Greedy Italians’ fish soup-stew

You can rely on Antonio Carluccio and Gennaro Contaldo for a hearty recipe, and this fish soup-stew is no different.

Just in case one day the above link stops working, here’s how I cooked it (looking at the recipe again I just spotted I missed out the red wine when adding the tomatoes – whoops):

– Fry 1 chopped onion, 2 minced garlic cloves in a heavy based pan
– Add a handful of chopped cherry tomatoes, a chopped red chilli, a handful of chopped parsley, 1/2 tsp of mustard seeds

– Pour in a tin of chopped tomatoes and season with salt and pepper, bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes
– Add your fish – I had a fish pie mix which was nice, although this would be a lot nicer with a white fish and mussels
– Dish up and serve with a squeeze of lemon juice

Steamed mussels with plenty of garlic

There’s been a little lull on my blogging of late, this is because I’ve been to Ibiza – the party island! We went out there for our friends’ picturesque wedding overlooking Cala Tarida.

I’m not that much into going to super clubs until 6 in the morning, but I am into having cocktails and watching the sunset, like this one:

So in an attempt to get over our holiday blues we had steamed mussels for dinner.

The most work of this dish goes into cleaning the mussels, you have to cut off their ‘beards’ and scrape the shells clean so you don’t get gritty bits in your sauce. I always worry about the mussels getting warm while I’m doing this and opening up too early so I keep them in a big bowl of water during the cleaning process, sometimes with an ice cube or two thrown in.

Important – you must discard any that have opened before cooking.

Once the mussels are all cleaned, I leave them in the cold water while I prepare the sauce by frying a finely chopped shallot and lots of crushed garlic (6 or 7 cloves) in a little olive oil in a big, heavy set pan.

Once softened, I add a large glass of white wine, season and leave for a couple of minutes before adding the (drained) mussels and putting the lid on the pan for them to steam.

They should take around 3 minutes – once they are opened they are cooked – I sometimes take a few out as they open, to allow space for others to open.

In the last minute I grated in lemon zest – a whole lemon’s worth – and then removed the mussels that were cooked with a slatted spoon (throw away any unopened mussels).

Leaving the sauce in the pan, add a dash of cream and turn up the heat to reduce and thicken – this is what you’re meant to do and it’s really delicious when you do – usually after a minute of waiting to thicken (I think it takes about 5-8mins) I can’t wait any longer, and pour the sauce over the mussels to eat with lots of crusty bread for dipping.

Smoked haddock chowder

Summer weather (now that we’re experiencing 2 days of sunshine in England) makes me want to eat lots of seafood – so after my morning class and waiting in a stupidly long queue to pick up a letter from the post office (V festival tickets – yay!) I stopped off at the fish stall.

One of the things I got was some Scottish smoked haddock and set out making this chowder as soon as I got home. (arguably, chowder is a better dish to warm you up when it’s cold outside but I’ll stick to my original premise is summer and seafood going hand in hand)

If you’d like to make this chowder you will (for 2):
– 2 rashers streaky bacon, chopped
– a small chopped onion
– 300 ml cream
– 100 ml milk
– 2 potatoes, peeled and cut into cubes
– 100 ml water or fish stock
– 1 bay leaf, shredded
– a handful of chopped fresh parsley
– a squeeze of lemon

And here’s the method:

– Fry the bacon and onion in a little butter
– Put your potato cubes into the microwave in a bowl with a splash I water and loosely covered with cling film for 5 minutes, this will save you time later
– Once the onion is soft add the cream, milk, stock or water, potatoes and bay leaf to the pan. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 5 minutes
– flake in the haddock and warm through
– add a squeeze of lemon, and some lemon zest if you’ve got it, season (with the bacon and smoked haddock it will be quite salty already) and throw in the parsley

Serve with crusty bread and enjoy

Grilled octopus

These are the 2 octopi (we all know it’s not octopuses) I got from the fish stall in Chelmsford’s Saturday market.

Octopus is a tough animal, you can’t just stick it on the grill, you need to tenderise it first. So after cleaning it by turning the head inside out and carefully removing the inside sacs (it’s quite stinky if you burst the wrong one) I simmered the octopi in salted water for an hour and a bit.

I then transferred it to a pan, generously glugged olive oil over the octopus, along with the juice of half a lemon, 5 cloves of crushed garlic, salt, pepper and a little crushed chilli.

At the point, you could eat your octopus like this, or mix it into some spaghetti for a lovely octopus pasta, or turn it into a stew.

I put the octopus under grill until crispy (at the point I was wishing we had a BBQ, it would be so tasty grilled over coal) and served with chopped parsley, lots more lemon and crusty bread.