Fish, fish fish!

First of all I want to share with you the stunning fish soup that Sam made a few nights ago (recipe from Robuchon):

We ate this with toasted gruyère on baguette slices:

Then there was the amazing meditteranean baked fish with vegetables, also by Sam, also from Robuchon (he's getting really into this Robuchon book - I'm all for it!):

And last night I made a Moroccan fish tagine, flavoured with paprika, garlic, cumin and lemon and cooked with carrots, onions, tomatoes, potatoes and peppers.

So all in all it's been a pretty fishy couple of weeks - no bad thing, if you ask me.

Pea, lettuce and lovage soup; beetroot and walnut salad with garlic yogurt dressing; tomato and chilli jam - and Scrabble...

There have been so many great meals lately that I've built up something of a backlog. First there was the tomato and chilli jam that I cooked the other day - the first successful chutney I've ever made, sweet as heaven and spicy as hell, and I already couldn't imagine cheese, not to mention life, without it:

Then there was the delicious pea, lettuce and lovage soup that Sam made last night, with lovage from our herb garden and stock from the other night's chicken:

Which was followed by a beetroot and walnut salad with a dressing made from yogurt, lemon juice, garlic and chives:

We ended that meal with a wonderfully fungal Tomme de Savoie, complemented by figs and the tomato and chilli jam. Or rather, we thought that was the end - until I hit on the idea of making a dessert out of the surplus lemon icing from the carrot cake I'd made for our tea party with the neighbours on Sunday (just mascarpone, lemon and sugar, so really a lemon mousse), topped with crumbled up homemade ginger biscuits, also leftover from said tea party:

It was one of those evenings where the food had been so good that I couldn't bear for it to end. Afterwards we played a game of Scrabble (our first in German), which is still on hold halfway through because we were too tired to finish it before bed (I'm currently winning by a long way, having cleared my rack on my very first go with 'reintun', simultaneously making 're' off the end of Sam's 'Wege' for a whopping 62 points...)

Tonight Sam was working and a girlfriend of mine came over - she brought pork medallions, which we grilled and served with a garlic, mustard and cream sauce, and bacon (the Germans don't half do good pork products), which we fried up with red cabbage and chestnuts - delicious.

Soy chicken wings...and the ones that got away

There have been so many great meals lately - and I've not been able to photograph any of them because my camera was bust! Wild mushroom and basil lasagne; hot tropical fruit salad; veal escalope with lemon and sage; plum cake. Here, at least, are a few that I did manage to photograph: aubergine parmigiana (the first meal I cooked in our brand new oven), soy chicken wings with rice and kohlrabi (tonight's dinner), and the first roast chicken in our new home. On the menu for tomorrow night, when we have friends coming for dinner, is coleslaw (the real thing), wild mushroom and sage risotto, and tarte tatin (because we currently have more apples than we know what to do with). And we're working on getting a vegetable box delivered.

Grilled mackerel with pea mashed potato

The second meal I cooked for myself and my husband in our new home in Cologne (the first was an Indian meal of dal, rice and spiced vegetables which unfortunately I forgot to photograph for this blog). Our oven still hasn't been installed yet, so every meal has to be cooked on the hob until then. I'm not complaining, though, because the inconvenience of not having an oven is (for the moment at least) far outweighed by the luxury of having a proper gas hob after putting up with a shitty electric one for three years. We are doubly lucky because gas hobs are extremely rare in Germany - so much so that there is no mains gas supply and we have to get ours from a canister that needs replacing every couple of months. (Electric hobs being so vastly inferior to gas, this suggests a conclusion I don't want to draw about German attitudes towards food and cooking. What on earth do they do in restaurant kitchens, I wonder?)

I consulted Hugh (that's Fearnley-Whittingstall, needless to say) on how best to achieve a crispy skin and nicely cooked flesh. Unfortunately by the time I consulted him I'd already slapped the fish on the griddle, so all I discovered was that I'd done just about everything wrong! (I used olive oil, which is too volatile to be used at such a high temperature, and I oiled the pan when I should have oiled the fish. Oh well - I know better for next time.) But I did make use of a nice little tip from Jamie Oliver, which is to season the fish well 15 minutes before cooking and leave it out. That way, the salt draws water away from the skin and stops the skin from sticking to the pan. It worked for me - the skin was lovely and crispy.

At least I got the temperature and timing just about right (medium-high flame, 5 minutes on each side), and the end result was completely delicious despite my errors. For a sauce I simply fried some sliced garlic for a minute or two in the still-hot oil after I'd taken the fish out, then mixed both garlic and oil with some lemon juice and torn basil leaves and poured the lot over the fish. With mashed potato and peas as an accompaniment, this was a memorably good dinner.

Honeymoon delights

Just returned from a glorious honeymoon in Liguria, Italy. Haven't cooked a thing for almost a month, but here are one or two photos of some of the culinary highlights of the holiday: grilled prawns (the most gigantic, juicy and delicious I have ever had), fritto misto of fish, and a plateau of frutti di mare. The first two were both from a wonderful restaurant recommended by a chef friend of my husband's called La Bitta in the small town of Fezzano, near La Spezia. It was everything a restaurant should be: inexpensive, unpretentious, and serving simple, fresh, delicious food cooked with skill and love. I strongly recommend it to anyone visiting the region.

Having eaten nothing but seafood for the last two weeks I'm rather looking forward to the rack of lamb which my husband is marinating downstairs in the kitchen as I write! But that's for another post.

Grilled salmon with teriyaki marinade, rice, broccoli

Bit of a cheat putting this on here, really, because I didn't make the marinade - it's out of a bottle. I was going to make it - I got the soy sauce, mirin and brown sugar out the cupboard - only to find that nestling behind them was a bottle of Tesco ready-made teriyaki marinade! I haven't been in much of a cooking mood lately - too many other things to do - so I decided to go with it. I did fry some ginger along with it though.

Sardines, roasted peppers and lemon ice cream in NYC

I've been staying with family in New York for the last 10 days and cooking dinner for them every night. It was boiling hot, so I made lots of summery salady things, trying to minimise oven and hob use because it was like a furnace in that kitchen. Made lots of lovely things, only some of which we got round to photographing. In these photos (in a random order) we have:

- Tilapia fillets cooked en papillote with white wine, garlic, lemon and herbs, served with cannellini bean and roast vegetable salad

- Grilled sardines

- Tomato, basil and cucumber salad

- Mashed cannellini beans with rosemary and olive oil; tzatziki

- Roasted red and yellow peppers with garlic, olive oil and balsamic

- Homemade lemon ice cream with blueberries and strawberries

I also made a killer Boston corn chowder, but the photo didn't come out well.

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