Australian salmon are not a salmon at all, but a sea perch, and though sustainable, they are notoriously not a prized table fish. If fresh caught, bled, skinned, and filleted to remove the dark “blood” meat, the flavour is good – strong but good. The texture is more the problem. They are a bit chewy and soft at the same time. Only one way to honour the life of an…
Bream is not one of my favourite fish, but it’s one of the easier ones to catch, and Lewie likes fishing. I could never get appropriately excited about the catch until I discovered just how easy Thai Fish Cakes are to make
I remember when I was quite a small child my grandfather had a shack on Bribie Island. Just before dusk, he would take his rod and walk down to the beach. We kids would play in the shallows and barely have time to make a sandcastle before it was time to head back with a bucket full of whiting fillets.
We stopped in at a fish shop on the way home from visiting our daughter at the coast yesterday. I had just bought a half kilo of squid, thinking calamari, when I noticed they had snapper frames at a ridiculously low price.
There is something very satisfying about using the whole of an animal that is killed for food, and even more so when it leads to this. The bouillabaisse fed another dinner party of eleven people, so those fish made a total of over 20 meals. I felt like a very good predator!
It’s getting a bit cold now of an evening for barbeques, but my partner still loves fishing. Fish soup is a great way to make a dinner party of the catch, and using the whole fish – head, bones and all – I feel like an ethical predator.
I picked some lemon basil, dill and culantro from the garden and blended the herbs with a bit of lime juice, garlic and olive oil to make a thick marinade. We laid the fish on the banana leaves on the hot barbecue plate, spooned the marinade over the top, and put some whole cobs of corn and whole zucchini on the side. Guests arrived, opened the bottle of wine, turned…
Squid are generally a fairly safe choice – they breed fast, die young, and may even be over-filling their niche as their natural predators struggle to maintain their populations.
My partner came back from a trip to the coast with octopus. I’ve cooked baby octopus before, marinated briefly and cooked fast on the barbeque. But these were a bit larger than the babies I’d cooked before. What to do with them?