Mediterranean Sea with added Bass

I went flat out at work on Friday having woken extra early to cadge the bus and train in which gave me the opportunity to make some early headway at the office, as well as allowing me to have a tasty beer or two after working hours had finished. The reason for the post-work beer was it was an old school friend's birthday. He is currently a student at one of the universities in the city where I work and he had decided on a night out on the Friday.

We went in one pub called the University Arms, which I had last drunk in as a student when I studied at the university myself nearly a decade earlier. I'm not a great one for looking back these days, however the walk up to the University Arms was an exception to this rule, as heading towards the pub I felt a little like the ghost of a student from semesters that had long since vanished into history. However when we entered the pub through the double doors I felt the intervening decade slip away and the memories of afternoons in there drinking after lectures and seminars came stampeding back to the front of my mind. The other punters in the pub were an eclectic bunch from fresh-faced youngsters who had not even finished school when I was last a student, a mature student with a laptop and a pint of something hoppy and a bloke in a tweed jacket and fedora combo who looked stoned.

Beer, whisky and chilli flowed through the late afternoon and early evening and during the celebrations individuals from key stages of my friend's life were present at different times; his parents and gran who were all there at the beginning and have always been there, two people from his original university days in the noughties, someone from his current degree and me from his schooldays. We spent plenty of time reflecting on nearly twenty-two years of drink, decadence, walking encyclopaedias and comedy before I barrelled off into the night suitably stuffed with alcohol as I zig-zagged home to my bed via the train and the bus.

Yesterday morning I woke with a slightly thick head that was cured by high-fibre cereal, boiled eggs and paracetamol. After a day of pottering and avoiding the heavy rain showers when walking the dog I settled on a suitable evening meal and the recent hot weather made me think of a Mediterranean recipe, which was roasted Sea Bass with vegetables. 

The album of choice was a throwback to the 1980s in the shape of Tears for Fears' excellent Songs from the Big Chair, containing the brilliant singles "Shout" and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" amongst others plus the expressive and powerful "Head Over Heels" and "Listen" not to mention a photo of the duo sporting fashionable (for the time) mullets. With all these obvious plusses what's not to like about the record?

The first job in preparation of the meal was to take a red onion, peel it and then slice it widthways. Next I diced an orange pepper and five cloves of garlic. I added them all to my Le Cresceut dish and fried them lightly in sunflower oil and black pepper with the lid on the Le Cresceut for about half an hour. The reason I did this was because although I was going to subsequently roast them with the Sea Bass there was a risk, if I did not pre cook them, of the vegetables being too crunchy and getting burnt in the oven.

In the meantime I sliced a whole lemon widthways into six or so slices and cut eight cherry tomatoes in half. Once the vegetables in the Le Cresceut were cooked I used them plus the lemon and tomato as the bed on which the Sea Bass was to lie. I was able to make this happen by taking an ovenproof dish and lining the bottom with foil onto which I poured sunflower oil and then spread the lemons, tomatoes and the vegetables from the Le Cresceut on the dish evenly together with a sliced up chilli I had grown previously.

Next I put two Sea Bass fillets on top of the dish and garnished the fillets with sliced green olives and sprigs of Rosemary and Thyme from my garden. I cooked it all on Gas Mark 6 ( or 200 degrees for electric ovens and 180 degrees for electric fan ovens) for half an hour. When I removed it from the oven I was greeted with the flavoursome smells of Thyme, Rosemary and Lemon. The pre-cooking of the vegetables was a sensible move as they were soft because the sunflower oil had kept them from burning and becoming crunchy. The Sea Bass flesh was tender and full of protein, a perfect meal to revitalise me after Friday's excitement and the meal was rounded off by a side of steamed new potatoes.

Finished off with the new potatoes.

The bed that they lie on- the fillets on top of the lemons, tomatoes and the vegetables.

Soup for the Weather

Yesterday was a good day. It had been one that began with a quiet walk early on with the dog in the nearby woods and then a great carvery at a well-known local pub which was followed by another walk that, although it took place in a familiar part of the world, contained much that was exciting and new.

Although the sun had shone a lot during the walk, the rain had arrived in miniature monsoons that bathed the leaves on the trees bordering the old railway tracks and parkland that the walk took in. This meant despite the time of year I knew that a good quality soup with plenty of body was in order.

Having already had some Game Soup as a starter prior to my carvery I concluded that a similarly substantial soup was needed for tea. I decided the make a sausage soup using a batch left over from a recent indoor barbeque.

The playlist for this weekend was an eclectic mix of mainly and/or introspective music and included Scott Walker (both the avant garde version and the easy listening version), ...and you will know us by the trail of the dead, Suede, R.E.M and at the time I was preparing the soup, Roy Harper. Harper is man who is his own genre as nobody has quite combined the worlds of progressive and folk music in the way he can. The two albums of his that followed each other on the playlist at this time were 1992's Death or Glory and 1988's Garden of Uranium. The former was a fighting response to his partner of some years running off with someone else and includes the track "Miles Remains" a reflective acoustic piece with a soaring quality that is one of the best tributes out there to late Jazz Giant Miles Davis. Garden of Uranium meanwhile is a worthy effort too despite having some songs undercut by synths that although appealing for nostalgic value to a child of the 80's like me, were probably a touch disconcerting for the fans who had been following the great man since he started out in the 1960s.

The Le Cresceut was back in action for today's dish and I started by slicing up finely four carrots, a white onion, two sticks of celery and two cloves of garlic. I added these to the Le Cresceut with some sunflower oil and three ounces of dried parsley. I stirred the ingredients well and put the lid on the Le Cresceut before cooking the contents of it on the hob on a medium heat for around twenty minutes while stirring the food occasionally to stop it from sticking to the bottom of the dish.

While the vegetables were cooking I prepared the sausages. They had been on ice in the freezer since the indoor Barbeque and had been defrosting on my worktop for the last twelve hours. I used a separate knife from the one I used to prepare the vegetables and cut the sausages into narrow slices. I then fried them in a frying pan for fifteen minutes on a medium heat while turning them regularly.

I have a bit of a phobia about undercooked meat; it stems from a time when I accidentally consumed on a night out some raw chicken, which on the face of it looked cooked, and got food poisoning that de-railed me for a good week. This was the reason I pre-cooked the sausages prior to throwing them into the Le Crescent as I wanted to be sure they were cooked properly first before adding them to the vegetables. After fifteen minutes the sausages were ready and I dunked them in with the vegetables in the Le Cresceut. Once the vegetables had cooked for the twenty minutes they needed I added half a pint of vegetable stock and simmered the food for another ten minutes to ensure the carrots were softened as I did not want them al-dente.

After this I added a tin of Canelli Beans to the food and after warming it through for five minutes the soup was ready to eat.

This is one of those soups that is more like a casserole or a stew than a soup, which after a nine and a bit mile walk that featured almost every type of weather known to British meteorology bar snow, was a perfect dish to have as the last meal of the day. The Cannelli Beans and the sausages gave it a rich edge while the parsley, onions and the celery gave a flavour to it that was powerful in the best possible way.

Freshly cooked, crisp sausages simmered in parsley with vegetables and beans- the perfect match for the unpredictable British Weather