Ok so we both like seafood, but the number of dishes I can cook is easily countable on fingers. I want to be able to cook anything, and get some good ideas along the way, so Kat decided that I should go to the best seafood market in Australia (they claim the world... im not sure about that) and get on a class.
It was a last minute booking, only 2 paces left out of 40 Friday, Saturday and Mondays classes were full so quite lucky in the end to get on I think.
First lets say a word about the fish market, Sunday is not their biggest day, the boats don’t actually go out on Saturday night so it’s a smaller affair than the rest of the week, but it was still big, lots of fish of all sorts pilled up on ice, really quite impressive, they claim they have the most variety of fish in the world, even more than in Tokyo, and you know how the Japanese love their fish. I wondered what I would get my hands on upstairs!
The whole thing was 4 hours long, 11 – 3, broken down into 2 hours lecture, 2 hours cooking. The lecture part was taken by Brenda in like a lecture theatre, she basically cooked 5 dishes one after another and showed us the details of all the prep stuff, she was really good.
Dish 1.
Skewered king tiger prawns with herb marinade
Lovley :-) the best think I learned here was how to correctly devein and peel the prawns. To get the main black vein out you take the head of the prawn off with your thumb and if done correctly the vein comes out with it, then you can peel the shell in one (2 if you're not a pro). I must say it’s a million times better than how I used to do it, hacking away at it with a knife.
P.S no im not going to reproduce the recipies here, if you're nice I might let you taste them sometime.
Dish 2.
Thai style squid salad
Squid, yuck I thought, I’ll let someone else do it, and I can just not eat it at the end. Oh my, nicest dish on the table. But also messiest.
Have you ever been to a fishmongers, looked at all the nice looking fish then at the squid and thought, who would buy that, I mean who... well next time I'm there me that’s who.
So I had a full squid, straight from the sea, body 10-15 cm long, 4-5 diameter, tentacles 20-25 cm long, all very wet and cold. Basically you pull the thing apart with your hands, over the sink (it’s a bit messy) its hard to describe what you do, you just have to do it, but once you know its not that bad, as long as you don’t mind squid ink all over your hands. But the worst but was pushing the beak out from the centre with your fingers.
Nice though really nice.
Dish 3.
Chargrilled veg salad
Boring, but again very nice. And interesting way of char grilling the peppers and peeling them.
Dish 4.
Blue Mussels with garlic butter
Geordie, this one's for you, exactly the same as I've done em before. Clean them up a bit, and throw them straight on the BBQ, when they open up they are done.
Nice, but not as nice as the 1st 2 recipes.
Dish 5.
BBQ Garfish
Garfish are quite a small white fish (at least the ones we had were), very mild, not strong at all. They had been gutted but that’s all, head still on everything. So we went through how to de-bone and prepare them, which was really interesting, can't wait to try with a bigger fish, maybe a trout, then we battered them (egg, flour, olive oil) and fried them on the hot plate, not too long, serve on rocket and lemon, really nice.
Dish 6.
Seared yellowtail kingfish with wasabi mayonnaise
The steaks were a lot like swordfish , quite big, thick, firm fish. It was sashimi grade steak which means it was prepared in a special way the moment it was caught, for details use google, but basically it means its good to eat raw if you choose. We marinated it in olive oil and lemon juice and then seared it on the BBQ, tender, the outside was cooked but the inside was just basically warmed through.
Grandad would be proud :-)
Hi Grandad.
(for the benefit of all of you who don't know my family, he was the best fishmonger in all Halifax)
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