Fish and Chips

Sat 24 Feb 2007

A bit of a back track in time ... and a slight lie about the menu ... for it wasn't fish and chips but rather fish and potato salad! And most importantly, it was going to be served with the bottle of Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc.

Recipe inspiration came from the January 2007 issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller. The pretty colours of the fish dish in Fare Exchange won me over. The original dish came from Centennial Vineyards in Bowral, New South Wales, and featured barramundi. Amazingly, one of the fish mongers in the market did have barra, but it was frozen and we were on the hunt for fresh fish. I'd left my list of 'ethical fish' behind, so all we could do was avoid those we knew to be bad. This led us to opt for dorade. Dorade is also known as black bream, porgy or sea bream, and fortunately comes in at a 2, so I was able to eat my dinner with a clear conscience!

The fish was to be simply pan fried, so back in the kitchen, the thing to do was to set to making the salsa. For the two of us, I peeled and coarsely chopped two tomatoes. To peel a tomato, make a nick in the top, pour over boiling water and leave it for a while. The skin should come off without too much hassle. Half a sweet potato was peeled, cubed and boiled and added. Four tiger prawns were boiled until they just turned pink, then shelled, coarsely chopped and allowed to cool. Half a courgette was very finely cubed and added to the mix. This was finished off with a very generous handful of chopped dill. The original recipe called for baby spinach, but we couldn't find any and so, went without.

This salsa was to be dressed with vanilla olive oil. This sounds a bit ... different ... but it's very simple to make and tastes delicious. The vanilla in particular goes very well with the prawns. Pour some good oil into a saucepan, add part of a vanilla bean and bring to a simmer. Remove from heat and allow to cool. I only added the vanilla oil to the salsa when I was ready to serve.

The potato salad was equally a dish to be prepared ahead. I quartered my potatoes and cooked them until just tender, then set them aside. While the potatoes were cooking, I heated some oil in a pan and cooked a very finely sliced leek until soft, before adding a tablespoon of brown mustard seeds. When the mustard begins to smell, remove the pan from the heat and add in a splash of vinegar and some lemon juice. When ready to serve, mix the leeks with the potatoes and finish with mint and chives.

With the majority of the meal ready in advance, when hungry the only thing left to do is cook the fish. Since the fish monger had filleted the fish, all I had to do was heat some oil in a pan and throw the fish in, skin side down first. I was very careful not to over cook, and when the fish was cooked, I squeezed some lemon juice into the pan to deglaze it and served fish and juices on top of the salsa ... potato salad on the side and Cloudy Bay in glass.

The wine had a very delicate nose with hints of cut grass and gooseberries but had a very complex and long palate. The wine started off smooth, creamy and almost buttery, but there was loads of citrus which kicked in and meant the wine had great length. I would have been quite happy to sit and just drink (sorry, share) the whole bottle, but since I had some food to eat with it I have to say that it went very well indeed. Because the food was not highly spiced it didn't swamp the wine, and the good, citrus-y length of the wine cut through the oil in the salsa.

All in all, the meal was a hit. It would be great for a dinner party because there is so much that can be done in advance, and the food all looks very colourful on the plate. And as for the vanilla olive oil ... well, I might be making use of that in future.

tagged with: "cloudy bay"

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Combinations 10: Lemon Chicken

Sun 25 Feb 2007

It's been a while since Eating Leeds last participated in a Combinations exercise (well, that's a formal, blogging event type of one) but somehow, this month, it's been slotted in. Hosted by Andrew, over at Spittoon, this month he chose lemon chicken with pak choi. Hmm, I managed half of this dish, because I had so many vegetables it didn't feel right to start buying pak choi too. Also, I'm not the biggest fan of Chinese food, so I guess it's a curious month for me to rejoin the fray.

The original recipe (rather lazily, in my opinion!) calls for packets of lemon sauce. Tut, tut, tut! I figured it couldn't be too hard to make a lemon sauce and trawled the internet for a recipe. Nothing definitive popped out, so I made it my way.

Since I was only cooking for two, I very much did the quantities by feel. In a small saucepan I put some water, added probably about a teaspoon of sugar, followed by about 2 teaspoons of honey. I crumbled in half a chicken stock cube and let it all dissolve over the heat. Then I added 3 or 4 very fine slices of lemon (lemon rind would probably go well) and some finely sliced ginger, before adding in lemon juice, tasting and adding, until it tasted lemony rather than sugary or like stock. At that point, I decided I didn't like the taste and I definitely didn't like the smell. I thought I'd let Andy make the call on the sauce, put it to one side and go on with everything else.

I was supposed to serve the chicken with steamed pak choi, but there were lots of left over veggies, so I decided that the side dish would be stir fried noodles. The oil was duly heated in the wok, one sliced onion was added, along with two cloves of garlic and some finely sliced ginger. As that started to soften, in went one (very hot!) dried bird's eye chilli. Then I added a quarter of a red cabbage, finely sliced, half a sweet potato (diced and boiled - left over from the night before) and half a courgette, sliced in strips. I let that cook for a bit with the lid on, so the cabbage could soften, before adding some udon noodles, a splash of soy sauce and a splash of mirin. Just before serving, my sous chef (Andy!) added some sliced spring onions and we finished the stir fry off with chopped chives.

The chicken part was super easy! I heated some oil, ready for deep frying. While it was warming up, I finely sliced the chicken breast and made a thin batter of equal proportions of plain and corn flour and cold soda water. The chicken was dipped into the batter and went straight into the oil and was cooked until golden. I had to do this in quite small batches, so I had the oven on and a plate with paper for draining off any excess oil.

And that was it! We served the noodles on hot plates, but left the chicken on one plate and passed the lemon sauce separately. Andy sampled the sauce and it passed his taste test. What was interesting, was that the sauce went really well with the chicken - I was actually spooning extra on!
Now ... what to drink? I chose a Babich 2006 Sauvignon Blanc. This was driven by several factors: some internet based research suggested a sav blanc would go well with an oriental style chicken dish, the night before we had a sauvignon blanc so it was a good comparison (that's a whole other story and you'll have to wait for it!) and the Babich had scored 90 points in a recent Wine Spectator Sips and Tips newsletter. So ... how did it go? Very well.

The wine had a strong hint of pineapple on the nose with lots of citrus up front on the palate. It was a really crisp wine, and at about £8 a bottle we thought it was fantastic value. It actually went a lot better with the spicy noodles than with the chicken, although as a whole package the meal did really work.

tagged with: combinations, chicken, sauvignon blanc

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