Lemon sole with herbed green rice

I was chatting to Amy Caviston and Shane Willis of A Caviston, Greystones yesterday (Amy is going to be joining me at the For Food’s Sake event at Inishfood next weekend, as per previous post, where she’ll explain why they insist on selling Irish fish where possible), and they mentioned in passing that lemon sole takes just a couple of minutes in the oven.

It occurred to me that lemon sole is one of those fish I tend to overlook, maybe cos the fillets can be very small and are often overcooked and bland. I popped by my nearest fish counter on the way home and picked up three fillets for €1.60. When I got home I wrapped them in foil with some of the gnarlier bits of a fennel bulb, a few wedges of lemon, lots of black pepper and a little olive oil, and preheated the oven to about 200C.

The plan had been to use the rest of the fennel bulb in a risotto, so I sweat it until nice and soft with a chopped shallot and heated up some vegetable stock which I had prepared the other day from bit and bobs gathered in my ice-box for the job (off-cuts of onions and leeks, leftovers from bunches of herbs, etc). I was about to throw in my risotto rice for toasting when I realised I was all out of arborio, so I tried the same approach with basmati rice to see how it would work out. I didn’t rinse the starch off like you normally would with basmati, just threw a couple of handfuls in, toasted for a minute or two and stirred in the hot stock ladle by ladle. Meanwhile I wilted some spinach in the simmering stock until nice and soft, and removed to add in at the very end with lots of chopped tarragon.

It took about ten minutes to cook to al dente, at which point I popped the sole in the oven. Three or four minutes later, rice and fish were both ready. I seasoned the rice with the juice from the roast lemon, lots of pepper and a little salt, and tucked into a delicious dinner that had cost me about €4 and took me about 20 minutes. Not bad, and a great example of how fish really can be cheap as chips, if we’re willing to look for the bargains out there.

Hmm, today I think I’ll go waste my money buying all sorts of ingredients which aren’t already lurking in my over-stocked dry store cupboards, and then I’ll spend way longer than necessary mixing them all together, and then – when I go to put them into my pre-heated oven with the desire that alchemy will transform said ingredients into a moist, warm, almond-dense appley cake over which I’ll pour my very posh home made ginger crème fraiche as friends applaud in wide-eyed, sugar-hungry anticipation – then I’ll notice that my ‘pre-heated’ oven is cool, and so I’ll fiddle with oven knobs until the fickle on-off light comes on and then I’ll wait another age and then I’ll put my cake-to-be into the now-hot oven, and then I’ll go do something else while this thing of potential beauty burns.

No, definitely not the kind of plan that normally has me bounding out of bed, of a Sunday morning, after a Saturday night.

I should explain: my oven is a relic of a previous period of recession. When I moved into my current rented property, there were many things that clinched the deal. A city-centre location. A balcony from which sun spills onto my desk, and from where I can follow the progress of the neighbourhood birds having their own little soap opera episodes in the garden below.

The oven was always going to be a problem, but was one I was prepared to swallow in the overall balance of things I could live with. Somehow I thought that it was a matter of us just getting to know eachother. And having successfully heated several things in said oven over recent months, I decided it was time to coax a cake from it.

Well, I got to know my oven alright. And I can tell you now, it’s a no-good freak of an oven, turning from nonchalantly cool (at 300ºF – yes, Farenheit, that’s how much of a throw-back we’re talking) to vindictively hot (at 305ºF) with no more than a blink of a red light.

And so, I burnt the first cake I’ve cooked in my happy home. What a way to spend a hungover Sunday.

On a happier note, I did also make salt cod croquettes to bring to a friend’s house for dinner. Now, if truth be known, Jamie Oliver had made not one 30 Minute Dinner but a whole week of school-nights worth of dinners in the time that it took me to burn one cake and roll four sausage-rolls of salt cod croquette mix. And I’m sure I should have bought some cheap salt to layer under and over the cod fillets rather than wasting my precious Maldon. And there was a moment when I let the milk – in which the now salted and rinsed and soaked cod fillets were supposed to be poaching – boil over in a fishy, milky mess that bubbled on the hot plate lurking under the electric rings of my relic. And then when I tasted the now-cooked flaky salt cod there was another moment when I thought I’d have to dump the lot because it was still so darn salty.

But I persevered, and rinsed it again, and then mixed it with a little puréed potato and a lot of fine herbs and lemon juice and Dijon mustard. And when it tasted good, I made it look good too by rolling it up into cling-wrapped sausages and rolling them really tight and popping them in the fridge to firm up. And by the time I had cut them into bite-sized bits and peeled off the cling and panéed them (that means tossing consecutively in flour, egg wash and breadcrumbs) and deep-fried them, and served them up with Bar 8 tomato ketchup and Ard Bia red onion marmalade, I had almost forgotten my burnt cake. By the time we were tucking into a baked ham with mashed potato, cabbage and parsley sauce, I cared even less. And by the time we were rejoicing in another relic of 80′s Ireland – the unbeatable creamy-crispy contrast of Vienetta, which we gave an extra-Italiano twist by pouring over some very strong fresh coffee for an affogato-esque pudding – me and the burnt cake had made our peace. Sort of.

What I love about cooking is that most things can be saved if you catch the problem in time.

What intimidates me about baking is that you don’t know something needs saving until it is well and truly lost.

Well, I may have lost this particular face-off with the spectre of domesticity that baking represents, but one thing’s for sure. It’s game on. Watch out oven, I’ve got your measure now.

If the words ‘fish skin’ bring to mind a slithery, wobbly layer of grey chewiness insulated by another layer of gelatinous fat, then I’m guessing you might be pushing that delicately to the rim of your imagined plate.

But if instead what comes to mind is a nut-toned, nicely seasoned crisp of a skin, crossing savoury notes with a touch of sweetness drawn from the melted fats – in other words, something closer to the crackling that makes a roast pork so special – then I’m thinking that this is something you savour when it appears on your plate.

We had a discussion of this kind over lunch today, which consisted of pan-roasted cod (of crispy skinned persuasion) perched atop a chickpea and chorizo cassoulet with aubergine caviar, if you don’t mind. (Yes, that was our starter. Mains of rib-eye with Bearnaise and chips. We deprived ourselves of dessert, you’ll be glad to hear.) Anyway there were several converts to the delights of crisped up skin amongst the other students at the table, and a few who haven’t yet dared to cross the line. If you fall into the latter camp, I’d suggest you shore up some courage and give it a go. A few tips first though:

• The pan has to be hot, hot, hot. When it’s smoking, splash on a little oil and then pop in the fillet, skin-side down. Turn the heat down a little and step away. Really, back off. Leave it to crisp up for a few minutes all by itself. If it’s a thick fillet (cod, for example) once the edges are looking good, you can throw a knob of butter onto each fillet and finish it in the oven, turning it skin-side up for the last minute or so. If it’s a thin fillet, finish it on the stove-top.
• Some fish skins are thicker than other, so you might want to score them a few times. This will stop fillets of seabass or seabream curling up in the pan, and will help the heat get through. John Wyer recommends scoring mackerel skin too if pan-frying it.
• There are some fish which really need to be skinned. Monkfish, which I posted on in Week Two, is definitely one of those. What I didn’t mention in the previous posting was just how labourious – and imperative – skinning monkfish is. Besides getting the outer layer of skin off the ugly bugger, you also need to be very careful about removing all of the rather slimy lagging jacket of an underlayer of fat he carries about the bottom of the ocean with him. This turns particularly rubbery if left on, and contracts to make the flesh curl, so take your time to remove it.
• When skinning fish, use a smallish knife with a bit of flexibility to it, and make sure it’s darn sharp. (We used to have a fat cat who would be summonsed, panting with excitement/exertion, at the sound of my mother’s knife on steel, as she sharpened up for our fish supper.)
• Starting at the tip of the tail, run the blade in as close to the skin as possible, and pull back enough skin to get a good grip. Place the fillet skin-side down on the board and, pulling on the skin, run your knife along between skin and flesh, checking frequently as you go that you’re on track.
• You can apply this same technique to the monkfish’s lagging jacket layer of slime too, though you’ll also need to get in with the tip of your knife to get some of it off.

And finally, a note of controversy. I noticed today that John skinned the halibut fillet he was featuring in the demo of tomorrow’s lunch (oh, just something we’re going to throw together in the morning involving lobster dressed in tomato sauce, lobster tortellini filled with a bisque-y froth, and a garnish of basil oil). I queried him on the halibut skin and he said he removes it, finding it too troublesome and fatty.

It was only later that I remembered an unforgettable halibut dish served up by Temple Garner in Dillingers last year. I was reviewing the restaurant for FOOD&WINE Magazine at the time, and had a superb meal. The one thing that blew all the other fine elements out of the water was the halibut, and more specifically, its skin. I spoke to Temple later, and he said he had been experimenting with it lately, and was pretty pleased with the results he had been getting. He was right to be: it was superb. Think crispy duck levels of crispness giving way to an amazingly flavoursome, melt-in-your-mouth matter (okay, fat, but fat can be beautiful too folks!) and then the pearly white flesh beneath.

So, it seems that the subject of fish skin divides great chefs too, and not just us mere mortals. Whichever camp you belong to, it’s always worth at least trying a little of what the other side is eating, even if only so you can fight your case more convincingly.

Today was all about the butter. I’ve hinted at my feelings for Irish butter before, so I was in my element today – though even I was shocked when I found myself eating the remains of our pink grapefruit and dill beurre blanc with a spoon, especially having just devoured two seared scallops sitting in a pool of the good stuff. (As a brief digression, anyone who read yesterday’s post about the Maillard reaction which gives much food those lovely savoury carmelised notes would do well to bear that in mind when cooking scallops. Pop them on a very hot pan with a little oil for 60-ish seconds on the first side and another 30+ seconds on the second, depending on the thickness. Don’t crowd the pan, and don’t move them round. And do try the coral, or roe – I did today, and was pleasantly surprised.)

Anyway, butter. We built today’s starter (scallops, as above) and dessert (hot lemon soufflé) and tomorrow’s main course (rib eye with twice-cooked chips and Bearnaise sauce) around this block of gold. Now you could argue that those dishes are all about scallops, eggs and beef respectively, but as chef Oliver Dunne rightly pointed out yesterday, it’s often the supporting role that really makes the performance – indeed often steals the whole show – and there’s surely no better character actor than butter. Authentic, hard not to like, with a touch of the everyday about it that we can all relate to, yet so versatile: capable of great elegance and refinement or of real ballsiness, of melting into the background or bursting centre stage.

Our grapefruit beurre blanc replaced the usual base of vinegar, wine and shallot reduction with citrus, vermouth and shallot, but the principle remained the same. Reduce the base liquid, allow to cool a little, and drop in cubes of unsalted butter one by one, whisking as you go. A Rosle spiral whisk has been added to my must-buy kit list (which I hope to attend to just as soon as I get back to earning some money after this month in culinary paradise!) – its clever design helps you get into all the corners so that all the butter emulsifies into all the reduction. The heat is important, so feel free to move the pan on and off the heat to regulate: you want it hot enough to melt the butter but not so hot that the sauces splits (watch out for the warning sign of sudden thinning).

Avoiding a split sauce is the name of the Bearnaise sauce game too. Bearnaise is simply a tarragon flavoured Hollandaise; when paired with hot chips, it’s a ticket to heaven (via a coronary seizure if you lose the run). Think of these sauces like a warm mayonnaise in which egg yolks have been emulsified with liquid butter rather than oil. Or like a beurre blanc which has been thickened with egg yolks. The butter should be clarified first to refine it and remove the milk solids: simply slowly heat in a small pan until it separates, and remove from the heat to allow the solids settle to the base. It’s the clear golden elixir above that which you’re after.

The classic method to make Hollandaise or Bearnaise sauces is to whisk vinegar reduction and yolks together, and cook very very gently over a bain marie (a ‘water bath’, or metal bowl over a pot of simmering water). Remember that 65ºC is the point of no return, after which you enter the ignomy of curdledom, somewhere you do not want to go (from which, they say, there is no returning). Now, enter stage left that golden liquor that is your clarified butter. As with making mayo, whisk in a very little at a time to start, and then as your confidence builds you can get more flahulach with it.

Speaking of confidence, I ate my first fluffy soufflé today, and I’d even go so far as to say I will be making them again. This lemony cloud began its short life as a lemon curd, a wickedly easy thing to whisk up. This time the butter itself is melted down for the base liquid, together with the lemon juice and sugar, and the egg yolks are beaten in. Again, moderating the heat is crucial. Once the curd is made, it can be set aside until you have an audience gathered in breathless anticipation for the daring act of culinary courage that is The Souffle. Into the curd goes soft peaks of glistening egg whites, with no more careful folding gestures than you really really must to mix the two unctions. Then into a soufflé dish (or several) with it, and into a properly hot oven to work their airy magic.

And when you’re lapping up the compliments over after-dinner coffee, don’t forget to pass around the butter biscuits just to round off the meal.

To start with, we were all hungover to some degree or other, having decamped to Fallon and Byrne’s fantastic wine cellar on Thursday evening after a field trip to Drury Street’s Asian Market in the company of Lynda Booth and Matthew Albert. We had been in the Asian Market to pick up some last-minute ingredients for Friday’s feast of green papaya salad with griddled poussin; stir-fried mussels with chilli jam and Thai basil; stir-fried beef with cumin, onions and Bird’s eye chillies; green curry of halibut with pea aubergines perfumed with fresh pandanus leaves; and southern grilled prawn ‘gola’ curry. It turns out that Thursday is the day the delivery arrives from Thailand, and so the best day to pick up fresh produce. Several of the students took the opportunity to fill their baskets with other treats such as pre-prepared jellyfish (which were two for the price of one!) and 8″ granite mortar and pestles for less than €40, a worthy kitchen investment if there ever was one.

The varying degrees of hangovers actually set us up nicely for the day that was in it, which involved team work of a new level (so all that drunken bonding came in handy) as we came together as a group to pound, chop, bruise, slice, marinate, griddle, curdle, simmer, reduce and stirfry our way towards our late lunch – served with more wine, an appropriately lush and aromatic Sipp Mack Pinot Gris. By the time we were clearing the long dining table in the late afternoon, most hangovers had hightailed it, chased out of the place by heavy doses of endorphin-enducing capsaicin, the chemical that gives chilli peppers their peppery heat.

Spirits were high at the end of Week Two of this month-long course; in part because we knew we still had two full weeks to look forward to; and in part because of the fantastic day-and-a-half session we had just had with Matthew Albert (who will be back in May for the next Cooking for Life course, when he will also do a one-day Saturday class on Thai barbecues).

Anyone who’s really serious about Thai food needs to check out two books, both written by Matthew’s executive chef, David Thompson. His seminal tome Thai Food established him as the authority on the subject, and is a joy to savour, with a good 100 of its 360+ pages devoted to the historical culinary culture of this fascinating country. Last year, his follow up, Thai Street Food, was one of the foodie publications of the year.

Matthew’s session on Thai stir-fries, salads and curries demonstrated just how much work can go into making Thai food from scratch, and just what a difference that significant effort can make to the end product.

If you want to try some ambitious Thai cooking, Thompson’s books will provide you with lots of material, and Drury Street’s Asian Market with lots of fresh fodder (as long as you visit on a Thursday).

Here’s a couple of rules of thumb to tuck up your sleeve in the meantime:

• When pounding pastes, deal with each ingredient separately starting with the most fibrous ingredients first.
• Try to use a granite pestle and mortar for pounding pastes, and save the wooden ones for bruising green papaya salads.
• Aim for the smoothest paste possible for curries, but keep it coarse for stir-frying so that it is less likely to burn.
• Lots of curry pastes can be boiled in coconut milk, but to really capture the freshness of green and red curry pastes, it’s better to fry the paste.
• The best way to do this is by ‘cracking’ the coconut cream, which refers to the process of reducing the liquid until it curdles and the oil separates from the cream. Once this happens, the added paste will amalgamate with the  cream and will fry in the hot oil.
• Most tinned coconut cream is homogenised, so the best way to crack the cream is to crack the coconut itself yourself. (I hope you’re keeping up.)
• Do this by holding said coconut (or three: one fresh coconut yielding about one cup of cream) in a linen-lined palm of your hand, and whacking it repeatedly with the back of that cleaver you keep lying around for such purposes.
• Blitz the inner flesh to a pulp in a blender with some water, squeeze this through muslin into a non-metallic bowl, and set aside to settle into thin milk and thick cream.

If all this sounds like more work than craic, you could cut some corners by simply booking yourself into Nahm next time you’re in London town. Say Sawatdee Khrab/Kaa to Matthew for us when you’re there, and tell him to hurry back!

You have to be a man to know how good that feels.”

A line that, it turns out, could have as easily been spoken by a monkfish as by a songwriting legend of a Jewish poet of a beaut of a 70-something year old man (that’s Mr Leonard Cohen for those still chatting down the back).

It was the first day of the second week of school today, and – having cooked up a tropical storm of an Indian-influenced lunch (with recipes courtesy of Ananda‘s Sunil Ghai and Benares‘ Atul Kochar, both critically acclaimed and award-winning chefs in their own jurisdictions) which included naan breads and chutneys, aloo tikka, spiced yoghurt marinated chicken with lots of sides, and a ginger-spiced almond and pear cake – we settled into an afternoon demo of Tuesday’s culinary forays.

Monkfish is on the menu tomorrow, and John Wyer is generously sharing a rather clever little take on beouf Bourguignon, in which he replaces the beouf with lotte, that  fearsome looking fish known in English as monkfish.

Fish? With a gutsy red wine sauce loaded with veal jus and swimming with earthy mushrooms and fiesty onions? Bien sur! Besides being one of the meatier fishes going in terms of texture, monkfish also pairs especially well with red meat: indeed, John was pleased with previous renditions of monkfish with oxtail, and I can imagine the contrast of firm fish and melting meat working very well indeed.

Until lately monkfish was more likely to be thrown back out of the net for its rather unendearing, toothy grin than to be considered quite the catch for its toothsome texture and its ability to stand up to robust flavour pairings. Yet despite its appeal to even those diners for whom other fish can be a challenge, monkfish can remain something of a challenge for cooks who insist on treating it like any other fish.

The trick, John reckons, is to treat it like a piece of meat, or a beef steak to be specific. By that he means the following:

• Get your pan good and smoking: this tough customer can handle a bit of heat.
• Don’t be shy with the oil, you want to aim to sear the flesh and lots of very hot oil is just the job.
• Once the fish is in the pan, leave it be for long enough to allow some tasty carmelisation to crust up on one side. When that has happened, flip it, and back off again.
• Once it has browned up nicely on both sides (a couple of minutes should do it) lash the pan into a hot oven to pan-roast for another four to six minutes, depending on the thickness of each individual fillet.
• Remember that neither underdone nor overdone will do, but that while you can doctor the former diagnoses, there’s no hope for the latter.
• When you think your piece of meat, I mean fish, is getting there, remove from the oven and set aside to rest for a couple more minutes.
• At this point you can check the texture for clues: press a finger into the flesh. Does it feel light and springy, and does the indentation bounce back in a lively fashion? Sounds about cooked. Does it feel spongy and heavy and take its time fleshing back out again? It probably needs a little more heat in it.
• If it does need more cooking, you can happily finish it in the pan on the stovetop.

Hopefully with the above approach, you can avoid turning people off this versatile fish by serving them up chewy, tight, dried out fillets that are way more work to eat than they warrant.

One final curious tip: monkfish is one of the very few fish that actually improves with a little maturity. Fresh out of the water, the flesh itself is too full of water to sear nicely in a hot pan. Instead it spits water and dries out and toughens up. Ask your monger when it was caught, and allow a day or two’s reprise before putting it on the menu.

On our way we passed a joint calling itself a Risotteria, and even before we looked at the menu’s choice of over 35 different risottos, we knew that pizza – even the best pizza in Manhattan – had been trumped.

I love risotto. I love the solace it gives, especially when rendered out of an almost empty fridge and larder: as long as there’s a lump of butter, a rind of Parmesan or similar hard cheese, a couple of shallots, a source of stock and, say, a handful of dried porcini, then you know there’s a dinner worth 20 minutes of stirring on the way.

I also love risotto’s versatility. Once you master the basics, you can really play around with seasonal flavours. If spring is in the air and greens are plentiful, you can celebrate by loading up with greenery (even wilted leaves work wonders) and a sprinkling of sunshine in the form of lemon zest grated in at the end. You can keep things very simple with singular flavours like fennel, saffron or truffles, or classic pairings like blue cheese and walnuts (Ursula Ferrigno’s book, Risotto, has a chapter on different cheese combos, including ricotta, Taleggio and Fontina). Winter gourds like squash and pumpkin work great, or root veg like Jerusalem artichoke or celeriac. Or use it as a foil for luxurious flavours such as lobster, calamari or your own favourite shellfish. The  menu at Risotteria on Bleecker Street features a whole section of carnaroli based risottos with the likes of chicken, Parma ham, Italian sausage, roast pork shoulder and even roast leg of lamb.

Anyway, like most of the students, I was fairly wiped on Day Five of the Cooking for Life course, having been exposed to so much during the week. I suspect it was no coincidence that risotto featured as our main course on the menu: this one was made as a basic recipe flavoured just with onion and garlic, and then with Jerusalem artichoke purée stirred through toward the end, Gabriel cheese grated in and a girolles vinaigrette spooned into each bowl. Just the food needed to reboot spirits on a Friday afternoon!

There’s lots of recipes for risotto out there; I love Nigel Slater’s approach in Appetite which acts as a guideline rather than rigid rulebook (eg the suggestion of two handfuls of rice per person makes weighing scales redundant). Use these recipes as guidelines or as inspiration for flavours, but try to bear in mind some of the following points before you pick up your wooden spoon, much of which is inspired by John Wyer’s demo:

• Like most Italian food, risotto is about the combination and celebration of a few simple flavours, so don’t feel the need to complicate matters.
• Those simple base flavours have to be the best flavours going, and nowhere does this matter more than with the stock. If you’re going to use stock cubes, make them good ones, and MSG-free: I sometimes mix a little Kallo organic French onion stock cubes with Marigold organic vegetable bouillon powder as base for a mushroom risotto. Fresh (or frozen) stock is even better, and chicken stock will give better depth, while a fish stock of some sort is a must with seafood (the fiver you spend on Lidl’s great frozen lobsters goes even further if you use the shells for a stock).
• Arborio is the most common rice for risotto but not the only choice: many prefer to use carnaroli or vialone nano which both have a different shape and texture. Experiment to see what you like.
• Start with a big enough pan: once you sweat the onion/shallot and garlic (which you should take your time doing so they get nice and sweet), you’ll need to toast the rice to ensure it gives out its starch when the stock is added, and you’ll need as wide a pan surface as possible for this.
• If you want to add veg such as mushrooms before the stock, they’ll need to be sautéed – consider doing this in an extra pan so you’re not crowding and over-working the main risotto pan. (Jamie Oliver’s suggestion to dry-griddle porcini mushrooms adds an unusual dimenision.)
• When adding the stock ladle by ladle, make sure it’s hot going in, and keep the risotto at a gently rolling simmer.
• You can pre-prepare the risotto by cooking for a strict 15 minutes, spreading onto a tray to cool quickly and evenly at room temperature, and then storing in the fridge until you’re ready to serve. Then just bring the heat back into it gently, and complete the cooking.
• The risotto is ready when the grains are cooked but still have a nice al dente bite. It should be almost soupy in consistency. Add a little extra butter to emulsify, grate in the cheese to bind, adjust the seasoning and serve immediately.
• You could use up any slightly dried out leftovers by forming into balls with some mozzerella, breadcrumbing and deep-frying. These snacks are called suppli di riso (or arancini in Sicily). If making from scratch, aim for a drier risotto.