diet a success: dieter scarily skeletal etc:
possibly the best aftermath-offshoot of the south beach diet is that i am allowed ALL THE SHELLFISH and FISH i can eat!! (well, it doesn’t quite put it like that, but i am supposed to eat allowed stuff till i am satisfied PLUS no marine life is off limits so what am i sposed to conclude eh?)
ANYWAY: the good bit is that i can finally get my head round fish recipes, which i have hitherto found daunting. this is bcz i teach myself from books, of course, and specialist “fish and shellfish” recipe books tend to assume
i. that all fish ever are easily available (when actually fishmongers are almost all local-shop-for-local-tastes), and (contrariwise)
ii. local-type “ethnic” recipes are what we are after (which of course means hunting down very specific ingredients you will only ever use once) (or at best once in a very long while)
this is the main one i have: basically it is over-ambitious and fiddly for a relative beginner, in that it includes a complete ethnobiology of EVERY FISH EVER (organised as per marine and freshwater science), plus nicely pictured and yummy-lookin recipes which mostly fall at fence two AFTER you have have set yr heart on them!! :'(
what i actually need is more like “digested world rules-o-thumb for say mackerel and mackerel-type fishes” – in this case, the rule being HOW TO DEAL W.the oil of the OILIEST FISH ALIVE – “given what you have in yr kitchen” (and what you shd stock up on, viz LEMMINGS, DILL, blah blah): my approach at the moment is to go into a fish shop (my local is turkish and eschews signage), say i want [x] of those plz, then ask after what they are called, then look em up when i get home and improvise
anyway swiftly onto stuff i can now more or less do by heart which is good:
A: skate wings in a black butter sauce:
i. poach skate wings in water for 10-12 mins (plus pinchosalt and dash of red wine vinegar); set aside keepin warm (w.capers and fresh parsley)
ii. melt chunk of butter until it foams and turns brown – pour over waiting skate
iii. reduce three dashes more red wine vinegar in butter pan to two-thirds of self, drizzle over skate etc
iv. this goes nice w.spinach (and yes black butter sauce is way off in the not-really-allowed part of my diet) (ps skate bones can’t be removed, they form a dense fan, but the flesh just falls off em so easy to take out by hand and v.hard to swallow)
B: seabass baked in a salt crust
i. clean but don’t descale a big seabass (u needn’t dehead it either, though my dish wz too small so i did)
ii. flavour seabass tummy w.eg dill and parsley, then totally bury in rocksalt
iii. sprinkle dashowater over lump in salt and bake for 30-odd mins
iv. break crust: the salt has turned the fishskin to dry paper, which peeels open nicely – the fishflesh = lovely eatable moist consistency, perfect to consume while watchin an overlong doc abt krakatoa
WARNING: this is likely expensive (seabass prices seem to vary wildly) and a bit wasteful of rocksalt, since it is full of skinbits so you can only really reuse it in fishy dishes thereafter
C: i think i hate sardines