Surf & Turf BBQ: Lamb burgers, Sea Bass & Prawns with Watercress Salad

When we looked out of the upper window of our house on Sunday afternoon we saw three things in common with all of them: laundry on the line, mowers running and barbecues out. Ok, so we didn't quite get around to getting the mower out, but we did do the laundry and wheel out the barbecue.

We went to the supermarket on the way home from the pick-your-own farm, primarily for cat food and compost baggies, but couldn't resist a couple of special offers on organic lamb mince, line-caught sea bass and large atlantic prawns. Oh yum. We were salivating already as we drove home, catching the smell of everyone elses barbecues on the way past.

The skewers are easy: take prawns, thread on skewer. Done. Major mistake? Using pre-cooked prawns. They were still tasty but dried out quite a lot on the coals.

Lamb, Redcurrant & Mint Burgers
I got the idea for these from the counter at waitrose, where they sell them pre-made. As we'd just picked some redcurrants at the farm these burgers came back to mind so I thought I'd give making them a go. I made it up as I went along but the results were really good.


I put a handful of redcurrants together with a handful of chopped mint, some salt and pepper, 200g of lamb mince, plus onions and garlic, pre-fried with a little sugar to help them brown and make them slightly caramelised. Squished up by hand and formed into patties, these were perfect.

Asian Style Steamed Seabass
This one's easy, just whisk up a couple of dashes each of light and dark soy sauce, the juice of a lime, a splosh of sesame oil and another of rice wine vinegar, a big dollop of grated ginger, some chopped coriander and a red chilli. 

Keep tasting it and adding the ingredients until it tastes good to you, if it isn't acidic enough add more lime or vinegar, if it's too acidic add more oil, if it isn't salty enough add more soy. Tweak away until you like it, that's why you're making it.

Lay the fish in a foil parcel and spoon over the sauce, wrap it up tightly so it won't leak and it's good to go on the barbecue.

Watercress, Herb, Blue Cheese & Walnut Salad

I love watercress and I love herbs, luckily I already had a lot of both. I mixed the watercress with the following, scavenged from the garden: chives, basil, oregano, marjoram, coriander, spinach, sorrel, parsley, fennel and nasturtium leaves.

Make up a dressing from balsamic vinegar, first cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, spoon this over and then top the whole salad with walnut peices and little peices of blue cheese - whichever is your favourite, but a slightly sweeter type goes best.

I garnished it with a nasturtium flower and borage and coriander flowers, because they're incredibly pretty and edible too.

Fishesto

So the fridge is looking a little bare, as it often does towards the end of the week. Luckily I had a couple of sea bass fillets in the freezer, left over from my last order with The Fish Society. Their frozen fish really isn't any different, in taste or texture, to the fresh product and has the added bonus that it stays nice and fresh in the freezer until you're ready for it.

All I had to do was move the fillets into the fridge this morning, so they could defrost over the course of the day. I put them in a colander over a bowl as they recommended, to stop fish juice dripping all over the place.

As I had some pesto left over from breakfast on Monday (A&C's pesto is fantastic) and some heirloom tomatoes in the fridge, I thought  I'd pan fry the sea bass and serve it with a tomato salad and a dollop of lovely pesto. Easy peasy.

This tastes a lot better than my awful photo makes it look!

Fish is really easy to cook but hard to be confident about; it tastes horrible if you overcook it and the texture is nasty when half-done. 
Still, as I'm finding out, the trick to a lot of meat and fish cooking is just having the pan pretty insanely hot before you put the food in. I have found that most often my fish seems to be cooked pretty spot-on after about 4 minutes frying on the skin side and 3 minutes on the flesh side, but that is just a rough estimate.

The bread and tomato salad recipe I've mentioned before: quartered or eighthed tomatoes mixed with finely diced red onion, toasted bread cubes, parsley, basil, salt, pepper, vinegar/lemon juice and olive oil, chilled in the fridge before serving. 
It's a very quick and easy, filling little salad with lots of flavour and goes with lots of different foods. It's good if you aren't in the mood for a stodgy carb side dish but still want a bit of chewy, starchy goodness.

Do give The Fish Society a go if you can, they are a very sweet company, do their best to provide ethically sourced fish and are efficient to boot. Here is what they have to say about their lovely wild sea bass: "All our sea bass is caught by a single Cornish fisherman, with rod and line. He fillets and freezes them for us within 24 hours, and then he delivers them all the way up to us in Surrey (usually taking his wife via Ikea, on the way). What a romantic tale!"

I do realise that this looks expensive, I chose sea bass and that's a pricey fish; it's just one of my favourites so I treated myself.
I also chose to buy it from this company because the quality of the fish itself is absolutely fantastic. If I want fish for the freezer, I'm better off buying it from them (where it's frozen directly after the boat gets in) rather than buying fish to be delivered fresh and then freezing it in my domestic freezer.
If I want to eat sea bass on a Friday (my A&C delivery day) then I'll order from them for a cheaper price. 

The same dinner would also have been awesome with mackerel, which is much cheaper than sea bass and just as easy to buy ethically. Abel and Cole sell a big fat dinner's worth of mackerel for just £3.99.

Hooray for fish!

Mayonnaise and a thing that goes well with it

For many years I have been scared of making mayonnaise, it's a very stressful condiment for me. What if it split and I wasted all that expensive olive oil? What if I simply couldn't do it, I would spend the rest of my life branded a terrible cook and a kitchen fraud! The fear was so great that making mayonnaise even made it onto my new years resolutions last year...

A week ago I was staring into the fridge, trying to come up with a meal for a friend of mine, who doesn't like red meat when I only had venison and pork in the house. I found a packet of halloumi nesting behind the butter and decided that roast med veg stacks with pan-fried halloumi and a basic bread salad would do the trick. But what could I do to make the meal a bit more special? Aioli!

After a failed attempt at getting it to work in the food processor I plunged ahead with the traditional method: a hand whisk. 
One egg yolk, a blob of mustard and slowly slowly add a bunch of olive oil - I think it worked out as about half a pint. I did feel like I was going to end up with one monster hulk arm and one cramped up claw hand at one stage but the emulsification did happen and after that it was just a case of mixing in a minced clove of garlic that had been mashed up with a big pinch of salt and some lemon juice, voila - aioli mayo.

I put two quenelles of aioli (okay okay, it sounds pretentious but it really does look nicer than a big messy blob on the plate) next to a stack of aubergines, courgettes, peppers, red onion and asparagus that had been roasted in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. I lay the cooked halloumi slices on top and surrounded each stack with a few spoons of bread salad - this is quartered tomatoes mixed with finely diced red onion, toasted bread cubes, parsley, basil, salt, pepper, vinegar and olive oil, left to chill in the fridge for an hour.

The whole meal took very little graft, didn't cost much and everyone cleared their plates. The mayo lasts at least a week in the fridge too, so we were able to pair it with some other meals as well. Give it a go, mayo really isn't as scary or difficult as it sounds and it is rather satisfying to demystify something that we usually pay someone else to make for us.

Links
For those meals when you don't have time to make your own mayo, you can find the best commercially produced version I have ever tasted here.