Fish Pie

Sun 17 June 2007

Until I came to England I'd never had fish pie, and I have to confess I am quite a convert. This month's Australian Gourmet Traveller is, of course, a winter edition - so full of warming, slow cooked comfort food. While we're not sure whether it's summer or winter here in West Yorkshire I didn't fancy having the oven on for hours on end and so ended up sampling the snapper (we substituted coley, a general purpose, cheap, white fish, which is also OK to eat), fennel and potato pot pie.

It does take a while to put together but is fine to assemble in advance (if you're aiming for pretty you may wish to do the potato topping just before you pop it into the oven, as otherwise the potatoes will brown a little). The original recipe is for 6 and I approximately halved it for the two of us.

Take 175mL of milk and bring to the boil with 175mL of vegetable or fish stock then remove from the heat and keep warm.

Melt some butter in a saucepan and add a couple of sliced shallots, a bulb of fennel, sliced and a couple of cloves of garlic, minced. Cook until the vegetables are soft. Add a couple of tablespoons of plain flour and cook out for a couple of minutes, before slowly adding the warm stock and milk mixture. Stir the mix continuously until smooth. Add a squeeze of lemon juice and season with salt and pepper to taste. Cook until thick.

Remove from heat and add your fish (skinned and cut into 3 cm cubes) and green prawns (headed, tailed, shelled - I cut ours in half too) and mix well. The recipe suggests to add the chopped fennel fronds, but I didn't have any, nor did I have green onion, but I did add in a big pile of chopped dill.

You can now set this aside until you are ready to cook.

Heat the oven to 180C and, using a mandolin, finely slice enough potato to make a topping (we used Jersey Royals and left the skin on). Layer the potato over the top of the pie and brush with butter.

Bake for 30-35 minutes until the potatoes are golden and it looks done (the recipe says until the fish is cooked, but I don't know how you'd know that!).

We served with steamed broccoli and carrots, and a bottle of Foxwood Dawn Picked viognier (Hoults, £4.99). As a disclaimer, I shall admit that I don't like viognier, and I set Claire the challenge of picking one I would like. This wasn't it. Very toast and butter on the nose, but a lot of citrus on the palate, with a slightly oily/diesely finish and a hint of lychee. Not one I'll be rushing out to buy again, but maybe fans of the grape will love it.

Addendum: I was to find a viognier that I liked only a couple of days later, which was a Condrieu and came in at just four times the price of the Fox Wood. But more about that later!

tagged with: viognier, fish, potato

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Spiced Mackerel

2 June 2007

Another Olive recipe into the test kitchen: spiced mackerel fillets with potato salad. Another recipe that's really a bit of a non-recipe ...

Buy your mackerel - the fishmonger will fillet it for you and mackerel aren't known for their scales so running your hand over the skin will be enough to ready the fillet for cooking. Do buy a whole fish from a fish monger, as you will be able to pick a nice big fish. We only needed one fish between two of us.

In a mortar and pestle, crush equal quantities of cumin and coriander seeds (for 2 people sharing a fish, it was 1 tsp of each), cayenne pepper (or chilli powder, or chilli flakes) to taste, a dash of tumeric and enough lemon juice to make a paste.

Score the mackerel (on the skin side) and rub the paste all over. Leave to marinate.

While marinating, prepare the potato salad. Boil up some new potatoes until tender. When cooked, drain and to the pot add chopped spring onions, some lemon juice, some olive oil and some parsley. Put the lid on and give it all a good shake together. To serve at room temperature, keep it covered until ready to serve.

To cook the mackerel, grill (and I recommend this rather than frying, which is what we did, because the skin didn't hold together particularly well) - skin side up until done.

Serve with the potato salad. We also served with runner beans in a light tomato, garlic and chillli sauce.
The cumin and coriander flavour works really well with the oily, rich fish and I really enjoyed the simple potato salad. The beans added a bit of colour and, with their chilli flavours, complimented the fish. A quick, simple supper - and one that could be adapted quite easily.

Easy peasy. We served with Señorio de Sarría Viñedo no 5 2005, from Navarra (£7.99 from Hoults). It was a lovely wine - smelt like berries, but quite dry and citrussy on the palate, finishing with a touch of red fruit. It went well with the fish but would also be good as an apéritif.

tagged with: mackerel, potato, fish

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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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