Fish for Thought

It's odd the ideas we now take for granted - like ordering fish on the internet but it makes abundant sense when you think how few people have access to a decent fishmonger these days and how second-rate supermarket fish counters are.

So I confess I really didn't need convincing when the PR for Fish for Thought, the new(ish) name for Cornwall-based online fishmonger Martins Seafresh asked if I'd like some of their fish to try. Including a lobster and who'd look a gift lobster in the mouth?

In fact I was rather more excited about the sardines and mackerel which were sparklingly fresh and reminded one how delicious - and healthy - these simple fish can be. (Maybe that's why they call it Fish for Thought - all that brain-boosting Omega 3?)

As we didn't want to stink out our flat with fishy smells we bought a disposable barbecue and cooked them down in the gardens below with some grilled fennel and courgettes I'd pre-cooked on a ridged grill - a simple, summery feast that made us feel as if we were camping by the sea.


The Cornish lobster was fine too although I never feel lobster is quite as good if it hasn't been freshly cooked - it seems to lose a bit of texture and sweetness in transit. But you can have it sent live if you're brave enough to dispatch it yourself.

It was much tastier than the ubiquitous Canadian Lobster you get nowadays though ironically more expensive given the shorter distance it had to travel - from £14.37 for a 0.6kg lobster to £29.94 for a 1.25kg one. At just £6.95 a kilo you could buy a lot of mackerel for that.

I'm lucky enough to have a good local fishmonger near where I live in Bristol - Mitch Tonks's Rockfish Seafood Market - but if I hadn't, and had a big enough freezer to store a delivery - I'd certainly use a service like this.

* Incidentally I noticed on the site that pollack which has been much touted as a sustainable catch is now £11.95 a kilo, the same price as haddock which has a much better flavour. Or go for the very reasonable whiting at just £8.96 a kilo.

Have you ever bought fish online and if not where do you buy it?

July’s Blogs of the Month

Blimey, how time flies! It’s July 10th already and I’ve only just got round to putting up my blogs of the month. Put it down to post-Noma excitement and frantically trying to pull together a book(ette) which I’ll be telling you more about in due course.

Gourmet Traveller
I’ve been corresponding with the anonymous Gourmet Traveller on my recent visit to Copenhagen and hadn’t realised what an inveterate traveller she (I think she’s a she) was. She eats at some good places: check out her recent review of Paris’s controversial Le Chateaubriand. A minor quibble - I'd ditch that black background. Food mags are printed on white for a reason.

Joy the Baker
I have to confess I’m not big on baking but the ideas and pictures on LA-based Joy Wilson’s baking blog could almost - almost - tempt me to take it up, if only to see what that yummy-looking avocado pound cake tastes like. She has a HUGE following: 186 comments on a wedding cake post alone. Let no-one doubt the power of the blogger.

While on the subject of cakes - and for another insight into the devotion they inspire - check out the The Cake Committee which reports on London-based get-togethers where everyone brings their own cake. It seems to have spawned several international offshoots or 'slices' as they call them, as in The Singapore Slice. Seems to be a bit of a craze in Japan too.

And don't miss a visit to Cake Wrecks, a hilarious celebration of cakemaking disasters, another site that has attracted a cult following in the US (over a million and a quarter followers on Twitter alone). Apparently all the cakes are made by professional cakemakers. Unbelievable.

A Forkful of Spaghetti
A blog which will be familiar to British food bloggers but maybe not to the rest of you and one of the first blogs I followed regularly. Helen is not afraid to speak her mind - witness this post on London’s celebrated La Fromagerie, an institution few food writers would dare to criticise. I'm personally a fan but I haven't had the experience she obviously did so good for her. Some classy photographs too.

Lunch at Noma in pictures 29.06.2010

The idea of the world's best known restaurant being a 'find' is, I admit, ludicrous but in some ways true. Every meal is a discovery at Noma (which for those of you who haven't heard of it is a modern Danish restaurant in Copenhagen, recently voted the best restaurant in the world). And eating there is such a rich and complex experience that you need time to think about it before attempting to write it up.

So here are my amateurish, snatched snaps of the 20 courses we ate 3 days ago, described as they are on the menu. Just a remarkable meal.

Bullrush and praline (you find the rushes lying on the table when you take your seat)



Sea buckthorn leather and pickled hip roses


(Savoury) cookie with lardo and currant


Rye bread, chicken skin, lumpfish roe and smoked cheese (a clever spin on a smørrebrød sandwich)


Smoked and pickled quails egg. (Note the wisp of smoke coming up from the side of the dish which billowed out of the decorated egg 'casket' as it was opened suffusing the air with the smell of smoke)


Radish, soil and herbs. The soil, of course, being edible



Æbleskiver and Muikko (spherical apple dumplings with tiny freshwater fish). Loved the way they looked like Viking helmets.


Toast, herbs, smoked cods roe and vinegar (Another riff on a Danish open sandwich topped with 'duck film' the umami-rich crisped up film that forms on duck stock)


Noma's bread which is served with 'virgin' butter and pork fat with scratchings - a fine meal in itself.


Shrimps and sea urchin, cream and dill


Beetroot and sorrel, malt flat bread (the tiny poori like puff)


Dried scallops and watercress. Biodynamic grains and beech nut. Those wafer-thin slices of scallop were possibly my favourite thing in the entire meal. Or possibly not - so hard to decide.


Tatar and sorrel, tarragon and juniper (a steak tartare you eat with your hand, holding the meat with the leaves)


Langoustine and soil, parsley and seawater


Oyster and the ocean


White and green asparagus. Pine. (The pile of green needles in the front are young spruce shoots)


The hen and the egg. A dish that you cook yourself, breaking a duck's egg onto a hot skillet, adding thyme butter, spinach, wild garlic and herbs and topping it with curls of fried potato. Ultimate egg and chips





Summer deer and snails, forest shoots and chanterelles


Sheeps milk mousse, sorrel and fennel seeds (the only dish from the menu I had three years ago)


Strawberries and straw. Chamomile and elderflower (a new dish on the menu for the first time that week)


'Gammel dansk'. Milk and woodsorrel (Gammel Dansk is a bitter herbal digestif similar to Fernet Branca and Jägermeister)


Of course photos alone don't give the full picture. The extraordinary tastes of these dishes, the homely smells coming out of the open-plan kitchen, the beauty of the building, the intimacy of the service. I'll link to other posts and features as I write them but for now that will have to do.

Except to say that the food was so light that even after all these courses we didn't feel overfull.

A more than drinkable party wine

One of the downsides of going to big events is the quality of the wine they generally serve. That's not being snobby, just realistic about the economics of catering for large numbers. Coupled with the fact that you - or at any rate, I - almost always end up drinking more than you intend to it's an almost inevitable recipe for a significant dip in productivity the following day.

But not yesterday. Because the night before at the Guild of Food Writers' awards they served a wine called Nerola from the very decent Spanish producer Torres which was not only delicious but, being organic, presumably had far fewer nasties in it than most commercial wines. I remember drinking it once in Barcelona with Asian food (can't remember why) and it certainly sailed through the assorted, mainly salmon-based canapés at the event. (It's a blend of Xarel-lo, the grape variety that is used to make Cava and Garnacha Blanca but actually tastes much more characterful than you'd expect from those grapes: more like an oak-aged Sauvignon Blanc or Sauvignon-Semillon)

Needless to say it must have been heavily subsidised (Torres was one of the sponsors of the event) as it's not what most people would consider a party wine price. The lowest retail price I could find was £8.99 from Bennetts Wine Warehouse while everywine.co.uk was charging £84.78 a six bottle case - or £14.13 a bottle which seems more than a little cheeky for a by-the-case rate. You'd need to check the vintage from Bennetts though as they might be trying to clear old stock. If I track down any other stockists I'll let you know. (And I finally have! Apparently a website called vintagemarque.co.uk will be selling the 2008 vintage from July 1st at £9.49)

Incidentally if you are thinking of buying booze for an event or to stock up for summer entertaining I'd do it this weekend. Chances are there will be a heavy hike on duty in Tuesday's emergency budget. (Well, wrong there for once!)

You can read about the GFW award-winners here.

New Voices in Food: two stars in the making

For those of you who - like me - have become increasingly depressed at the way cookbook publishing has been gripped in a celebrity stranglehold over the last few years Quadrille’s new series New Voices in Food is like a breath of fresh air. The idea is to give a platform to budding young food writers - without them having to have secured a TV slot first.

The first two titles - Stevie Parle’s My Kitchen and Alice Hart’s Alice’s Cook Book are a delight - inspiringly written and full of luscious things to cook

Parle’s is probably the most challenging. As befits a graduate of the River Café he refuses to compromise on ingredients which occasionally leads him down some pretty obscure alleys, cooking with ingredients that even I as a food writer would find tough to source. Typical meals and recipes are a romesco sauce with three kinds of paprika (one agrodolce which I’ve never seen) and a glass of Albarino (like his mentor, the late Rose Gray, he obviously believes in using decent wine for cooking) and a Malaysian breakfast that he just happens to rustle up for friends who’ve popped over from Paris. There’s certainly no dumbing down here.

That’s not to say there isn’t some thoroughly useful information. I love the step-by-step illustrations of how to prepare an artichoke and how to cut a mango (there are, refreshingly, no glossy photographs in his book and few in Hart’s) and the focus on less common ingredients make this an inspiring read for the more experienced cook. If Elizabeth David had back-packed round the world you feel this is the book she’d have come up with.

Hart’s, by contrast, is a more conventional cookbook but that’s certainly not to damn it with faint praise (she has, after all, a degree in physiology and neuroscience and this year’s must-have accessory, a camper van). She writes with great energy, verve and humour, making you want to try every one of her simple, delectable recipes. (Top of my list currently are the roast carrot houmus and raspberry custard cake, the latter part of a ‘Holiday Lunch for Six to Eat Outside’.) There are also some additional pages of quick ideas which are as good as the full recipes - a generous bonus.


If I had to crudely categorise them I’d say that Parle was the new Sam and Sam Clark (of Moro fame) and Hart the new Nigella - which sounds faintly derogatory until you remember what a joy her first book How to Eat was. I already know they’ll become great friends in the kitchen. They should be in book shops by the beginning of next month.

Why South Devon crab is special

My first clear memory of crab was eating crab sandwiches in a pub in Winchester with a boyfriend 30-odd years ago. I can’t remember the boyfriend but can remember the sandwiches (story of my life . . . ) and I’ve been hooked ever since.

And although I could tell good crab when I came across it I had no idea why - until this week when I went to a lunch at Mitch Tonks’ Seahorse restaurant in Dartmouth organised by South Devon Tourism who are trying to promote this delicacy as an alternative to the ubiquitous cream tea.

They say - and obviously would - that the brown crabs that are fished off that part of the coast are the best in Britain but they have some basis for the claim. For a start they’re bigger. There is a minimum landing size for crabs locally which is 16cm across for males and 15cm for the females or ‘hens’ which also can’t be lifted if they’re full of eggs. They're also particularly sweet.

Crabs are in season between April and November but at their peak in the autumn when there is a higher proportion of brown meat - a rich source of Omega 3.

But best of all they’re sustainable: there’s plenty to go around or would be if 60% of it didn’t go abroad, mainly to France and Spain. It should ideally, of course, be eaten on the spot, freshly cooked which removes the need for pasteurization.

The campaign is also trying to get across - slightly less persuasively - how easy it is to pick a crab. Mitch was also on the BBC’s Countryfile this week opening a crab on a beach and cracking the claws with a large pebble but I can’t honestly see many visitors to the area doing that.

Anyway this is how we had it for lunch (above, with a gorgeous great glob of homemade mayonnaise) - and the next day at the South Sands hotel down the coast (below) which I’ll be posting about separately. I love crab in recipes like linguine but you just can’t beat it served simply. Except maybe in a sandwich . . .


I attended the lunch as a guest of South Devon Tourism.

June’s blogs of the month

Only four this month. I’ve been slacking on my blog-spotting . . .

Eat like a girl
An overdue mention of Niamh Shield’s Eat Like a Girl - not that she really needs one: she's one of the UK’s best known food bloggers and was recently listed by the Times among their 40 bloggers who really count. I’m not sure how she finds time to work as she’s always popping off to have lunch for her new Posh Lunch Club feature, or going to tastings or writing up recipes or running a market stall or masterminding last year’s famous Blaggers’ Banquet but she’s a great girl.

Love and a Licked Spoon
A wry, sharply observed, self-deprecating blog from food writer and editor Debora Robertson who I think I’m right in saying once worked for what is now Waitrose Kitchen (née Waitrose Food Illustrated) You won't find this sentence on their pages: “Cake: the shortest measurable distance between now and then, something about its comforting sweetness pulls memories from their recesses better than any truth drug. Cutting into a big, soft slice is the culinary equivalent of ‘Once upon a time…’ And that’s the real joy of blogs

Recipe Rifle
The strapline of Recipe Rifle is ‘getting recipes wrong so you don’t have to’ but that doesn’t really do its creator, journalist Esther Walker, justice. She doesn’t get them THAT wrong for heaven’s sake - or at least no more wrong than the rest of us - and besides she writes prolifically and brilliantly, in a non-stop stream-of-consciousness that would be worth reading even if you weren’t into cooking at all. She also seems to have quite a short fuse which must make for an interesting domestic life. Her husband - as of a month or so ago - is the self-confessedly choleric restaurant critic Giles Coren to whom she is touchingly devoted.

Taste Languedoc: a blog about the wines of the South of France
I feel slightly embarrassed I didn’t know about this blog until the other day, not least because we have a house in the Languedoc and its author Rosemary George as well as being a fine wine writer is a neighbour - well 20 minutes away which almost counts as foreign in French village terms. Anyway it is - exactly as it says - all about Languedoc wines and winemakers and very well-written and authoritative it is too.