Mussels with celery, bacon, cream and cider

Mussels are something I don't remember to eat often enough. Wonderfully rewarding to eat and immensely easy to prepare they deserve cooking far more often. This is s simple way to do them, and Anglo-accented sidestep from the familiar moules marinieres with cream and white wine.

• mussels
• fatty bacon
• celery
• cream
• cider
  

Fry your celery in slices with a little butter then chuck in the bacon. When the meat is browned and the celery softened but not totally surrendered add the mussels (do all the boring prep beforehand bla bla) and a bottle of interesting cider.

 

When the mussels have opened add some cream. Don't go mad. Make sure it's off the heat so it doesn't curdle. Add plenty of black pepper and serve with some bread.

My, that's an easy recipe. Needless to say more cider is advisable for drinking with the food. A little bit of parsley would be nice if you have some to hand but it's far from essential.

We had some amazing smoked trout with lentils to follow.

Spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, creme fraiche and bottarga

Bottarga's a bit of a funny one. Incredibly expensive (an entire dried roe in a Bologna Deli whose price I enquired was valued at over forty euroes), and strongly redolent of fish food in its little jar, it sits in the cupboard waiting for moments such as this. It's a luxury item like truffle oil that's best saved for an occasional treat. Used judiciously and simply (like truffle oil) it gives an extra kick to standard dishes. For this combination try and get hold of very sweet cherry tomatoes and cook them slowly to give a wonderful flavoursome sauce.

• cherry tomatoes
• olive oil
• a few cloves of garlic, chilli flakes
• bottarga
• creme fraiche

The key here is to give the tomatoes plenty of time - be generous with the olive oil and garlic and patient with the cooking time. They will break down and form a wonderful sauce. Add chilli flakes to taste.

Serve with a dab of creme fraiche and a sprinkle of bottarga. These can then be mixed on the plate to make a beautifully rich but simple sauce.

Some fine parmesan may or may not be gilding the lilly. You decide.

Chickpeas with saltfish, tomatoes, garlic and kale

Assemblages. They are the business. Not quite salads, stews or anything else, assemblages are the pragmatists' favourite - a type of mixed dish which can take everything from fridge skulking vegetables to the finest of treat produce. With something filling and carbohydrate based in the mix they constitute an entire, discrete meal. Beautiful.

This cracking dish is from a small River Cafe fish book and centres around three central earthy ingredients: saltfish, chickpeas and kale.

• saltfish
• chickpeas
• kale
• tomatoes
• garlic, dried chilli, olive oil

The night before you cook put the chickpeas in a bowl of boiling water. They are so central to this dish that it's worth the bother of soaking your own. When the cooking has started in earnest put the chickpeas on to boil - they'll need about forty minutes. Put your saltfish through three boils of cold water and see how salty it is. It may need one more.

Chop loads of garlic and and slowly cook in plenty of olive oil with a handful of sweet cherry tomatoes. After ten minutes add the chilli to taste. When the saltfish is satisfactorily de-desalinated push the tomatoes to one side of the pan and briefly fry the fish in the flavoured oil. Meantime, cook your kale down in some water until tender; ready your chickpeas. Combine everything in something big and add a splash of sherry vinegar and another of olive oil. I also chucked in some nice, sharp rocket. Lashings of pepper also advisable.

A wonderful mix. In turn resistant and giving - taste sweet and salt, iron and pepper. One might easily make it vegetarian compatible by using some nice grilled halloumi instead of the fish. On a similar tip the St John cookbook has an assemblage of tomatoes, boiled potatoes, roast garlic, roast tomatoes, saltfish, chopped boiled egg and parsley which is also amazing and probably next on my list as I bought three packs of saltfish for a fiver.

enjoy

Sea bream with spiced couscous

I've just been to Hastings. As well as checking Bexhill's excellent De La Warr Pavilion I was kindly gifted three fish (two bream, one bass) by someone big in the sea-fishing game with a big freezer and a kind heart. I took them home frozen: stiff and leaden and kept cool on the sluggish journey back to Liverpool St. with frozen bottles of water. With one bream and one bass somehow stuffed into the freezer for future use I left a bream out to cook the following day.

I'd been instructed to cook the sea bream simply and after reading about it's geographical spread and presence in the Mediterranean as well as the South of England I opted for something vaguely Middle Eastern and fairly faff-less to go with it. Couscous mixed with preserved lemons, chickpeas and cauliflower, flavoured with cumin and dried chilli and dressed with olive oil and sherry vinegar.

• sea bream or similar
• couscous
• can of chickpeas
• cauliflower
• olive oil, sherry vinegar
• preserved lemons, cumin, dried chilli

Put your cauliflower florets in boiling water until cooked (but still with a good crunch). Rehydrate your couscous. Chop some preserved lemons. Toast some whole cumin and chilli flakes (can't recommend Turkish kirmizi biber highly enough in this department). Open a can of chickpeas and rinse them. Combine everything in a bowl and stir. Perk with oil and vinegar. Sorted.

Chickpeas in couscous are wicked! Such a great switch-up texture wise. I'd recommend heartily. The other ingredients are your standard middle eastern-ish flavours and gel nicely. This mix is best served warm but not hot.

Grill your fish (with a sprinkle of salt and a little lick of olive oil) and serve with the couscous.

Delicious! Sea bream is quite a meaty fish - a nice white dense meat with an appealingly moderate flavour. I think grilling it is a good choice which allows the fish itself to be foregrounded and focussed upon. I might try roasting its twin or frying it in steaks, as the one thing grilling leads to is a lack of crispy bits.

Thanks for the fish Shaun.

Squid with peas and mint

Squid's have been christened just about correctly. The single rubbery syllable, squirting muscle and watery propulsion: they must really dart about in the sea. Above the water they look rather alien - the thick sheath of muscle, the plasticy translucent mantle and the horrible mucus in the body cavity.

Squid are notoriously rubbery when cooked of course, and to combat that you must either cook very briefly (a quick dip, floured, into a deep-fat fryer for instance) or at some length. This recipe goes down the second route. It's a simple combination of squid with fish-favourites white wine and fennel, plus peas and mint. It's in the second Moro book (billed as cuttlefish with broad beans) and is well worth a go. As ever I've tweaked the version to my taste - fiddle at will with the basics below.

• squid - a couple per person as a main
• a medium glass of white wine and a big one of water
• paprika, fennel seeds, bay leaves
• onion and garlic
• peas or broad beans
• mint

Fry one sliced small onion in olive oil per squid. Add sliced garlic.

After ten or fifteen minutes add a few bay leaves and a teaspoon of fennel seeds. Fry for a few more minutes. Add a teaspoon of paprika. Add the wine and water to make up a sauce. Add the squid or cuttlefish chopped into small pieces. Keep the crowns of tentacles complete unless the beasts are monsters. They will shrink when cooked.

The muscle fibres will contract and tighten when exposed to heat. They need to be cooked enough to start breaking down. This may well take around fifty minutes on a low, puttering heat. Keep an eye on things and stir from time to time.

 more tentacle vicar?

When the squid tastes done add the peas or beans and cook till done. Good time to draw for the frozen veg here. Also added some ripped up mint - as much as you see fit. I found I needed more than I first thought. I gave it a minute on the heat to wilt the herb down pleasantly.

Wow. The sauce itself almost outshines the squid. It's perfectly balanced and made to be mopped up with a fat slice of bread grilled and rubbed with a cut garlic clove. This sauce would also be excellent with a fried piece of white fish or how about some asparagus, peppers and artichokes for a veg version?

Spicy braised fish with whole garlic (da suan shao yu)

cold, dead eyes

Just when you thought those spicy Szechuan sauces couldn't get any better... Whole garlic cloves - genius. This dish consists of a thick spicy sauce featuring all the usual suspects – chilli bean paste, ginger, spring-onions and dark soy – but this time with whole garlic cloves as well. An initial softening stage is required to partially cook the garlic and a ten minute spell of peeling is also needed. FD suggest cooking the fish in with the sauce but I think to keep things really simple next time I’ll just fry the fish separately. That way it’s easy to control the speed and rate at which the fish cooks, crisp up the skin and prevent it disintegrating the sauce.

• dense, meaty fish (I used more Billingsgate mackerel from the freezer)
• chilli bean paste, ginger, lots of garlic, dark soy, a smidgeon of sugar, stock/water
• spring-onions
  
  

Firstly prepare the garlic: peel a bulb of the stuff per person or more if feeling foolhardy. Fry on a medium heat for five to seven minutes with a stir every forty-five seconds. The skin should crinkle lightly but not darken in colour too much. The cloves should be moderately soft. Remove.

Next, make the sauce: fry a few tablespoons of chilli bean paste in oil for thirty seconds and then add quite a lot of chopped ginger. Give this another minute or so – by now relentless heady waves of loveliness should be rolling off the pot and you should feel reassured and gladdened by the scent of frying chilli. Add a little splurt of dark soy and then top up with stock (or boiling water and pinch on stock powder) and reintroduce the garlic. You need enough liquid to make plenty of sauce: probably about 240 mills per person. Bring to a light boil to finish cooking the garlic.

Meantime fry the fish (after slashing the body) with a little oil in any way you feel comfortable. A nice crisp skin will be provide admirable textural juxtaposition to the garlic nodules and spicy sauce.

When the garlic seems pretty cooked introduce a little thickener (corn flour, potato flour etc) mixed with a dash of water to add gloss and thickness to the sauce. Add some chopped spring-onion at the last minute – FD suggests using the greens only (which is the authentic thing to do) but what’s a man to do with a load of half eaten spring-onions in his salad drawer? It all goes into my pot and I give them a minute or two on the heat to break the rawness of the white parts. (I forgot to add them this time which is why they are casually sprinkled on top.)

should have put the fish and sauce on top of the noodles really

Dish up the fish and pour the sauce over it. We had cabbage (the cannonball-heavy compact white type) fried with whole dried chilli, Szechuan pepper, chopped pickled chilli and dressed with Chinkiang vinegar.

Another delight then: quick, easy and tasty as you like. I've run out of things to say about Szechuan food really. It's just seems so perfectly balanced: numbing, hot, sour, sweet, vinegary. It's flexible and good at accommodating errant or forgotten vegetables and odd bits of fish from the back of the freezer. It's relentlessly tasty and pretty spicy which is surely a major plus in the minds of right-thinking people everywhere. Perhaps I better just say I really like it. Hopefully I'm helping convince you that you may too.

Fish soup with pickled greens (suan cai yu)

All this fun with chilli-bean paste had to end some time. It's regular and welcome appearance in my fridge, pan and mouth was making me forget the amazing Szechuan food that existed without the wondrous paste. It was time for a go at something else.

This soup with pickled mustard greens and fish looked just the ticket as I had some super fresh mackerel from a trip to Billingsgate in the freezer. I thought an oily and meaty fish would stand up well for itself in a hot and sour soup filled with pickled vegetables.

wonderful pickled mustard greens

Here is a recipe modified from FD.

• one mackerel per person
• one pack pickled mustard greens (300g)
• 1l+ stock
• pickled chillies (if you have no Szechuan ones use Turkish)
• Shaoxing wine, ginger, garlic
• bunch spring onions

Firstly fillet the fish and pour a little salt and Shaoxing wine over the fillets.

Next you need a stock. If you have any fish stock to hand use (or maybe a light chicken one, just?), otherwise make a quick stock with the spines and heads of the fish, some appropriate spices and a pinch of veg stock. I boiled the bones (after smashing open the heads) with Szechuan pepper, a couple of dried chillies, fennel seeds, star anise, false cardamom and a scant handful of dried oyster and porcini mushrooms for some depth. I also added a small amount of Gentleman's Relish, containing as it does mainly anchovy and salt, this is a good short-cut when bolstering a fish stock.  Strain the stock well - lots of small black particles will have exited the fish heads and entered the liquid. My Le Creuset was a warlock's crock-pot of grey sediment and unidentifiable bits of mackerel matter by this point: muslin recommended.

false cardamom - amomum subulatum

Fry the garlic, chilli and pickled chillies, all cut fine. The yellow-green Turkish chillies that you get with kebabs worked great as they are a bit sour and suitably tangfastic. I asked Fuchsia Dunlop on her blog about the right pickled chillies to use and she was kind enough to reply. The ones in my previous post are a hot mountain chilli. What is needed here is the milder, sour ones - hence me using the Turkish option. I don't know what the authentic version of this soup tastes like and I don't think it matters hugely, but this substitution hits the right notes in my opinion.

Add the strained stock and mustard greens (cut ragged). Add the chopped spring onions. Bring everything to a simmer and leave for five minutes to bring things to a head.

Gently introduce the fish pieces and poach for a few minutes until cooked. FD suggests thickening but I loved the soup thin and broth-like. She also offers an option for chilli lovers of pouring on a layer of hot oil and Szechuan pepper. Now normally I'd be all over that, but the beauty, to me, of this soup lies in its soothing qualities. It is a balm, a tonic, and the pickled chillies give a gentle and suggestive heat that needs no augmentation. I saw somewhere the taste of the false cardamom described as 'antiseptic'. That's apt - initially I was worried by its strident flavour but the menthol notes of the pod assimilated well and added to the overall taste pretty well. You end up with a soothing savoury broth, the sourness of the pickled vegetables, some welcome squeak from the mustard greens and then the dense mackerel, surprisingly delicate in its liquid matrix. It tastes downright healthy this soup in fact.

note the beautiful, miso-like, fine particle cloud of the soup

I suggest eating this with a bowl of brown rice at your elbow.

Braised fish and tofu (dou fu shao yu)

This dish of braised fish and beancurd is fairly similar to the mapo tofu I made a week or two ago. It doesn’t have any minced meat in, rather some lumps of fish that are made extra tasty by being first fried. As Szechuan is an inland area the fish eaten there seem to be freshwater carp and catfish. FD recommends various substitutes (mullet here) but I had some odds and sods in the freezer which needed eating up so I used some snapper pieces that had been maturing in a drawer since their impromptu and purposeless purchase in Dalston over a year ago. They worked fine!

This one is of course another winner and tastes as might be expected. You get to enjoy the lovely soft beancurd, the hot and numbing spice combo and then the fried crust of the fish, now soaked in the delicious braising liquid.

Ingredient used fairly often in Szechuan recipes are the preserved vegetable ya cai (similar to the Tidjan ones available in shops) and preserved salted chillies. The Tianjin vegetables are pretty cheap and come in a pretty earthenware pot (visuals below). They have a real strong, salty taste and should be used almost as a seasoning I feel, chopped up small and mixed in with meat or veg. I don't have any Szechuan salted chillies yet so I substituted some pickled Turkish ones chopped up small. These two ingredients were tossed in with some stir-fried Chinese cabbage type thing (sorry, have no idea of real name - like a pale yellow/green long lettuce shape with a watery stem) and dressed with a minor sprinkling of sesame oil, which made a nice vegetable side dish. Like the mapo tofu this sauce was composed of stock and thickened. Scatter with spring onions greens and eat with rice. Super hearty.

Saltfish gratin and a quince and chocolate squidge cake

The wet weather of winter demands potato and cream, amongst other things. This dish is extremely simple and recalls the Scandinavian dish of baked sliced potato with cream and anchovy whose name now escapes my head if it ever lodged there at all.

Ingredients

• five - seven potato
• saltfish amounting to roughly a quarter the mass of potato
• spinach (the proper stuff not namby-pamby baby nonsense)
• cream, butter and garlic
  

 

Boil the saltfish in three changes of water from a cold start to get rid of the salt. Slice the potato thin and put a layer in an oven-proof dish. Scatter over the saltfish (flaked), some bits of butter and plenty of pepper. Go easy with the salt on account of the preserved fish as the seasoning can be corrected easily later. Add a layer of spinach and repeat till everything is used up. Pour an amount of cream you feel comfortable ingesting over the dish and add pepper and a little butter to the top. We had a fish free version also. They will need around forty five minutes - keep an eye on the top spud slices to prevent over crisping. Foil can be used here.

In my one Euro bargain pyrex bowl from Brussels we made a chocolate squidge cake with an impromptu addition of some quince.

Ingredients

• four eggs
• the same weight on dark choc, butter and caster sugar
• eighty five grammes ground almonds
• one tablespoon cornflour
  

This comes out like a less chewy brownie. Firstly the chocolate is melted in a bain-marie then butter whisked in followed by sugar, egg yolks, ground almonds and cornflour. The egg whites are beaten till stiff, then folded in. It needs about forty minutes at 190C. I put some of the poached soft quince in small cubes in here but you could use whatever you fancy.

We had it with quince poached with sugar and a little spice and creme fraiche.

Peppers stuffed with saltfish and chorizo

Saltfish. What other un-tinned fish can just sit in your cupboard waiting for a chill evening and a keen hand to remove and ready it for the pot? Nocturnally hydrated it is ready to lend its bounce to soups, salads, patties and pastes. Cookbooks sometimes stress how expensive saltcod is and how its availability is limited to Spanish and Italian delis. There is a simple way to get around both problems that they never seem to mention - get down to a local market with a Caribbean stall and fill your boots. I got three packets of saltfish (it's pollock but I guess we shouldn't be eating cod anyway right?) for five pounds.

There is a recipe in the second Moro book suggesting stuffing spicy peppers with saltfish and I admit that it was the idea for this combination. But nothing was taken so so I'm claiming this one as a SD, ON (near) original!

Ingredients

• 400g saltfish
• six spring onions or a similar amount of onion or shallots
• 100g chorizo
• 2 medium cooked potatos
• five peppers
• dried chilli, garlic, cumin

 

Hydrate and desalinate the saltfish either by soaking overnight or boiling from a coldwater start a couple of times or until it tastes acceptably (un)salty. In the last boil put the potatoes in to cook cut into small chunks. When fish and potato are ready mash together in a bowl.

Meanwhile soften the onions with plenty of garlic in a pan and add the chroizo to colour. Add chilli flakes, cumin  and black pepper to taste. Allow all to cook for a couple of minutes and lubricate with plenty of olive oil. When this mixture is ready combine with the saltfish and potatos and correct seasoning. Stuff this into the peppers and bake for forty-five minutes in a moderate oven until the peppers have started to break down and blacken on top. I had a few tomatoes in the mix too.

For a salad I made a lovely Moro one - blanched cauliflower, chickpeas and preserved lemons dressed with olive oil thick with cumin seed and chopped coriander. This is a wonderful salad that should be made as often as possible.

We had it with pittas.