (the recipe for which is also given).


















I halved the quantities, left out the salt (lots in the capers), and made it with a pestle because I wanted a lumpy texture. It's a sort of winter, herb-less version of salsa verde, which we eat a lot in the summer. A good discovery. Thank heavens I've got two copies of Jane Grigson's Fish Book!


Anchovy, garlic and caper sauce

Serves 6

An 18th-century sauce that goes beautifully with hard-boiled eggs - halve them across, spread the sauce on a dish and put the eggs, cut side down, in neat rows on top. Allow 6-9 eggs. Serve it with cooked haricot beans, salt cod and grilled white fish, or tuna.

10-12 large garlic cloves, in their skins
8-10 anchovy fillets
2 tablespoons small capers
dash of wine vinegar
salt, pepper
about 12 tablespoons olive oil

Simmer the garlic in water to cover for 7 minutes. Cool under the tap, remove their skins and put them into a blender (better than a processor for this kind of sauce) with the anchovies, capers, vinegar and a little seasoning. Whizz to a puree, then slowly add the oil to make a sauce of mayonnaise consistency. Taste and adjust seasonings.

This is a strong sauce - you could use half sunflower or safflower oil and half olive oil to make it blander.


PS Fabulously easy, even in a mortar. Utterly delicious, especially with cold potatoes. Who needs hard-boiled eggs?

Would you like me to give you a recipe book?

The other day, in the post-Christmas sales, I bought yet another recipe book. When I got home, I realised there really really wasn't anywhere to put it. Not a bookshelf, not a worktop, not a table. Some weeding of cookery books is required. 101 cookery books? Here, that's only the beginning.

I read somewhere that most cookery books are either not used at all, or only for a couple of recipes. In this house, cookery books are frequently consulted - often several at once for versions of the same recipe - but rarely used chapter and verse. Many are kept for one recipe, perhaps two. But there are a number that haven't been consulted for years, even for the one treasure they (may) contain. And so I am going to weed them out. One by one: it's too difficult - painful even - to make a huge pile in one day.

Each book will be read one last time. I'll post about it, document the recipe/s I actually use from it (maybe even cook it) ... and then give it to one of you ... just email me (joannacary AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk) and let me know why you'd like it, and I'll pick a winner, and post it off. All I'd like you to do in return is write a post about the book, linking back here.

I'm aiming - but not promising - to do this once a week. There's enough to keep us going for at least a couple of years. Some of them are in the picture. Some of them are in a pile on the floor. Some of them are covered in food stains. They need a new home. Yours?


So ... I wrote all that a couple of weeks ago, and have spent much of the intervening time thinking, either that I've gone stark staring mad, or about which book to give away first.

Well, maybe I have gone mad, giving away my books to strangers (although I have many real friends in cyberspace, AND there's something very intimate about food blogging, something which goes right to the heart of how people live their lives & what they consider important). I'm going to start with a favourite, which I'm giving away because it's a duplicate.

Jane Grigson's Fish Book











All of Jane Grigson's books are magisterial yet accessible, scholarly yet fun. This one is no exception: it's full of erudition, AND is written with the confidence of someone who has cooked everything not just once for research, but daily weekly monthly because that's how she lives.

As a sourcebook of coldwater fish, this cannot be beaten. For instance, in the section on flatfish (just one of over 40 chapters on individual groups of fish), she explains the differences between dab, flounder, fluke, lemon sole, megrim, whiff, sail-fluke, west coast sole, Torbay sole, witch (with separate sections for halibut and turbot). Whatever you impulse-buy at the fishmonger, you'll find great advice and inspiration. There are no pictures, just a few lovely line drawings by Yvonne Skargon.


I said I'd cook one last recipe from each book I give away ... and I have, but I'm putting Jane Grigson's Anchovy Garlic and Caper Sauce in a separate post, because it's so delicious I shall want to find it again easily.



Both my copies are a 1993 Penguin reprint (it was first published in 1973), and I'm giving away the pristine, unused one, because I've made notes in the other one, and I find those indispensible when I'm returning to a recipe I don't often use. Would YOU like it? Just email me (joannacary AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk) and let me know why you'd like it, and I'll pick a winner, and post it off. All I'd like you to do in return is write a post about the book, linking back here.

Baked scallops

Lettice and I were on our own for lunch - Lucius was playing in a real tennis tournament, the boys ate early before rushing off to play hockey. So we treated ourselves ... just how much, we realised when we started to eat: this is a simple dish which transcends its ingredients.

We used a small bag of frozen scallops which have been sitting in the freezer for a couple of months since I impulse-bought them. And we used crumbs made from the last of the bread I brought home yesterday from my day's baking with Richard Bertinet. The crumbs on the top make a pastry-ish lid; the ones on the edge crisp up and provide contrast to the creamy texture of the lemony sauce in the centre. I don't think this would work with Mother's Pride.

Baked scallops for 2

6 scallops with their coral
20-30g fine fresh breadcrumbs
lemon zest and juice
coarsely ground black pepper
olive oil

Heat the oven to 250C. Grease a couple of small shallow dishes. Put the crumbs into a bowl, mix in lemon zest and pepper. Add the scallops and toss them until they are completely coated with crumbs. Arrange carefully on the dishes, making sure that the fish is completely covered with crumbs, and that there are a few round the edges. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the two dishes, then drizzle with oil.

Bake for 15 minutes. Leave to settle for a couple of minutes before eating.

This could be a starter or a light lunch (we ate it with raw beetroot salad). Next time, we're going to make it with mussels.


















There's something pretty similar in Nigella Lawson's new book, Nigella Express ... but her version is heavier, less heart-healthy, using butter, and there's no zest, which seems a wasted opportunity.

Related link

Scallop and chorizo salad