Cha Ca, Hanoi

Ok so....I did write and publish a big old post on this dish just a few days ago, but blogspot seems to have bloody lost it!  Either that or I'm going mad. 

Anyway here's a short version of what was previously here:

The pics are of 'cha ca thang long' in Hanoi, 'cha ca' for short - it's a delicious combination of turmeric marinated white fish (often 'snakehead' fish, or 'pla chorn' as it's known in Thai) along with fresh dill, chillies, peanuts, more herbs and some dipping sauce.
 
The dish is famous in Hanoi and there's loads of places to try it.   I tried a few places, the best version I ate was here ...where the pics above are from.

Or make it at home, it's pretty straightforward, here's a good couple of recipes you might want to check out:

Great vid from Luke Nguyen: http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/lukenguyen/recipes/detail/recipe/11022

Nice version by the lovely people behind 'Ravenous Couple' (great sounding dipping sauce recipe there too): http://www.theravenouscouple.com/2009/06/cha-ca-thang-long-vietnamese-turmeric-fish-with-dill.html


Andy

Seafood BBQ, Mui Ne

Al fresco seafood BBQ, Mui Ne: the unlucky prawns, crabs, fish, lobster, turtle (yes turtle) etc.... are kept live in tanks of sea water.

You point, and the nice Vietnamese people slap it on the grill.

They're good at it too; I went back two nights running and everything I ate was perfectly cooked (which isn't as easy as it sounds).

A few snaps:

Crabs and lobster are grilled plain, then served with lime, white pepper & salt:

Little sweet tasting scallops get a brushing with spring onion oil:

...& tiger prawns get a simple garlic marinade:

Then you just buy a few beers, and perhaps a french bagette or two, and you're set.

(I didn't try the turtle).

Seafood 'hot pot', Mui Ne

This is a seafood hot pot I ate on the beach in Mui Ne (a small beach town in the South of Vietnam).

I'm normally a bit suspicious of something with a name like 'Seafood hot pot': can mean anything really...perhaps there's no recipe but the kitchen just boil up some seafood odds 'n' ends with a token vegetable or two.

Not so this one!

It was a perfect seaside bowl of food: a very tasty broth sweetened by the chunks of juicy pineapple, soured with fresh tamarind (the seeds from the pods were in the bottom of the bowl once I’d slurped it dry). Floating temptingly about in it were big pieces of v.fresh veg: tomato, okra and spongy-juicy taro stem – a perfect soup vegetable, and one which I’ve only come across in Vietnam.

Plus of course seafood: squid, chunks of white fish and prawns (the Vietnamese tend to eat the small ones shell and all, which works for me). I think the recipe was based on a soup which comes from the Mekong region called 'Canh chua cá'.

Delicious. Plus the kind of dish that you can feel doing you good; swim in the sea everyday and eat this...you'd live past 100. Guaranteed.

Thai style grilled tiger prawns

Here's a quick Thai marinade, perfect for a tiger prawns on a BBQ or on a griddle pan. Barely a recipe really. Would work well with other seafood e.g squid or a whole fish like snapper or something.

All you need is some raw (grey, not pink) big prawns ideally still in their shells. A few hours before you want to cook them use your pestle and mortar this marinade (proportions below about right for 6-8 prawns)...

half a teaspoon of white peppercorns (if you only have black peppercorns then I reckon just leave them out)
2 sticks of lemongrass, tough outer layers peeled off
2 cloves of peeled garlic
5-6 washed coriander roots (you could use stalk at a push)
a 2cm piece of fresh yellow turmeric, peeled / a v.small pinch of tumeric powder
two bird's eye chillies ("scuds")
plus a splash of fish sauce & pinch of white sugar & sea salt

Start by pounding the peppercorns, then chop the lemongrass and throw that in with pinch of sea salt (seasons and helps with pounding-down process), crush until quite fine, now add your garlic and coriander roots, pound again, finally chop up the chillies and turmeric and add them, pound again. When it's all well smooth-ish add a tablespoon or so of fish sauce and pinch of white sugar, mix, and it's ready.

Prep your prawns. In the pic I've removed the shell from the body but left the tail and head on, but I often just leave the shell on as it stops them from drying out. Either way you want to remove the vein - if peeled then do this by cutting down the back to expose vein and pull it out, if you want to keep shell on then hook the vein out with a skewer or toothpick.

Now rub the prawns all over with the marinade and leave to marinate for at least an hour, several hours is better.

When you're ready to cook grill them until charred and just cooked on you BBQ, probably 2 mins on each side.

Serve with coriander and lime pieces to squeeze over, plus, if you like, a little bowl of fish sauce and lime juice with a sliced chilli in ("prik nahm pla") or a bought chilli sauce like siracha.

P.S you can obviously tweak this marinade in all sorts of ways e.g simplify it to just the garlic-coriander root-peppercorn combo, or for extra fragrance pound in some fresh galangal and finely chopped kaffir lime leaves ....etc etc

Thanks to Ben for the pic.

Monkfish with clams, saffron potatoes & samphire

Here's a quick recipe i cooked for an al fresco lunch on a recent sunny day, for once not Southeast Asian themed....


Monkfish with clams, saffron potatoes & samphire

You could use all sorts of fish and shellfish here in place of the monkfish-clam combo. Only tip is don't be too heavy-handed on the seasoning because the samphire and clams are both salty already.

Ingredients (serves 2):

• 300g of monkfish fillet
• 2 small handfuls of clams
  
• 2 plum tomatoes
• 1 clove of garlic
  
• a handful of samphire, washed
  
• 1 large waxy (e.g 'cyprus') potato
• some chicken stock & a glass of white wine (both optional)
• pinch of good quality saffron strands
• EV olive oil
  
• sea salt & black pepper
• small handful flat leaf parsley
• some fresh chervil (optional)
  

Method:

• First peel your potato and dice it into cubes about 1 - 1.5cm square, put them into a small pan with enough chicken stock (or water) to cover, add a good pinch of salt and a nice few saffron strands. Simmer until just cooked (about 6 - 8 mins i guess), then drain and set aside, keep the saffron cooking liquid too.
  
• Meanwhile wash the clams, cut the monkfish into slices about an 3cm thick.
• Peel the tomatoes, de-seed and then dice them about the same size as the potato. Chop your garlic and parsley fairly fine (but keep them seperate).
  
• Put a wide frying pan (which you have a lid for) on a medium high heat, add some olive oil, throw in the garlic, now season your monkfish slices with salt & pepper and lay them in the pan to fry.
• After about a minute or two the fish should have starter to colour, so flip the pieces over, turn up the heat nice and high and add in your clams followed by your glass of white wine and a bit of the saffron potato water (just use more of the latter if you got no wine handy) and clamp down the lid.
• Leave covered for about 2 mins, then lift off the lid and throw in your samphire and tomatoes, cover again for one more minute - by which time everything should be nicely cooked & the clams all open (throw away any that aren't).
• To finish stir through the chopped parsley, drizzle with olive oil and garnish with chervil sprigs (if using).

Some more wine (to drink) and bread (to mop up the sauce) is ideal here.

Hope you like it.

Thai feed: southern style curry, grilled pork & chilli jam relish

On a recent day off i made the effort to go to Chinatown and pick up fresh Thai ingredients for a bit of a cook up. I went to Loon Moon - far as i know it's by far the best shop in Chinatown / central London for Thai ingredients, that is apart from when giant Icelandic ash clouds are stopping flights of Thai goodies coming over.

A couple of friends were coming over, one of which was Ben who kindly took some pics of the food.

I didn't have an exact plan of what to cook before i went out shopping but ended up deciding to make fresh coconut milk and using that to do a yellow curry with prawns, then some Northern Thai style grilled pork and an easy relish using bought Nam Prik Pao (a smoky Thai chilli jam) along with a few herbs, a grilled banana blossom and a various bits and bobs of garnish.

Here's some snaps and rough recipes:

First the curry...

I made my own coconut milk for this, which is not something I've done much before at home. But it's not as hard as it sounds, and, while more hassle, does produce much tastier result than opening a can. I'll take a load of pics next time i do it and do a whole post on it.
The curry itself was based on a quite a simple yellow* curry paste, which works well with lots of different types of seafood. I was going to put some torn up betel leaves in there at the end, but forgot!  No matter, but for the record they go well in this kind of curry.



*n.b I say 'yellow' here because the paste contains a good dose of fresh turmeric which makes the final curry.... you guessed it, yellow.  But!  That's slightly confusing because, in Thailand, if you ask for yellow curry (gaeng leung) you'll get a quite different spicy boiled curry with no coconut milk.  Hmmm...perhaps I should call this a 'turmeric curry'.  Any ways, i digress, back to the recipe!   


Here's the recipe for the paste:

- 6 long dried red chillies, soaked and de-seeded
- about 5 cleaned coriander roots
- 4 sticks of lemongrass, tough outside peeled off
- 5 Thai red shallots, peeled
- 3 cloves of garlic, peeled
- a small piece of fresh tumeric, peeled
- a square inch of peeled galangal
- a tablespoon of shrimp paste (gapi)

Chop all the above nice and small and then ideally use a pestle and mortar to pound the ingredients one by one (hardest first) into a paste. If you're not feeling motivated enough to go the authentic route then a small hand blender thing will whizz it all up in half the time with the addition of a splash of water to help it bind.













So to make the curry I heated most of the coconut cream until it cracked (split and became oily), then fried the paste in resulting 'crack' until fragrant (about 5 mins). I then seasoned this with a pinch of palm sugar and a few tablespoons of fish sauce, added a little more cream and some plain chicken stock to let it out.

Next went in the prawns (tail and heads still on but I'd taken the vein and middle section of armour off) and a couple of torn lime leaves, which i let cook for 4 or 5 more mins. Finally I added some sliced long red chillies (the forgotten torn betel leaves would have gone in now too), double checked the seasoning and dished in to bowls, finishing with shredded lime leaves:























At the same time I also cooked some slow grilled pork - using pork neck, but any not-too-lean cut would work, and marinated it in a paste of coriander roots, garlic and white peppercorns along with some sweet soy sauce. I cut it pretty thick and grilled it on my cast iron griddle thing long and slow, turning regularly.

Next time i think I'd cut it bit thinner (maybe 15 cm), just so it cooks bit quicker and gets a more caramelised crust, which is obviously the best part.

With the sliced grilled pork I served a sauce which Dtew (a Thai chef from Chiang Mai showed me recently) made from lime juice, tamarind water, roasted chilli powder, fish sauce and a v.small pinch of white sugar (i topped it with ground roasted rice for a bit of extra texture & nuttiness). Plus some fresh mint and coriander sprigs, lime & cucumber slices.
























Finally I did a relish based on nam prik pao, which is a chilli jam made from fried garlic, shallots, chillies, dried shrimp etc. You can buy quite good stuff in Thai shops. Which is what i did here - just warming a few tablespoons of it up in a pan and seasoned it with fresh tamarind water, palm sugar, roasted chilli powder and fish sauce. We do similar at Nahm, and then use it as a dressing for a salad.



Alongside the relish: some grilled banana blossom, blanched green beans and betel leaves:
























Thanks to Ben for the great snaps.

Thai crisp fish salad with green mango & cashews

Crispy fish salad with green mango & cashews

For the last month or so i've been doing salads at the restaurant. It's a big step up for me and a really challenging role - partly because they're a lot of work to knock up during service, but also because whoever is doing salads runs the 'Larder' section. Larder does pretty much half of the kitchen's menu; we do all the canapés, entrées, relishes & salads, plus, at lunchtime, we also knock up the soups, pad Thai, oh and need to be able to jump on pastry and do the desserts too.

There's normally 3 of us and i have organise the team's prep during the day, make sure we're ready for service, not in the shit, or, for that matter, about to run out of any of the wide array of obscure sliced, toasted, deep fried, julienne or fermented wot nots we need each day. During service i then call the orders, do my dishes, check the other's, taste this that or the other, and generally sort of hold it together and not sink the ship.

It's challenging, and sometimes v.stressful. Especially for someone like me who was behind a desk not much more than a year ago. But I'm learning loads and basically loving it.

Anyhow, i ramble! Basically what i meant to say is: i'm now doing salads, so here's a nice salad recipe from Nahm: fish salad with green mango and cashews....

It's a dish we've had on as a special recently, using brill. It's exactly my kind of food - fresh & simple, but also interesting and bang full of flavour and texture. so thought i'd share the recipe, i'm sure the nice man David Thompson wont mind (!?).

No of ingredients might look a lot but it is a pretty simple salad by Thai standards.

Ingredients (serves two without much else or four or more as part of a Thai meal)

• Around 250g of fish on the bone (as mentioned we use brill at Nahm for it but any firm-ish rich white fleshed fish should work well, e.g john dory would be ideal, or even trout or salmon i would think, i used a hake tail cut in to thick steaks on this occasion). Whatever you buy get the fishmonger to gut, clean & scale it first.
  
• 100g or so of plain cashew nuts
• 4-5 sticks of lemon grass, peeled and though outer layers removed.
• 4-5 red Thai shallots, peeled
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 green (hard & unripe) mango
• small bunch coriander, with the roots
• small bunch mint
• couple of kaffir lime leaves
• juice of 3 or so limes
• 2-3 bird's eye chillies
  
• white sugar
• salt
• light soy
• fish sauce
• plain oil to deep fry

Method


Peel the mango and julienne it into matchsticks (see pics - feel free to use a mandolin or something here).
















Finely slice the lemongrass, slice the shallots quite thin.

















Slice 2 of garlic cloves a thinly as possible, then shallow fry in plenty of oil until just golden and crisp, set aside. now fry your cashews until golden in the same oil (boiling them for 20 mins first produces a nicer result, if you can be bothered).

Pick the leaves from the mint and coriander, tear off the coriander roots, wash and set aside.

Cut your fish in to steaks (on the bone) about thumb thickness, marinate for 5-10 mins in generous amount of light soy with a pinch of white sugar, before deep frying in plenty of sizzling hot oil until dark golden brown with crisp skin. drain on to kitchen paper and allow to cool for few mins before flaking flesh off bone in to large chunks, ensure crispy skin included.











Now make the dressing: pound the last garlic clove with 3-4 cleaned coriander roots, a bird's eye chilli or 3 and a pinch of salt, in a p & m until fairly fine. add juice from about three limes, good pinch of white sugar, and season up with fish sauce. it should be hot, sour, salty and only slightly sweet.





Ok nearly there....shred your lime leaf as fine a you possibly can and assemble the salad by adding all the ingredients (except the dressing) in to a mixing bowl, saving back half the lime leaf shreds for garnish.














Now just mix, add dressing, mix again briefly and serve. garnish with reserved lime leaf.








Serve in nice bowl for people to share from & garnish with reserved lime leaf.







Andy.

Red mullet, aubergine caviar and roast tomatoes

Red mullet is one of my favourite fish, aubergine is probably my favourite vegetable. Here's a recipe combing the two - with just the addition of some basil and a few roasted cherry tomatoes.

If you wanted to make this dish more fancy you could include some roast baby aubergines, a drizzle of black olive dressing (blitzed black olives, splash of EV olive oil and of good balsamic) and few micro herbs and if your going all out.

Ingredients (about right for a lunch / starter for 2):

1 medium sized red mullet, cleaned, filleted and pin-boned
1 medium aubergine
handful of baby plum / cherry tomatoes, ideally mixed colour (red, orange, yellow)
few cloves of garlic
sprig of rosemary
sprig of thyme - optional
bunch of basil
pinch dried chilli flakes
EV olive oil
a lemon
sea salt and black pepper

Method

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C.

Cut the aubergine in half lengthwise, score in lattice fashion quite deep (see pic) then push garlic slices and rosemary needles into the cuts. Sprinkle the cut face with bit of salt, put aubergine back together and wrap with silver foil. Bake in the oven for 30 - 35 mins or until nicely soft and collapsing. Take out the oven unwrap and allow to cool a bit before scraping out the flesh into a small pan.

Now cook the liquid out of this pulp for 5 or so mins on medium low heat, season with salt and pepper, add a splash of some good EV olive oil, allow to cool and, if you like, add some some chopped basil leaves for flavour and colour.














Meanwhile half your little tomatoes, lay them cut side up on a baking tray and drizzle with EV olive oil, season with salt and pepper and scatter over some finely sliced garlic, plus, if you have them, a few picked thyme leaves (if using) and dried chilli flakes. Bake in same oven for 20 - 25 mins, so they're nicely roasted sweet and soft.



















Pick the leaves from the basil bunch, setting aside the small daintiest ones for the final garnish, and then pound them in a pestle and mortar with a little salt (or whizz up in blender if you prefer) until pureed. Add a good glug of EV olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice and then pass through a sieve to give you a vivid green basil oil.

Season your fish fillets and pan fry on medium high heat in a little olive oil on the skin side until crisp and almost cooked (opaque) the whole way through, flip over and turn off the heat, after another 30 secs or a minute they'll be perfectly cooked. Squeeze little lemon juice on and remove from the pan.

Finish the dish by placing a nice portion of the aubergine caviar on each plate, top with a fish fillet and dot around the roasted tomatoes. Garnish tomatoes with the little basil leaves and drizzle around green basil oil.





















Andy.

Thai-style fish salad

Here's a recipe for an easy Asian style fish salad. It is loosely based on Larp (or 'Laap' as it's sometimes written) - a salad of minced meat or fish found throughout northern Thailand & Laos (it's often described as 'the national dish' of Laos). But the recipe below is not true Larp, so I'm not gonna call it that. I will try an stick an authentic (e.g a version with home smoked fish and the essential roasted chilli powder) recipe up here at some point, because, although its more work, it's damn tasty. Working at Nahm is really strengthening my belief in doing Thai food the authentic way, which, 9 times out of 10 = the hard way i'm afraid (both in terms of work and the difficulty of finding the ingredients)! I believe it's worth it, but here on my blog i also want to do fair few dishes which are pretty accessible so hence 'Thai-style fish salad'. Should still taste good.

Thai style fish salad

Ingredients (serves 2 as a stand alone dish, or 4 as part of a Thai meal):

• 400g fish fillet - sea bass, bream, snapper or any nice flakey white fish
• Large handful of beansprouts
• 4 or 5 thai red shallots or a small bunch of spring onions
• 2 tablespoons of uncooked Thai fragrant / jasmine rice
• 1 - 2 long red chillies
• Optional: 1 - 2 bird's eye chillies
• 1 tbsp white sugar
• 2 tbsp fish sauce
  
• 3-4 tbsp lime juice, plus some extra lime pieces to garnish
  
• 2 sticks of lemon grass
• small bunch thai basil, or large handful of mixed coriander and mint or mixture of above as you please.
  
• salt and white pepper
  

Method:

• Take your fish fillets, season them with salt and white pepper and put them in a steamer or colinder in a pan and steam until just cooked - about 3 - 4 mins above boiling water. Take out and allow to cool a bit, peel the skin off (if there is any) and flake the flesh into a mixing bowl.
• Take the raw rice and toast in a dry frying pan on a medium heat, stirring fairly regularly for about 5 mins, until toasted. Grind in a pestle and mortar or whizz in a blender until a coarse powder (sounds weird i know but it gives some real texture to the dish).
  
• De-seed and finely slice the long chilli, peel the tough outer layers off the lemongrass and slice the tender inner part very finely, now slice the shallots or spring onion and throw all this, plus the beansprouts and ground rice into the mixing bowl.
• Now make your dressing - mix the lime juice, fish sauce and sugar together until sugar dissolves. If you want to heat things up then bash up a couple of bird's eye chillies and mix them into the dressing too. Taste the dressing and adjust with more fish sauce / lime / sugar.
• Add two thirds of the herbs to the mixing bowl and tip in the dressing, toss it all through.
• Plate up and garnish with reserved herbs and lime pieces.

N.B ideally dishes like this are best eaten as part of a Thai meal - along with rice, a curry, soup and relish and perhaps some raw sliced veg along side.

pic by www.benbroomfield.com

Fast food rant (and a crab pasta recipe!)

Ok, i've got tonnes of themes i'd like to blog about e.g Thai & Vietnamese herbs, dishes inspired by the restaurants i've worked at & my favorite sambos - to name just a few...

But! The thing i'm probably most passionate about is fast food...

Yep fast food! It's almost a swear word in this country. Why does so much of it (in the UK) have to be 'orrible!? You go to different countries all over the world (SEAsia, India, Italy, Lebanon etc!) step out on the street and there's a wealth of choice of quick, super tasty and often healthy food available to be knocked up for you in seconds.

I say we need a bit more of that over here? Why do we have no street stalls? Why is it that in 95% of cases fast food = fried chicken!?

Needs to change.

The other reason good fast food is the way forward iiiiis... that, obviously, it's quick and very often that means it's easy too. So if you dont have much time or dont like cooking all that much BUT you want to eat decent food then FF is the way forward.

I'm going to try and go about proving my point on this blog by doing a series of quick & tasty recipes which in my mind are Fast Food.

Plus! With my new full time chef's life imminent i'm going to be cooking much more of it myself i.e when i come home from a long shift hungry i'm invariably going to be looking to cook something quick, tasty and fairly healthy.

Ok, enough rambling, here's a recipe to start off with: crab pasta. It's tasty, healthy and quick. I spent 1 night a week for 6 months working at Refettorio - one of Giorgio's Italian places, and learned how Italians cook pasta. It's basically just the same for any other seafood pasta dishes so have a mess around.

It's 6 ingredients, 7 with the oil and is ready in the time it takes to cook pasta + 2mins.

Crab & tomato pasta.



Ingredients - serves 2 (any more is tricky, but doable, esp if you have a real large frying pan).

• enough pasta for 2 - linguine is perfect, but spaghetti or really any shape will taste good too)
• white crab meat - 3 or 4 tablespoons
  
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 mild red chilli
  
• a small bunch of parsley or basil
• a glass of white wine
  
• some olive oil
• 3 or 4 nice tomatoes

Method (to get it done super quick)

• Boil a full kettle and pour the hot water in a large pan, get it boiling and salt it generously
• Put the pasta in.
• Chop the garlic & chilli (small if you like but doesnt have to be perfect)
• Cut tomatoes in to quarters length ways then cut out the seeds and roughly dice.
• Chop a handful of parsley, if using basil just pick a bunch of leaves
• Stir your pasta so it dont stick together
• Put large frying pan on medium-high heat, add a couple of tablespoons olive oil
• Chuck in the chilli and garlic, fry for 30 seconds (dont let it color much)
  
• Chuck in the crab meat, season with salt and pepper, stir a couple of times then throw in the wine and let bubble for 30 secs
• Throw in your tomatoes, give them a stir and finally in with the herbs.
• If your pasta is ready, drain it and chuck it straight in the frying pan with a little of the pasta water too. If your pasta is not ready then just take the crab pan off the heat, when you are good to go put it back on a high heat.
• Stir all this through and then tuck in while it's hot.
  

N.B for more of a store cupboard number decent quality tinned white crab meat can be used here - it obviously wont be nearly as tasty, but still a nice enough quick meal.

Andy

Bisque.

Few people have asked for the recipe for the (seabass & prawn) bisque i did in one of invention challenges in the masterchef finals, so here's a general guide which you can adapt ow-eva-ya-like:

For 4:

4 portion sized fillets of bass
12 large king / tiger prawns

Rough guide for the bisque:

5 carrots - peeled & roughly diced
2 onions - roughly diced
1 bulb fennel - roughly chopped
6 sticks of celery - roughly diced
2 cloves garlic - roughly chopped
some herbs - sprig or two of thyme, few parsley stalks a bay leaf or 2
teaspoon of tomato puree / 3 -4 tomatoes
plus if you have them...few fennel seeds, few whole peppercorns (white are best if u got both), perhaps few coriander seeds if you fancy
a small wine glass of brandy
half a bottle of half decent white wine
a small pot of double cream
butter, olive oil, salt n pepper
juice of 1-2 lemons

Vegetable garnish:

3-4 tomatoes - peeled (if you can be bothered), seeded and diced into smallish squares
2 -3 large waxy potatoes - peeled and diced in to 1-2cm dice
a large handful of spinach per person - washed and any large stalkidge picked off
herbs - pref 2 choices from: finely chopped parsley/ picked sprigs of chervil or dill / finely shredded basil

Method:

• Prep your fish - pin bone the fillets and score the skin finely, shell the prawns (keep the shells!) and remove the veins by cutting their backs open and fishing out
• get a wide quite deep pan up to a medium heat &add a large nob of butter plus a splash of olive oil
  
• add your veggies, garlic and spices (if using) and sweat them for a good 10 mins stirring occasionally - your looking for them to start cooking down, sweetening and getting a bit of color
  
• now push the veggies to the side, turn up the heat a bit and throw in your prawn shells - cook for 3-4 mins until they're nicely coloured
• now throw in the brandy and boil until almost all liquid gone
  
• now add your tomatoes / tomato puree and herbs and mix everything around & cook bit more before adding the wine and about a pint of water, season with some salt and get it bubbling
  
• cook for 30 mins until reduced to a couple of wine glasses in volume
• strain through a fine seive and add to a new smaller pan, add the cream and reduce by about half (you want only about 2-3 tablespoons of liquid per person)
• while the bisque is reducing boil your potato dice in salted water until just cooked drain and cover with some foil to keep warm
  
• cook off your spinach in little butter and set aside again with some foil on top to keep hot
• now season and pan fry your fish fillets in splash of oil on medium-high heat (dont turn or touch until skinis really nicely crispy)
• similarly - season & cook the prawns (in the same pan while fish cooks if you like), just a couple of mins

Ok so to bring the dish together:

• make sure your bisque is bubblin hot, taste for seasoning and add a nob of butter & some lemon juice
  
• put mound of spinach in middle of each plate, then dot around the potato and tomato dice
• divide the hot bisque between the plates and place a fillet on top of each pile of spinach with 3 prawns around it
• finish with a sprinkle of herbs and a drizzle of oil

N.B as mentioned you can vary this in about 1 million ways - use almost any other type of fish fillet (think bream, hake, salmon, cod, brill etc); replace the 12 prawns with 1-2 (depending on how rich / generous you are) cooked lobsters - using shells for bisque and adding diced meat to final sauce; include mussels, scallops or clams; add saffron, use pernod etc etc!

Make bisque - you know it makes sense.

An easy fish dish

Still posting when i get chance! Not going anywhere, just working in restaurants now so have bit less tinterweb time.

Anyway, here's an simple an easy fish dish... a starter or light lunch.

Sea bream & roast pepper bruschetta with rocket and fennel.




















Ingredients (for 4):

4 sea bream fillets
2 - 3 red peppers
4 - 5 tomatoes
4 slices of good bread for grilling (e.g ciabatta, sourdough or something)
a clove of garlic
a small handful of basil or marjoram leaves
EV olive oil
juice of a lemon
a bag / couple of large handfuls rocket
a fennel bulb

Method:

• preheat oven to 180
• half your tomatoes and place in a baking dish / tray and sprinkle with olive oil, seasoning and perhaps some of the usual suspects: a few thyme leaves, bit of sliced garlic, few chilli flakes etc, roast in the oven for half an hour or so.
• meanwhile blacken your peppers under the grilled / on the gass flame, peel and put in a bowl with any juices, when cooled a bit add some olive oil, seasoning and a handful of basil or marjoram leaves. when your tomatoes are roasted, and have cooled a bit too, mix them in as well.
• prepare your salad by shaving the fennel very thinly (with a knive or - best option - on a mandolin) and mixing with some rocket, set aside.
  
• put a griddle pan and a large non-stick frying pan on medium high flames to heat up.
  
• now finely score the skin of the bream. season well and cook in little olive oil skin side down until crisp and fish is almost completely cooked through, before flipping over and turning the heat off.
• take 4 thick slices of bread and toast on the griddle pan until, errr, toasted and with nice char lines on (i tend to put something on top to weigh em down a bit), then rub each a couple of times with some cut raw garlic
• place a slice of toast on each plate, add some roast tomato and pepper mix, top with a fillet of bream then finish with the rocket an fennel salad (which you want to dress with little olive oil and lemon juice just before serving).
• Finish with a drizzle of your best olive oil.

here's another pic (thanks to www.benbroomfield.com):


















Needless to say this would work with seabass, snapper or several other fishies. Best of all i recon would be to use red mullet - adding some sliced black olives to the roast pepper mix.

Taking some proper food pics (spiced fish soup & duck with chutney )

As you may have noticed my camera is rubbish and i'm certainly no photographer. Hence the snaps on this site vary widely - from woeful (mine) to pretty good (not mine!).

But! I'm lucky enough to have a few friends who know one end of a camera from the other. So i sometimes get them over and exchange food for photos (works a treat - everyone's happy).

Here's few recent snaps taken by Ben Broomfield - who's a proper quality freelance photographer sort of thing (see his site here: http://www.benbroomfield.com).

I did a couple of work-in-progress recipes of mine: spiced fish soup with baby fennel, and then duck breast and confit with a pear and saffron chutney and accompanying veggies.

Below are a sample of the snaps (pretty good i think you'll agree) along with a rough overview of the recipes.


Spiced fish soup:

So, for enough soup for 2, i used a small-medium sized seabass - would have prefered 2 red mullet (i am mad for mullet!) but couldn't get any (it was a monday).

Ok, so, i filleted the bass, then took the neatest 1/3 of each fillet, trimmed it up and set it aside. The rest i skinned and chopped in few large pieces.






Then in a pan i sweated some diced fennel, onion, carrot and celery with a bay leaf and some parsley & coriander stalks (if you have). Then added pince of saffron strands, pinch of cayenne pepper and some seasoning...

Next a couple of large glasses of decent white wine with i let boil down. Added 3 or 4 large good tomatoes which i'd roughly chopped and put in the seabass skinned off cuts.

Just covered with water and simmered for 15 mins.

Pour it all (minus the bay leaf) in to a blender and whizzed up well. Push it well through a sieve and then return to pan, reduce a bit, taste, adjust seasoning, dash of cream, nob of butter, squeeze of lemon etc.




I then gathered some green garnishy things ...a few micro herbs - fennel or coriander cress would be perfect but i could nae find them that day (fennel or dill fronds would work well too here).

I braised a couple of baby fennel in some stock (or use butter and little salted water) until tender.

Finally I quickly pan fried the neat bass portions, plus a couple of scallops each...











...and presented all, plus a drizzle of olive oil, in a wide bowl - like this:

















and this:































Next was a work in progress duck dish...

It was spiced duck breast, with confit duck leg (which was cooked in a low oven covered in duck fat, salt and spices - for about 2hrs).














I served it with some green beans - dressed with toasted hazelnuts & hazelnut oil, and a warm potato-coriander-spring onion salad.

As an extra I made a little duck sauce over the breast - just browned duck bones with little veggies and stock, reduced until rich and dark.

Oh and in the middle i put some of my favourite (favourite - as in being additiced to) pear and saffron chutney - i will definitely put a recipe for this up soon...as it's features in quite a few of my recipes.


A final aerial snap from Ben before we tucked in.










Thanks Ben!

http://www.benbroomfield.com