What to do with an entire salmon

My dad brought be a big fish as a 'just because' present. We're tight like that, yo.
The first thing I did was to cut off and clean the tail to prepare gravadlax. I've done this before and it's a great simple way to preserve something as big as a salmon when there's only you and and fish-picky bf in the house.

The recipe I used came from Everything Raw which a dated book with a liberal interpretation of what raw food is. The only reason I bought is is because it's looked amazeballs in this Flickr set, I love the drab, morose food styling of old Penguin Books, hopefully something that will become more of a trendy thing to do (check out these shots for German food mag Essen und Trinken).

This preparation highlights just how oily and rich salmon is.Very good.

Next, I decided to teach myself a lesson against experimentation with When French Women Cook. It's a sweet memoir which I read on the tube for a week and tried to pretend I was back in Chamonix. I tried a recipe from the Alsace region which called for reducing a glass of wine and onions to a tablespoonful to make the sauce for basically fried salmon. A delicious syrup which would have been nice as salad dressing, rendered the colour of a filthy rag you use to clean a blackboard by the addition of cream. Alsace Rouge, called for in the recipe, is apparently not red but rose wine. White would have been even better. The visual element of the dish was actually a big turn off for me, but the taste was fine. get it into your head that red wine and cream = vomit. I'm not happy, Maurice :(

Finally I made a stock (fume from the Paella book) with the head and bones and used it to make a paella. I really follow a recipe, but referred to 1080 Recipes for the rough proportions of ingredient. Incidentally, 1080 has a recipe for a paella made entirely out of tinned ingredients. I love the idea since it's such an expensive dish to make and it's difficult to concentrate on proper technique and timing when you're worried about preparing vast quantities of expensive, difficult to obtain ingredients correctly. Essentially it's an all in meal and fiddling about with a tin of tuna here or frozen cod steak there is a good way to get confident before you move on to one of the excruciating recipes in the Paella book.

What was that? Throw some shrimp on there too? You got it, pal.

Paella Rice with Red Mullet and Roasted Pumpkin

I haven't posted anything for a while because I've been working on a new project. It' early days, so I'll see how it goes over the next couple of months, in the mean time I will do my best to keep this blog - my pet poodle - going. I've honestly missed the stream of consciousness confessional nature of writing here, never again!
Paella, by Alberto Herraiz is one of the books I got for Christmas, I saw a review for it here and put it on my wishlist on a whim, it's that kind of impulsive behavior that makes so charming you see.
My bf (who is also my bff) is half Spanish and I invited his mother over to borrow her paella dish and to get her hyper critical view on the validity of any of the recipes in this book. It's a very interesting selection, there are multiple recipes for stocks and sauces, a section of paellas made on the stove and in the oven, some to be made on a grill outdoors and even some sweet options. Some are very very traditional, some are quite... experimental. I chose red mullet because it's seasonal and there aren't any hard to find ingredients (did you know that Morrisons sells own brand paella rice now? Like ain't nothing but a thing!). You are meant to buy your mullets uncleaned and use the livers as a base for the rice. I got mine from Jonathan Norris's stall which is two minutes walk from my office. The first time I walked past him I thought he looked familiar, and then I realized that he's the guy from season 3 of Come Dine With Me!!!! So amazeballs, is it cool that I'm excited about that? Anyway, he was happy that I didn't want my fish cleaned and I feel like we really bonded.
Buying the fish was the best part of making this recipe, it will kill you. Here are some status pictures my stepmother took.
The result is beautiful and perfectly tasty, but a little too sweet from the pumpkin for me. It was also nothing like any paella Maria Isabel has ever heard of, but that's kind of the point of a paella, its a receptacle for any old junk you have lying around. And actually an insane amount of work. Why would you clean and fillet six red mullets, make a extraordinarily delicious stock, cut up pumpkin into two different sizes of cube, blanch, roast and puree half and assemble your 4 hour paella when you could just go down the road to your favorite Spanish restaurant and get something just as delicious for a lot less money. There are a lot of skills to master, and if that's your bag, this book is perfect.

Anyway, here's another thing I'm doing, it's a charming thing for charming people to do. Pick up the book closest to you, turn to page 45, the first sentence describes your sex life. This is a great game to play with cookbooks. Here's the result from Paella "There are differences of opinion when it comes to black rice", which describes my sex life exactly.

Christmas 2011

Happy New Year!
Christmas was stressful this year. In the last week before the break I got some kind of super flu so on the morning of the 25th I woke up with a fever and hallucinated my way through 8 hours of cooking. This (I assume everyone knows Bidstrup)
The run up to the big day almost killed me, going to work, running around buying presents and getting up at 5am to go to Billingsgate Fish Market was tough, but I don't have kids or any real responsibilities so this was all self inflicted.
Since we had to have seafood because of my family's dietary restrictions, I chose lobsters. It was kind of big deal as it's the boyfriend's and mine first year in our new house and it all of our immediate family would be joining us, so what's fancier than that? I got up early like a good girl on Christmas Eve and made the grueling journey to Canary Wharf to pick up 4, which were are very economical £10 each and ended up feeding all 7 of us.
I'd never actually had lobster before, let alone killed one! Far from the docile, obliging creatures I assumed them to be they were actually pretty feisty. I thought the fish guy would have a box or something for me to transport them in, but instead he put all four in a single plastic bag and told me they would be fine. It was a bit too much fun for me at 7am to return home on the tube with a smelly, writhing bag in my hands, but more on that later.
Because I hate myself (or because everyone else had to fast before going to church on Christmas morning), I decided to make some canapes for people to munch on while I made dinner.
Left to right these are:
-Octopus on butter bean puree, the recipe was from the Marie Claire Food and Drink book, easily my favorite party book
-Salmon roe on Borodinky bread, this is a very Russian thing. The recipe for the bread is here, I can't stop making it, I'll write it up in the next few weeks
-Smoked eel on this wholemeal sourdough, with some horseradish my dad made
-Little choux buns with prawns (Marie Claire)
-Artichoke pate (Marie Claire again)

It's a little difficult to recall exactly what was going though my mind when it was time to dispatch the lobsters but here is my version of events.
I used a recipe from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking for steaming the lobsters, she suggests slicing them open before cooking as humane, or alternatively freezing for an hour. I did neither and opted to just put them in the pots as quickly as possible, close the lid and ask God for forgiveness. This was predictably disastrous. Instead of gamely tucking in his legs and making an effort to fit into the simmering liquid the first one I picked up actually struggled for his life. I was holding him with one hand and the heavy iron lid with the other, the battle was not evenly matched. 'SKREEEEEE!!!!' went the lobster as I finally managed to stuff him into his watery grave and collapsed on the floor. My brother had to do the other 3. Next year, Tofurky. That's a joke, it's difficult to argue with how delicious they were.
I also made Brussels Sprout with Chesnuts (a Nigella recipe, way too sweet), sauerkraut, carrot salad and road potatoes (Jamie Oliver's method, very good). An lots of mulled wine. Did you know that the alcohol in mulled wine doesn't burn off? I sure as shit didn't!
Oh and we had pudding, the boyfriend's mum photographed.

Spicy Fried Cauliflower and Mackerel Balls

For the last couple of weeks I've been thinking about what to serve for Christmas. I have absolutely no minimalistic tendencies and will feel like a failure if the table isnt groaning and my family isnt crying at the end of the day.
I'm thinking about little side dishes to have on the side of whatever beast I decide on this year. Obviously I'm going to have potatoes and sprouts, probably carrots and I'm making some sauerkraut, but I'm sure there's something a bit more interesting that will become my holiday classic, out there. Now is the time to have these crazy experiments. By the time you have a family you should really have your crazy traditions down. It's a shame I don't have a crazy aunt that makes spam stuffing or something.
I'm using Moro East for the cauliflower recipe (which can also be found here) and Home Cooking the Flavel Way for the balls (they were supposed to be sardine balls, but all I had was mackerel in tomato sauce).
Flavels was a maker of gas stoves and produced this cookbook for hosewives in the 50s. It's exactly as old fashioned as you would expect, I bought it in a charity shop and it's quite charming. You can always find these slightly naff old book in second hand shops, and I can't resist. It's like a time capsule, here's an interview with a chef who collects old cookbooks. His motivation is to learn and he has a problem with the fact that modern cookbooks give excrutiatingly elaborate instructions for every process, which inhibits learning. Older book don't even tell you the temperatre that the oven is supposed to be, you're meant to use your intuition and the inevitable trial and error forces you to learn to be a better cook. The problem is that nobody is going to want to waste ingredients on something that might fail, but the implication that you can just wing it does appeal to the ego.
And look at it! There is a recipe for tinned sardines next to one for lobster, like you know, whatever, have one or the other for dinner tonight. A modern cookbook would have a two paragraph apology for the extravagance of one and the paucity of the other printed alongside.
For this you're meant to just combine all of the ingredients, roll in breadcrumbs and bake in the oven. I'm using mackerel instead of sardines, fish sauce instead of anchovy essence and panko instead of brown breadcrumbs. They look almost like truffles when the come out of the oven, and taste pretty nice too.
The cauliflower is eaven easier, just fry in olive oil, sprinkle with the ground spices and lemon and serve. It's lovely, and makes your house smell aniseedy and warm. V. good and a great way to make your cauliflower phobic boyfriend eat almost an entire head of it.

Part two - Urchin Croquettes

I woke up at 5 am on the Thursday before the party, sprung out of bed as energetically as is possible under the circumstances, had a cup of coffee whist brushing my hair and ran out the door. You have to picture what it's like to run on pure adrenalin, for the last two weeks I had been frantically making to-do lists for every day counting up to the big finale, and now as I stood on the (packed for some reason) train to Poplar station I could triumphantly check off 'wake up early to go to Billingsgate Market before work'.
This is the view I took in when I got off the DLR.
The dawn light filtered thorough the Millennium Dome's support towers and bouncing off the Bank of America building. If it wasn't for the smell of fish you could almost ignore the single story structure of the market, which looks and feels out of place in suit land.
I made my way down the motorway, along a tall metal fence surrounding the market. 'How do I get in?' I wondered, then I saw this
Sheesh, take it easy man, didn't realise it was such a big secret!
The selection was interesting, lots of razor clams, plenty of whole salmons for a tenner, some fish I couldn't identify. The tuna loins were already vacuum packed and priced at around £13 per kilo (half of what you would pay at a supermarket!) but obviously they're not going to rip open a package and cut you a little slice so I had to buy the smallest piece I could find - 4kg (I did get a nice-face discount, and some relationship advise from the trader, so I feel as though I came out on top in the end).
Here it is
I couldn't stop photographing it, it was so beautiful, a deep dark meaty colour. I couldn't help sneaking slivers as I was portioning it up and the taste was just incredible. I cut a big piece for my dad and another one for the boyfriend's mum, and set about grinding the rest up to make the body of the croquettes.
The recipe is fairly simple, you grind together fresh tuna, onions, and a loaf of white bread soaked in milk, season to taste and form into little balls, fry to seal and then finish off in the oven. I mixed in a little chopped urchin into each croquette - I was desperate, ok?
This proved to be the most difficult course, I mean look at it, what a bloody mess!
It's meant to be some kind of half assed charcuterie plate. I pickled some cauliflower in sugar and cider vinegar, and almost killed myself looking for the cheese. Urbriaco is an Italian cheese soaked in wine. I thought I'd found a trader in Borough Market, and dutifully wrote 'Saturday - wake up early and go buy the cheese' to do on the morning of the party, and get this - dude never showed up! I went home seething that he decided to sleep himself out of a 100g sale that morning, and stopped in at Waitrose to get some unpasturised hard cheese (Un-pasturised, get it?), a poor second choice. Luckily I found out thorough this blog that Selfridges Food Hall also carries Ubriaco and dispatched the boyfriend to go and fetch me some. Phew, crisis averted. This is why you should always read blogs, children.

Ume, Ube and Uni

I don't have a good answer when people ask me why I chose the letter U as a theme for my next dinner party. I think I was really drunk a couple of months ago and kept saying 'I love you, I love you, I love you' to "someone" and I thought this was really funny. Really funny and a great idea.

Believe it or not, there aren't a lot of foods that start with the letter U. I toyed with the idea of pig uterus as a starter (found in a Chinese supermarket, they look like little curly shoelaces) but the mere mention of this prompted revulsion in even my most adventurous friends. Pretty much the only other raw ingredient I can think of is urchin (that's sea urchin, not homeless children, David) so I started with that. I remembered this article from The Guardian from a few years ago, dude was working his way through the alphabet, cooking an exotic meat for each letter and settled on urchin, he had to do a lot of leg work around London to find the stuff and ultimately nabbed some in Selfridges. Well this was years ago, I followed in his footsteps only to be told that they no longer sell them, I ended up finding some in the Japan Centre. Maths fans (that's all of you, right?) work this out - this guy was offered 3 kilos for £72, which he declined in favour of 25 grams for £6.50, terrible deal, but I suppose not every one wants a ton of this stuff in their freezer. I got mine at 100 grams for £18, 300 grams in total. The sum makes me cry a little but it's still better than the price he paid.
Uni/ urchin is an acquired taste, it's buttery, a little salty, a little sweet and I think quite bitter. Served as sushi, the sweetness of the rice and savouriness of the nori mask the bitterness a little but it's still not something I would describe as a delicacy. The other obstacle was how to make this expensive, complicated ingredient stretch to feeding 10 people. The Guardian recipe struck me as a little uninspired, but most of the other recipes I found online suggested making it up into a pasta sauce as well, which just did not suit my show off sensibilities. But timing is everything, urchin is in season during the winter, and one of my favourite blogs devoted a few posts to it, one of which included a recipe that mixed the roe into the pasta mixture. I love it when the planets align like that.
Their recipe requires something called yuzu kosho, which I found both in wet and powdered form in the Japan Centre. The yuzu is a citrus, the exotic love child of a lemon and a grapefruit - taste wise, common in Japan and cultivated somewhat in the US as well, but virtually unheard of here. And yuzu kosho is a blend of the zest and green or red chilli (here's a recipe if you want to make your own, another amazing, inspiring blog). My special Japanese source at work tells me that yuzu kosho is typically used as a soup base, and you can tell, it's a very strong concentrate - not something to just spread over your toast in the morning.
The pasta rolled out in a beautiful leathery sheet, very fragrant, and flecked with specks of this and that. But when cooked I found it lost any delicacy and became a big bowl of starch, barely suggesting any flavour other than chilli unfortunately. I don't think that this is a problem with the recipe, I only used half of the urchin quantity specified, it's an image problem. I don't really want to serve people a pile of pasta, it's a bit yawn-tastic, and doesn't showcase the ingredient as much as I'd like. Next
Ube is a kind of sweet potato, popular in the Philippines, so much so that ube ice cream is a totally normal thing available in the shops. So wierd, I wonder if it will ever catch on here.
Old David L is my go to guy when it comes to ice creams. Maybe I should buy another ice cream book at some point, for contrast, but I don't see the point at the moment - as soon as I bought the machine I realised that don't actually like ice cream all that much. It's too creamy, and sweet :( (this is the bit where the boyfriend looks over my shoulder and calls me some kind of precious princess)
Anyway, in the book that I do have he mentions an ube ice cream he had in San Francisco a couple of times and gives a recipe for a sweet potato version. I found this jar of overly sweet spread in Chinatown and literally went to town on it!
The taste is nice, sweet in an indiscriminate way, it'll do. Oh and blah blah blah, something about ume.

Bacon-Rap'd Scallops and Simon Says Salmon

I've been a bit of a layzeeass recently, and have been putting off writing up the last two of Coolio's recipes that I've tried but until I do it I can't move on to other things so hey ho, lets go.
Bacon Rap'd Scallops is one of the first dishes in the book, the legend goes that when Coolio started his catering company a client requested bacon wrapped scallops, Coolio doesn't eat pork so he improvised with 'beef bacon' which I used my incredible Google-fu skills to discover is an approximation of bresaola.
The other recipe is for baked salmon, and is meant to be made with your kids. Cute. Here's some photos.
Result:
The scallops are very good. Salty and sweet and garlicky and expensive to make.
Salmon is super plain, even though it looks kind of gross in this picture, the garlic and onion sprinkled on top are almost uncooked but the whole flavour is subtle and nice. For someone who damn near drinks chilli sauce from the bottle, it's a nice change of pace.
Coolio is cool, the book is pretty good. Next.

Salt and Pepper Tofu and Crab with Lemon, Parsley and Chilli

My final two dishes from the Marie Claire book are both semi deep-fried and semi really quite fresh. I hate hate hate deep frying crap - it's almost like daring yourself to have an accident, a deadly serious accident.
Anyway, I started by marinading the tofu in ginger, garlic and lemon the night before, then you roll it around in Szechwan pepper, cornflour and salt, deep fry and serve with a cool, sweet, spicy cucumber sauce.
I accidentally made these too salty (that's a serious accident in my book), but they were still pretty nice and I might make them again just to munch on while I'm watching 'my stories'... on a Saturday night.
The second other thing I made was these little fried toasts covered with a mix of crab, lemon and parsley. I use tinned crab and it was meh. It was also one of the few recipes in the book that didn't end with the ominous 'serve immediately'.
There are a few heartier and less fussy things in the book like muffins and salad, there are also drink recipes - classic cocktails and lighter things like punch which looked interesting, but I'm just over it and I want to move on.

TV

OK, I'm watching Hugh Fearnley Knowitall's Fish Fight thing, and god how dreary is he? The first half of the show is all about farmed salmon - how dare those bastards in the fish farms and the supermarkets make salmon cheaply available to all, when there's all these sardines we could be eating!!! In principle I agree with him, but maybe I would be able to take him a little bit more seriously if he wasn't on the verge of tears pretty much constantly.
Oh noes! Sad face is sad :(
I was cracking up when I saw this piece of 'equipment' LOLZ

More Marie Claire

As the old adage goes, if you want something done - ask a busy person. After the relative relaxation of being sick and in bed all over Christmas I'm back in the saddle and going at it at an alarming pace. There are simply not enough hours in the day to get everything done, I mean, I only managed to find time to throw away our long dead Christmas tree yesterday. Stress, but it means that if anyone asks me to do anything I sigh, add it to my list and stay up until 1am to finish it. Still I prefer this to lounging around on the sofa all day, exasperated because it'll be an hour before Cake Boss comes on. Between running around for work, family and housework I've still had to fin time to eat and this is what I've been having from the Marie Claire Food and Drink book.

Squid stuffed with risotto.
You start off by making the most delicious risotto I've ever had - simply fry onions with garlic and thyme, add the rice and some lemon zest, dribble n the stock and finish with fresh parsley and the juice of the zested lemon. It's really perfect, without the cheese you avoid the slightly cloying aftertaste some risottos have and the caramelised onions have it out with the tangy lemon juice for some sort of sweet and sour battle in your mouth - absolutely delicious, I would have been happy with a big plate of this for dinner. But of course risotto isn't really a party food any more than stew, or leftover soup is, no no no, you must be crazy. What you're actually meant to do is stuff the still warm rice into squid bodies and roast for half an hour. I cannot emphasize how difficult this is, my top tips are to buy really big squid so that you won't have to insert the rice into their openings GRAIN BY GRAIN! And inject your hands with botox before you begin so that you won't feel it when your skin burns off as you plunge your fingers into the molten risotto. This is almost impossible to do with a teaspoon and when I tried to employ a piping bag IT FRICKING MELTED which I had no idea silicone did - that's how hot it was.
Here are the pretty little squid out of the oven
And here they are even prettier cut up into circles ready to serve to all your fancy pants friends.
I will definitely make the risotto again, but will probably not go through the S&M of stuffing it into squid. This really tasted better freshly made, not after half an hour steaming in the oven. Oh and here's a little secret, if somebody serves this to you at a party there is a 100% guarantee that their hands were all up in your risotto up to the elbow.

Roasted pepper tortillas
I had to read the recipe all the way thorugh twice to realize you are meant to hide little bits of tuna in these tortillas. Annoying, but apart from that, this was really simple. You shove a couple of peppers in the oven, and while they roast mix up some sour cream dough sprinkled with cumin. Pinch off little balls and roll out (using a wine bottle still instead of a rolling pin, sigh). Fry in a dry pan for 15 secons on each side, sear the tuna in the same pan and wah lah!
Not nice. The mix or roasted peppers, balsamic vinegar and basil was wierd and a little synthetic, tuna was tasteless compared to it and tortillas were ok but a bit austere. All rolled up together it was strangely bitter.

Pickled salmon
You buy a little tub of sushi ginger, spoon off some of the pickling vinegar and chop a spoon of ginger, add this to freshly grated ginger, lime juice, chilli I think and mint of all things! Then pour over slivers of raw salmon and leave to marinade for 10 minutes. The salmon turns a little opalescent like ceviche and then goes to stuff some chicory leaves.
Quite nice, but tasted a little soapy because of all the ginger. I mean pickled AND fresh? Come on, there are other ingredients you know.

Spiced biscotti
Finally, I rounded off with some little biscotti biscuits. It's the boyfriend's mum's birthday today and since she always insists on no gifts and there is really only so much chocolate you can give someone I decide to make these from the recipe in the book - which turned out o be very very straightforward and hassle free. The spice comes from cinnamon and cardamon, as well as dried figs and apricots and mandatory sprinkling of almonds.
Apart from the ridiculous non-biscotti shape these are pretty good, I munched on a couple as I was carrying them to her house (and am eating another one now), she liked them and I'll make them again (maybe add a little almond extract next time).
Ok that's it, I recon Marie Claire has enough juice in it for another week and then I'll lose interest and move on.