Bream with crispy polenta, oregano pesto, chorizo and broad beans

Fish

I love fish, I really do, and I don’t eat nearly enough of it. I think that this is typical of many people, and sadly is resulting in the decline of fishmongers on the high street. This is slowly destroying the connection between the animal source and the finished dish, and it is worrying that future generations might purely associate fish (or meat for that matter) with a bland coloured lump in a vacuumed plastic packet. 

When visiting a decent fishmonger, not only do you get to see the origins of what you are about to eat, but just the spectacle of the different colours, shapes and sizes is inspiring in coming up with what to cook. Many times I have been to a fishmongers with something in mind, only to be completely thrown by seeing something else that looked good. This just does not happen in the monotonous aisles of supermarkets, and even in the bigger ones with fish counters, the fish often look in a sad and old state.

Buying fresh fish can be quite expensive, and I always look at it as a bit of a treat. Fish like monkfish, turbot and brill are for very special occasions only. But in any good fishmongers there should be a wide selection of different fish on offer, to suit all budgets. Mackerel and mussels for example are massively underlooked and cheap, and are really easy to turn into fantastic dishes. 

Fish selection is important, and there are a few signs that you should look out for to make sure what you buy is fresh. Firstly and most obviously, fresh fish doesn’t have that overwhelming fishy smell. Other good signs of freshness are full, non-sunken eyes and red gills.

Bream with crispy polenta, oregano pesto, chorizo and broad beans

The joy of cooking with fish is that you don’t need to do a lot to it to make it taste great. Although in this recipe the polenta takes time to prepare, the rest is pretty easy and quick to assemble. I always make too much of the pesto and of the polenta, as both make great leftover meal components. 

I have chosen to use bream in this recipe because it is delicious, and the crisp skin and soft white flesh go really well with the other tastes and textures in the dish. Very similar to sea bass, it is readily available, sustainable and fairly cheap. I prefer to buy my fish whole and fillet them myself, but you can get the fishmonger to do this if you like.

The key to getting the skin on the fish lovely and golden and crispy is to make sure that you use a non-stick pan, and that it is hot when the fish go in. Always put the fish skin side down and carefully use your fingers to push down a little on the fillets for the first 5-10 seconds to help prevent the fillets from curling. 

Serves 2 as a lovely summer meal

Ingredients:

2 bream fillets, scaled and pin-boned

1 knob of butter

For the polenta:

1/2 a red chilli, finely chopped

1 large clove of garlic, finely chopped

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, finely chopped

75g uncooked polenta (the quick cook variety)

400ml water

For the pesto:

1/2 bunch fresh oregano, finely chopped

1 lemon (juice only)

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

4tbsp pine nuts, toasted

2tbsp pecorino cheese, finely grated

Extra virgin olive oil

For the broad beans:

300g broad beans, podded and shelled

1/3 ring cured chorizo, sliced into 1/2cm squares

First of all, prepare your polenta. Gently sweat down the garlic, chilli and thyme in frying pan on a low heat for a couple of minutes until cooked, but watch out that they don’t colour.

Meanwhile, bring the 400ml of water to boil in a medium sized saucepan.

When the chilli, garlic and thyme has cooked and the water has boiled, add the polenta to the water in one slow pour, using a spatula to stir at the same time. The mixture will start to thicken immediately, and once the lumps have been stirred out, return to the heat and cook for 4-5 minutes. 

Once the potenta has cooked, stir in the cooked chilli, garlic and thyme and season well. Pour the mixture into a lightly greased, rectangular shaped container (I use a tupperware box) and leave to cool. During this time it will solidify, and once cold, cut the polenta into two rectangular shapes that will support the fish. 

While the polenta is cooling, make the pesto. Mix the chopped oregano, garlic, pecorino and lemon juice into a small bowl. Crush up half of the pine nuts roughly and add, along with the whole ones. Pour in enough olive oil to make the mixture quite loose, and season well. Tasting at this point is important, you may want to add more of any of the ingredients to make it just right.

Pre-heat the oven to 180ºC, and take your fish fillets out of the fridge at least 15 minutes before you plan on cooking them

Heat a medium non-stick frying pan to a medium-high heat, and add a good glug of vegetable oil. When hot, add your polenta rectangles and cook on each side until they go crispy round the edges. Transfer to a baking tray and put in the oven to keep warm.

At the same time as the polenta rectangles are frying, heat a frying pan or saucepan on a medium heat with a small amount of vegetable oil, and add the chorizo. When it starts to crisp a little, add the broad beans and turn the heat to low. Season well.

Once the polenta is in the oven and chorizo and beans are slowly ticking over, it is time to cook the bream fillets. Put a large non-stick frying pan on a medium-high heat, and add a good glug of vegetable oil.  When hot, season the fillets well and place them skin-side down in the pan, holding them down carefully for about 10 seconds. Cook the fish for 4-5 minutes on the skin side, checking the colour of the skin occasionally and adjusting the heat. While this is happening, use a metal teaspoon to baste each fillet continuously with the hot oil in the pan, running the hot back of the spoon along the fillets as you do. This will cook both sides of the fish at once, and will give the flesh a lovely pure white colour and really soft texture, while the skin protects the flesh from the direct heat of the pan. After 4-5 minutes the skin will be crisp and the flesh will be cooked, so remove the pan from the heat and add the knob of butter.

To plate up, place the polenta in the middle of the plate, and scatter the chorizo and broad beans around it. Carefully place the fish skin side up on top of the polenta, and drizzle a tablespoon of the pesto on top of each. You are now ready to go!

The best thing about this dish is how flexible it is. If you can’t get bream, any white fish will work, although try and choose one which has the skin still attached. Similarly, the oregano can be swapped for traditional basil, and the chorizo for bacon. 

Restaurant Review - The Island Queen, Islington

This review is short, and is mostly here to express my delight at stumbling into a pub at 2.30pm on Saturday and finding that a brunch menu was in service. As I work on Saturdays until the early afternoon, I often miss out on weekend breakfast trips, so I was very pleased to find that I could still have my breakfast experience well into the afternoon and accompanied by a much needed pint. 

I was also sitting in a very lovely pub. The Island Queen is tucked away in the maze of well-to-do streets between the bustle of Upper Street and the canal, and you wouldn’t know it was there unless you were looking. Well furnished and welcoming, it is the ideal place if you are looking to spend an hour of two somewhere relaxing reading the papers.

The atmosphere is the thing that makes this pub work, the place has a busy bustle to it whilst being serene at the same time. The staff were charming, and happily topped up my pint when I asked. The prices for drinks on the other hand are hideous, and I will always shudder before parting with the best part of a fiver for a pint. Especially one not quite filled up properly.

The menu looks like good pub fare on paper; eggs benedict, traditional and vegetarian breakfasts along with wild mushrooms here and potted something there. In execution however it was a slight disappointment. I was still overjoyed at my breakfast, but I think that I would have been just as overjoyed at receiving the same in an average greasy spoon. My sausage and black pudding had long been forgotten, to the point that ‘well caramelised’ had flown well and truly out of the window. The egg was basically deep fried and hard yoked, and the beans were just beans. With the build up from the menu, I had hoped for something that didn’t resemble Heinz. The saving grace was the addition of bubble and squeak. I really don’t know why it doesn’t appear on other menus more often, when most of the time when cooked at home it’s the best bit.

This all sounds a bit doom and gloom, and perhaps unfairly as I ate it all, and everything tasted like a breakfast should. It was just that it didn’t seem to have been made with very much care. It is a nice pub, and the other food that people were eating also looked lovely (I had moments of food envy), so I would tell others to give it a try. The menu certainly looked nice, and on its day I’m sure (and hope) it’s just as much a treat as the surroundings you sit in. 

Flour and water, pizza and bread

Flour and water

Bread making, and a lot of baking in general makes great use of simple ingredients, and often ones that you have stored up in the cupboard. It does take a little longer than going to the shop and buying a loaf, but the results are often far better, and you can personalise each recipe to exactly how you want it. There is also nothing like the smell of freshly baked bread wafting around the house, and that first buttered slice while still hot is immense. 

I’ve always loved the idea of getting into baking bread regularly, but never managed to get around to it for one reason or another. Recently, quite by accident, I made my first loaf since I was at primary school by using the tail end of some pizza dough.

Following the recipe for Jamie OIiver’s pizza dough one night, I ended up with loads of the dough left over. More out of interest that intent, I kneaded some olives into it and threw it into the oven. After roughly guessing the oven temperatures and heat, I eventually pulled out the cooked dough and hey presto - bread! It basically looked like a cooked slug, with little shape, but once cut open and smeared with butter it was lovely. 

Since then I have got a bit of a baking bug, and every time I make pizza, I always make enough extra dough for a couple of loaves on the side.  

Pizzas

The price of a takeaway pizza at the moment is quite frankly shocking, with a large one being around £16.00. I often have a craving for a big, dirty pizza, but with a bit of planning ahead, making it yourself is really easy and much cheaper. You always seem to have to wait about 45 minutes for a delivery, but once the dough is made and proved, you can roll and cook a pizza at home in a fraction of that time. I like to make the dough and sauce the night before, so it’s all ready to go when I want it. 

Once you know how to make the dough, you can be as creative as you like with the sauce and toppings. I find that keeping to a couple of ingredients is better than pilling on a bit of everything, and also that a tower of toppings will not cook evenly, so moderation is best. 

Ingredients:

For the dough:

Makes 2-3 large pizzas

500g strong bread flour or ‘00’ pasta flour

50g uncooked polenta

325ml warm water

1 sachet quick action yeast

glug of extra virgin olive oil

1 tbsp caster sugar

large pinch of salt

For the tomato sauce:

2 tins chopped tomatoes

1 shallot

2 garlic cloves

1 red chilli

1 tsp dried oregano

1 tbsp tomato puree 

2 tbsp sugar (or to taste)

salt and pepper

A selection of cheese and toppings of your choice. For this post I went for buffalo mozzarella, parma ham, mushrooms, red onion, chilli and rosemary.

To make the dough, mix the flour, polenta and salt in a large mixing bowl.

In a jug, measure out the warm water, and stir in the yeast, sugar and oil. 

Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture, then knead everything together with you hands. Knead it really well for 5-10 minutes, adding more flour or water if necessary, until you have an elastic ball of dough that springs back when you poke it with a finger.

Give your mixing bowl a quick clean and place the dough back in it. Add a very small amount of olive oil and coat the outside of the dough - this will help it not stick to the sides as it rises. Cover with cling film or a tea towel and leave near to the oven, or in a warm place, until it has doubled in size (about 1 1/2 - 2 hours). 

While the dough is rising, make the tomato sauce. Soften the shallot, garlic and chilli in a large frying pan, then add the chopped tomatoes, tomato puree, oregano and sugar. Season and bring to the boil before letting reduce on a medium heat, stirring often, until it has thickened up. Allow to cool.

Once the dough has risen for the first time, break it into balls for the amount of pizzas that you are making - 200-250g will make a large pizza. Knead the balls a little and then place each one in a separate smaller bowl which will allow them to rise again by double. Add another small coating of oil, cover and leave these for another hour. This may all seem like a bit of a faff, but it makes the rolling of the dough so much easier when you come to it. 

After the portioned dough has risen again, roll each dough ball out to the size that you like it. I prefer a thinner pizza that will crispen in the oven and that has more room for toppings.   Wrap the rolled dough around the rolling pin and transfer to a sheet of greaseproof paper.

Pre-heat your oven to 230ºC.

The pizzas are all ready to be topped now, so spread a thin layer of your sauce on first before adding your cheese and other toppings. 

To cook, place your pizzas and greaseproof paper directly onto the shelf of the really hot oven. Cooking times vary on the thickness of the pizza and amount of toppings, but should be done in 6-10 minutes. Just keep checking every couple of minutes until everything is to your liking - I prefer my cheese starting to brown and the edges nice and crisp.

They are ready to serve as soon as they come out, but at this point you can also add things like rocket, sprinkled hard cheese such as parmesan or pecorino, and a drizzle of olive oil. 

As well as being great for a night in, they are also useful when cooking for lots of people, or getting bored kids involved. 

Bread

The above dough recipe can also be used to make fresh white bread. It is really simple, and a good starting point if you are interested in making bread. The finished loaf is delicious and soft, and impossible not to eat whilst still warm. It tastes like a basic white bread, but you can make it more interesting by adding various ingredients before you bake it. For this recipe I have made an onion, garlic and thyme bread.

Makes 1 very large loaf.

Ingredients: 

1 pizza dough batch from the recipe above

3 medium onions, sliced

5 garlic cloves, skins on

2 tbsp fresh thyme leaves

2 tbsp olive oil

Pre-heat the oven to 180ºC

Firstly, make your dough as instructed above and allow it to rise for the first time.

Meanwhile, roast your sliced onion, garlic cloves and thyme in the olive oil in the oven for about 30 minutes or until the onion is soft, do do not allow it to get crispy. When cooked, drain on kitchen paper and allow to cool before peeling the skins from the garlic and roughly chopping. 

Turn the oven up to 220ºC

When the dough has risen, instead of separating into balls for pizza, leave as a whole. At this point, knead the chopped roasted vegetables into the dough, adding a little more flour if it appears too greasy. Now stretch the dough into a flat, rectangular shape, and then fold in the corners tightly to make a round ball. Turn the dough over - this fold is the base that the loaf will sit on. 

You can now use your hands to shape the loaf to how you want it. Remember that it is going to rise again, so try and keep the dough in as tight a shape as possible. Place on a floured baking tray, cover loosely with cling film and allow to rise by 50 percent.

When risen again it is ready to bake. Place in the middle of the hot oven, and throw a small glass of water in the bottom of the oven to create steam. Bake for 20 minutes, before reducing the heat of the oven to 190ºC for 25-30 minutes. 

Once baked, leave to cool slightly before digging in with lashings of butter. 

This bread keeps really well for a few days providing that it is kept wrapped up. 

I’ve made this bread a few times, and although it’s great for ease, I now want to experiment with more complicated bread recipes. I recently bought Dan Lepard’s excellent new book Short and Sweet, which contains a wide range of bread recipes, along with loads of other baked goods. His style of writing and the layout of the book is really easy to understand, and I cannot wait to get started with some more advanced bread making. 

Bakeries

If making your own bread seems like a bit too much work, or you don’t have time, then I would thoroughly recommend bread bought from these two bakeries:

The Flour Station - Supplying restaurants and delis, as well as having their own market stalls, they produce really lovely artisan bread and pastries. Their Tortano Crown potato bread is amazing.

The Spence Bakery - This tiny little Stoke Newington bakery sells out of bread nearly every day. I always try and get one of their multiseed loaves when I’m nearby, but every loaf (and sausage roll) we’ve tried from them has been delicious.

Purple sprouting broccoli with bacon and poached egg

As my last post was quite a long winded recipe, I’m keeping this one quick and easy. 

Purple sprouting broccoli with bacon, gruyere and a poached egg

After a recent visit to Brighton to see my parents, my Dad sent Katie and I packing with a bag filled with allotment greens to play with. This recipe took advantage of the purple sprouting broccoli Dad gave us, and is perfect for putting together on a work night. Purple spouting broccoli is in season at the moment, so if you haven’t grown any, you should be able to get hold of it easily enough. If you can’t get hold of any broccoli (you will - it’s everywhere), asparagus will work just as well. 

Poached eggs are a great finishing touch to loads of dishes, and it works brilliantly here with the yolk running through the broccoli and ending up soaking the in bread at the base. Any bacon is fine, although use a sweet cured variety if you can - Waitrose do a particularly good one with maple syrup.

Serves 2 for breakfast, lunch or a light dinner.

Ingredients:

2 large handfuls purple sprouting broccoli, trimmed

4 rashers sweet cured bacon, sliced into small strips

80g gruyere cheese, finely grated

1 shallot, finely chopped 

2 large cloves of garlic, one finely chopped

1 tbsp fresh thyme leaves, finely chopped

2 eggs

2 thick slices of seeded bread

knob of butter plus a little for the bread

2 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp white wine vinegar

Pre-heat the oven to 180ºC and bring a saucepan of salted water and the white wine vinegar to the boil.

Heat a frying pan on a medium heat and add the butter and olive oil. Add the shallot, the chopped garlic and thyme and cook for a couple of minutes before adding the bacon. 

When the bacon starts to crisp, add the broccoli and fry gently until it has softened slightly, adding more butter if necessary and seasoning - I like the finished broccoli to have quite a lot of crunch still, fresh and full of flavour, but if you prefer it softer, you can boil or steam it for a couple of minutes first.

While the broccoli is frying, put the slices of bread in the toaster. When it pops up, rub the whole garlic clove all over one side and spread with butter. Place the toast on a baking tray.

When the broccoli is cooked, heap a large pile onto each slice of toast, and sprinkle liberally with the gruyere and cracked black pepper before placing the baking tray on the middle shelf of the oven. 

All that needs to be cooked now are the poached eggs. Holding the eggs as close to the water as possible, gently crack each egg into the boiling water, and immediately turn the heat down a little to a simmer - this will prevent the eggs from breaking up. Check these after two minutes and they should be cooked. 

Assembly is simple, take the broccoli heaped toast out of the oven, which will have gratinated as the eggs were cooking, and top with a poached egg. Season each egg with salt and pepper and it’s done! Serve with a simple green salad for a fresh yet comforting meal.

I’m a food obsessive. I love cooking, eating, and talking about food (talking about food a lot - sorry!). This blog takes in all of this; I will write about things that I’ve cooked and review the food I’ve eaten. 

The recipes that I post will vary from simple day-to-day recipes that I’d normally cook on a work night, to more complicated recipes when I have a bit more time on my hands. The vast majority of food posted on here will have been cooked in my tiny home kitchen. 

Pasta

Pasta is something that I will never tire of eating, from dried pasta boiled with a quick sauce and loads of cheese, to making fresh pasta from scratch. I was given my parent’s pasta machine a few years ago after it had lived on top of their cupboard unused, and it is something that I couldn’t be without. It looks great in the kitchen, making the surface look almost workbench like, and I find it really therapeutic spending an hour rolling the pasta sheets out before cutting them to the desired type and leaving them in various places around the flat as it dries out. Although there is definitely a place for dried pasta in a lot of dishes, freshly made pasta with a few simple ingredients is  amazing. 

My first blog recipe is:

Ravioli stuffed with mushrooms and goats cheese with wild garlic, crispy parma ham and a brown sage butter. 

This is a great starter, especially if you’ve got friends coming over  - although it is fairly time consuming, it can be made well in advance and takes only a couple of minutes to assemble. It’s very seasonal with the wild garlic, but if you can’t get hold of it then any other leaf like spinach or rocket will do. . 

Serves two, with spare pasta for leftovers.

Ingredients:

For the pasta:

As a general rule, pasta requires one egg per 100g of flour:

300g ‘00’ flour

3 medium eggs (plus 1 for eggwash)

A small drizzle of olive oil

Salt

For the mushroom and goat’s cheese filling:

2 tbsp olive oil

knob of butter 

3-4 large portobello mushrooms 

30g dried porcini mushrooms

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped 

1 shallot

a handful parsley, finely chopped

60g soft goats cheese

For the sage butter:

100g butter

6 sage leaves, left whole

To finish:

2 slices parma ham

Sage leaves, left whole

Wild garlic leaves

First of all, make your mushroom filling. Put the dried porcini in a bowl and cover with boiling water for 30 minutes. Once it has soaked, remove from the water, rinse slightly and chop finely.

Put your portobello mushrooms in a food processor and blend until finely chopped. Put the olive oil and butter in a large frying pan, then add the shallots and garlic and cook slowly until softened. Now add both types of mushroom and cook on a medium heat until all of the liquid has evaporated. Season well and stir in the chopped parsley and set aside to cool down.

While the mushrooms are cooking/cooling, make your pasta by putting the flour, eggs, a good pinch of salt and olive oil in a food processor, and blitz until the mix looks like coarse breadcrumbs. Tip everything out onto a floured surface and knead together until the dough has an elastic texture but is not sticky. Knead in a little flour if necessary. Wrap in cling film and put in the fridge for half an hour to rest.

While the pasta dough is resting, make the crispy sage leaves and crispy parma ham. For the parma ham, place the slices on a greaseproof-papered oven tray and put into an oven at 180 for 8-10 minutes. For the sage, put about 1cm of oil into a frying pan on a high heat and drop the sage in for about 10 seconds until crispy. Remove and drain on kitchen roll. 

After half an hour, remove the pasta dough from the fridge. Using your pasta machine, roll the dough through until it’s at it’s finest setting and you are let with a long sheet - you want the finished ravioli to have nice thin pasta. If you don’t have a pasta machine - you can use a rolling pin but it needs to be really thin - it’s hard work!

Cut the sheet in half and you are ready to construct the ravioli.

On one sheet of the pasta, add a tablespoon of the cooled mushroom filling, and sprinkle a small amount of the goats cheese on top of the pile before finishing with a little pepper. Repeat to make as many ravioli as needed, leaving about 10cm in between each pile. Once finished, whisk the spare egg in a bowl and brush it all over the pasta in-between the piles of filling. Now carefully place the second pasta sheet over the first, and press the two sheets together around the piles of filling, trying to release the trapped air before sealing. Using a large pastry cutter, cut out the individual ravioli and make sure edges are all sealed. These can now be kept on floured greaseproof paper until needed. 

When you are ready to cook the pasta, fill a large saucepan with salted water and bring to the boil, and heat a frying pan on a medium/high heat. Drop the ravioli into the boiling water, and put a timer on for two minutes. While the pasta is cooking, heat the butter in the frying pan. When the butter is frothing, add the sage leaves (not the ones you crispened up) and season, and when the butter turns a brown, almost burned colour, it is ready. 

To serve: arrange the wild garlic leaves on the plate, then top with the cooked ravioli. Top each ravioli with a crispy sage leaf and place a couple of large pieces of the crisp parma ham around the pasta. Finish up by spooning a little of the brown butter over the dish and it’s ready to eat!

This might all seem like a lot of work for a small dish, and you can certainly cut time out by buying the ravioli, but it’s very satisfying once everything is on the plate and it tastes great. You can also make a lot more pasta in one go, cutting the sheets into spaghetti or pappardelle and letting it dry out. It will keep for a few weeks after and be great for quick dinners.

Restaurant Review - The Spaniard’s Inn, Hampstead

Now a quick review from the weekend. Finding a decent place for a Sunday roast is a very difficult thing, and over the last couple of years my girlfriend Katie and I have been trying to search out the best one locally. It’s quite easy to find a pub that serves a decent roast, but one that leaves you with total, contented satisfaction is quite hard to find. I find that this is mostly because places concentrate too much on the meat, leaving the rest of the dish a fairly average selection of roast potatoes and a few greens that haven’t had that much care put into them. I guess that this is partly due to the logistics of serving a large quantity of roast dinners quickly, compared to making one at home where everything is timed for one sitting. But some pubs do manage to make the mark of a great sunday roast. 

The Spaniard’s Inn in Hampstead came quite close - but not quite. After an ill advised midday walk through the heath in mostly pouring rain,  slipping into the mud on quite a few occasions, we reached the very welcome warmth and ambience of the Spaniard’s Inn. As with most decent pubs at lunchtime on a sunday, it was very full, and with no queuing system in place, we spent two uncomfortable rounds standing around with the other vultures waiting for a table to come free (I would definitely book a table in the future). Once we’d finally nabbed a seat, the service was quick, and soon laid in front of us was exactly what we needed after all our trudging through the heath. 

I opted for an alternative to the roast menu with the haddock and chips, whilst Katie went for the roast beef. My fish was the best that I have had in a pub for a long while, being well seasoned and with lovely crisp chips and home made tartare. The only downside was the mushy peas, which were  very dry and came in a very slight portion. But that’s nitpicking really -  I enjoyed it a lot.

Katie enjoyed her roast beef, although it still didn’t hit dizzy heights (currently topped by the excellent Lion and Lobster in Brighton). Whilst the meat was good, and got bonus points for having cauliflower cheese on the side, it was the other things that didn’t quite match - the yorkshire pudding was a bit dry and the vegetable selection was a bit random with a heap of carrot and then only a small amount of greens. 

Again, not major things, and I would definitely recommend the Spaniard’s Inn. It’s just the small things - a bit of lacked attention and slightly rude service (a waiter actually shouted ‘service’ at me when i was slightly in his way!) that made it not quite hit the mark. The search continues.