Grown-up fish fingers with caraway dipping sauce.

Love the odd shallow-fried recipe from Ottolenghi.

Ocean trout and soba.

 

Delicious AND easy. Recipe here.

They were staring at me with their little eyes.

 

Not usually a fan of anything deep-fried but this salad kind of talked to me and i figured how much oil can these suckers really absorb?

We had a small hiccup to start with as green mangoes appeared not to be in season and the perfect replacement the Asian Grocery man so confidently sold us, which resembled a fat, short cucumber with elephantiasis, tasted like bark. Coles saved the day with a bright yellow paw-paw, which although not ideal for julienne-ing, made the salad one of our best yet.

While i was out on the rescue mission, Don took it upon himself to mortar and pestle the dressing ingredients (using his large & in charge biceps to assist our pov mortar and pestle), inadvertently using Thai basil in place of mint. Oh oh. Not cool. I cannot deal with straying from any recipe. So we had a  small disagreement (we only ever have disagreements about over-ambitious cooking when guests are around and being drunk and playing Zombie computer games in the middle of the night), which resulted in Don begrudgingly starting the dressing from scratch because he feared i wouldn't talk to him for the rest of the weekend if he didn't

The flavours were so unbelievable, that after about the second mouthful, i was able to ignore the eyes staring blankly at me and even enjoy the crunch of the deep-fried fishies with their tiny skeletons and funny little guts. And by the end of the course, my resentment of the 1kg pack of Whitebait (smallest size i could find) consuming precious space in our freezer had all but gone.

Day off means Domus gets gourmet affair for Friday night fodder.

One of our favorite sidies is this Green Bean Salad With Sesame Dressing. The reason we love it so much is because it has tahini in it. Mmm. It's meant to have asparagus in it too but we didn't have any handy and given the cleaning lady hasn't been in the hood for two weeks, the toilet didn't need additional offensive smells thrown into the mix, so we went without.

To make it blanch 250g green beans and 2 bunches of asparagus and throw them onto a lovely red plate. It's important to have contrast. It tastes better. Then stir together 2 tbs of soy sauce, 1/4 cup tahini, 1 tbsp of caster sugar, 1 tbsp of rice vinegar, 1 tbsp of finely grated ginger and 1 tbsp of water. Drizzle it over the greens and then top with 2 thinly sliced Asian eschalots. Boom. Fabulous side dish.

Then to go with this, i picked out a dead easy Asian-Style Fish Bakes in a Bana Leaf from the June 2010 delicious mag.Couldn't be assed hunting down the banana leaf so we wrapped it in baking paper and foil instead. Not as easy on the eye, but whatever. The recipe is not on the website yet and i can't be fagged tying it all out so i'll update this post when i can give you a link. I'll give you the ingredients. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out how to smack it all together. We always have quarter cups of different home made curry pastes in the freezer so we don't have to drag out the cook time by making paste as well, or worse yet, need to buy ready-made shit. Ew.

Serves 2

• 1 large fresh banana leaf

• 800g whole snapper cleaned (get the fish man to do this. Cleaning/scaling a fish sucks balls)

• 1 tbs Thai red curry

• 2 tbs coconut cream

• 2 tbs finely shredded ginger

• 8 kaffir lime leaves thinly shredded

• 2 tbs coriander springs

• 1 long red chilli sliced on angle

• 2 cups steamed rice to serve

* Coriander and chilli get sprinkled over the fish once it comes out of the oven.

Another freaking good looking/tasting meal AND i have picked up a new trick to get rid of the fishy smell from my oven. 2 drops of vanilla essence in half a cup of water and put it in the oven for an hour at about 150. It's toilet spray for the oven.

Thanks for the quickie Donna

Nothing like an easy steamed Barramundi on a Sunday night.

The sacrificial tail.

Sydney from Brisbane, who was holidays in Melbourne, popped in for a bite to eat on Wednesday night. Given she's currently not so into meat, i decided to have a crack at a fish.

The plan was to do 'Tom's lemon snapper swimming in a chilli and ginger sea', from the Master Chef cookbook. The recipe called for four 375g baby snappers, however South Melbourne market only had 2kg Snappers, the toothpicks i had on hand weren't robust enough to hold open this monster's gut flaps (to make him look like he was swimming) and the thing wouldn't fit into all the fry pans I owned, even if i cut him up, so I had to improvise.

Instead, we stuffed his insides with wedges of lemon, chopped spring onions, julienned ginger, chilli, sliced garlic, olive oil, lemon juice and light soy and popped the bad boy into the oven for 45 mins. We had to bend his tail back and slide it up the side of the oven as he was too big to fit flat! Abracadabra. We had dinner.