Forever Summer (13 page)

You can easily use any fish, chopped into meaty chunks for the curry itself (I’ve even gone hideously inappropriately for salmon in my time), though I tend to use whatever firm white fish I can lay my hands on; or just replace the fish with juicy, peeled uncooked prawns.

I’ve given a choice of amount for the tamarind paste: go by taste; it’s up to you how evocatively pungent you want this. I happen to have a sour, rather than a sweet tooth, and this is where I indulge it. And I always keep a bottle of Benedicta’s Touch of Taste fish bouillon concentrate in the house (which I buy from the supermarket, along with the tamarind paste), but you could crumble in half a fish stock cube if you prefer.

1.25kg firm white fish

salt

2 teaspoons turmeric

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

2 medium onions, halved and cut into fine half-moons

2 long red chillies

4cm piece fresh ginger

pinch ground cumin

1 x 400ml tin coconut milk

1–2 tablespoons concentrated tamarind

1 tablespoon liquid fish stock

Cut the fish into bite-sized chunks, put them into a large bowl, and rub with a little salt and 1 teaspoon turmeric. Heat the oil in a large, shallow pan and peel and tip in your fine half-moons of onion; sprinkle them with a little salt to stop them browning and then cook, stirring, until they’ve softened; this should take scarcely 5 minutes.

Cut the whole, unseeded chillies into thin slices across (although if you really don’t want this at all hot, you can deseed and then just chop them) and then toss them into the pan of softened onions. Peel the ginger and slice it, then cut the slices into straw-like
strips and add them, too, along with the remaining teaspoon of turmeric and the cumin. Fry them with the onions for a few minutes.

Pour the tin of coconut milk into a measuring jug and add a tablespoon of tamarind paste and the fish stock, using boiling water from the kettle to bring the liquid up to the litre mark. Pour it into the pan, stirring it in to make the delicate curry sauce. Taste and add more tamarind paste if you want to. And actually you can do all this hours in advance if it helps.

When you are absolutely ready to eat, add the fish to the hot sauce and heat for a couple of minutes until it’s cooked through, but still tender.

Serves 4–6.

LEMON RICE

As you can – almost – see from the previous picture this is a beautiful match for the Keralan fish curry. But all you need to know is that it tastes as wonderful. This way of cooking rice is very low stress, and the rice will keep, with a lid firmly clamped on it, without going sticky or overcooked for quite a while, so you don’t need to live by the skin of your teeth.

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

250g basmati rice

half teaspoon turmeric

half teaspoon dried mint

juice and zest of 1 lemon

approx. 500ml water

half teaspoon salt (or more to taste)

1 tablespoon black mustard seeds

Choose a saucepan with a close-fitting lid, and heat the oil gently before adding the rice. Stir it around to get a good coating of oil and add the turmeric and mint, stirring to mix. Squeeze in the lemon juice (reserving the zest) and add the water, so that it covers the rice by a good couple of centimetres. Stir in the salt, put the lid on tightly, bring it to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and continue cooking very gently (on a heat diffuser if you’ve got one) with the lid on until all the water has been absorbed. This should take about 15 minutes. And if, when the rice has cooked, the pan is still a bit waterlogged, take it off the heat and replace the lid with a tea towel draped over to absorb the remaining water. It will sit quite happily like this if you need it to for about 30 minutes or even longer, and then you can fluff it with a fork, season it with some more salt if it needs it, and then turn the rice out into a bowl.

While the rice is cooking, toast the mustard seeds by heating them for a couple of minutes in a dry frying pan, then set aside. When you’ve turned the rice into its bowl, sprinkle these, along with the grated lemon zest, on top.

Serves 4–6.

GRILLED TUNA WITH WASABI BUTTER SAUCE

Tuna is really the fish equivalent of steak and, in truth, you are eating it here as if it were beef, with a Japanese-mustardy beurre blanc. You can grill the tuna, fry it, cook it on the barbecue, as you please, but whichever method you use, make sure you cook it only briefly; you don’t want the tuna to lose its melting Carpaccio-red interior completely.

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

150ml white wine

2 shallots, finely chopped

1 heaped teaspoon wasabi paste

1 tablespoon dark soy sauce or tamari

250g unsalted butter, cold and diced into 1cm cubes

salt and pepper

1 bunch fresh coriander, chopped

6 tuna fillets, approx. 150g each

Heat the grill for the tuna while you get on with the sauce.

Put the vinegar, wine and shallots into a small saucepan, and simmer to reduce the liquid to 1–2 tablespoons. Strain this reduction, and put it back into the pan adding the wasabi and soy. Then over a very gentle heat, whisk in cubes of cold butter, one at a time, so that the sauce emulsifies. Be careful that the sauce doesn’t boil as it will split; just go slowly so that each cube of butter is absorbed before the next one goes in, though once most of the butter’s in, you can actually add a couple at a time.

When all the butter is whisked in, check the seasoning and add the chopped coriander.

Quickly grill the tuna and serve the coriander-flecked butter sauce in a jug, or bowl with a spoon in it, alongside. All you need to eat it with is a bowlful of steamed, leggy tender-stem broccoli.

Serves 6.

RED MULLET WITH SWEET AND SOUR SHREDDED SALAD

We are in rose-tinted heaven here: the pink glint of the red mullet’s skin flashes like a Barbie-mermaid’s tail against a salad of shredded pawpaw, red chilli pepper, carrot and spring onions, sprinkled pinkly with chopped, raw red-skinned peanuts.

If you can’t get hold of green pawpaw, I wouldn’t worry: most pawpaws are sold so unripe that you can slice them up as they are. Only when they are properly, juicily, coral are they unusable here.

There is something about the spiky, spicy sourness of the lime and fish-sauce dressed salad, and its nutty crunchiness, that makes this intensely refreshing and, if I may say it, unfishily inviting. It’s also a doddle to make, and I can tell you now you will be making it again and again, no question.

2 small red mullet, either whole or filleted, with the skin left on

for the salad:

4 tablespoons Thai fish sauce

juice of 1 lime

1 teaspoon caster sugar

50g raw peanuts in their red husks, chopped

50g (or a quarter) green pawpaw, finely julienned

2 small carrots, peeled and finely julienned

2 spring onions, finely julienned

small bunch fresh coriander, chopped

1 long red chilli, deseeded and finely julienned

Slash the fish if they are whole, or lay the fillets on some foil, and either barbecue, or cook the fish in a hot oven at 200°C/gas mark 6 for about 10 minutes. Remove to a serving plate.

Combine all of the ingredients for the salad and scatter and pour it over the cooked fish if they are whole. If you are using fillets, spread a bed of dressing and lay the fillets on top.

Serves 2.

THREE FISHES WITH THREE-HERB SALSA

You can take the girl out of the eighties, but you can’t quite take the eighties out of the girl. Far be it from me to call for a return to la nouvelle cuisine, but this is a chunky
hommage
to the seafood medleys of yore. You don’t have to adhere to the three-fish rule if you don’t want to; you don’t even need to use the fish I specify. Any fish will do here, but certainly the coral, deep pink and white-ish mixture specified looks, and tastes, wonderful.

2 salmon fillets, approx. 150g each

2 swordfish fillets, approx. 150g each

2 tuna fillets, approx. 150g each

3 tablespoons olive oil for frying

for the three herb sauce:

125ml extra virgin olive oil

zest of 1 lemon, juice of half

3 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped

2 tablespoons capers preserved in vinegar, drained but not rinsed

half teaspoon dried oregano

half teaspoon dried mint

salt and pepper

Make your herb sauce by combining everything in a bowl, whisking it together rather like a salad dressing. Leave it to macerate for at least 15 minutes for the flavours to develop.

Cut each fillet of fish into three pieces so that you have longish strips. Fry them in the olive oil beginning with the salmon as it will need the longest, then the swordfish and finally the tuna.

Arrange them on a large flat plate so that the different fish intermingle, and drizzle the herb sauce over the top. Serve the remaining sauce in a bowl alongside.

Serves 6–8.

LEMONY PRAWN SALAD

The dressing for this works along the same principle as the dressing for the
squid salad
: you peel the lemon and purée it, this time with spring onion, garlic and oil, in the processor. The cos lettuce is torn into bite-sized chunks and tossed in this thick lemony dressing; the prawns are quickly fried, laid hot on top and sprinkled with chives. This is one of my favourite summer lunches, or indeed suppers, of all time. I don’t normally portion food up individually, but this is how I make this: one person, one plate.

1 lemon

2 cloves garlic

1 spring onion, roughly chopped

2 tablespoons groundnut oil

5 tablespoons olive oil

3 cos lettuce hearts, or 1 large cos lettuce

375g medium raw prawns, shelled and deveined

small bunch chives, chopped

Peel the lemon by cutting the tops and bottoms off then sit it upright on one end, and cut away the zest and pith from top to bottom with a sharp knife, turning it with your non-cutting hand as you go. Chop it roughly and put it in the processor with one of the cloves of garlic and the spring onion and blitz. Open, scrape down, then stick the lid back on and, with the motor running, pour the groundnut oil and 3 tablespoons of the olive oil down the funnel into the processor. Roughly tear the cos lettuce into pieces, toss with this dressing and divide between two large plates.