Fish Curry

A kind of Goan Fish Curry

I call this a Goan fish curry because it is a curry, has fish in it, and, whenever I cook it, I look up these two recipes which are both titled 'Goan Fish Curry', the first by the ever knowleadgeable Anjum Anand and the second by Felicity Cloake*. 

Now, I know nothing about Goan Fish Curries apart from what these two lasses tell me.  I tend to get them confused with Thai Fish Curries and so you can call this a Thai Fish Curry, if you want.  It's a fish curry.  I like it.

Anyway, when I made it this time, I had a little bit of the paste left over from making aubergines and green beans a couple of days before; and that contains pureed fresh lemongrass, which is kind of a Thai thing.  I'm going to recreate how I made it today, but everything is very fluid.  I think we might just call today's effort Coconut Fish Curry.

Ingredients

For the paste:

• Two to three shallots or a small onion
• Three - four hearts of lemon grasss
• Two - three chillies, depending on their hotness
• A thumb sized piece of ginger (2 cm cubed)
• Five or six cloves of garlic
• Two teaspoons of freshly roast cumin
• One teaspoon of powdered coriander (more, if you like coriander)
• One teaspoon of tumeric
• Two teaspoons of garam masala

Whizz this all up in a small blender with a splash of water.  If thie ingredients given vary a little from the paste shown in the Green Beans and Aubergine recipe, that gives you some idea of the boundaries of variability. 

You'll need about half this paste for four helpings or the 500g of fish which I have used in the rest of this.

Spicing in addition

Because I felt like it, I added

• three teaspoons of black mustard seed,
• about 5 cm of cinammon stick
• a desert spoon of amchur, which is dried mango powder. 

The amchur is there to add sourness instead of the vinegar that Felicity Cloake recommends; it adds a lovely, cheek-sucking sourness, but you're definitely not going to find it in Tesco.   I usually add it to the fish curries.  Here's some pictures of the amchur, and the mustard seed and cinammon (fear my use of the Oxford comma):

 For the sauce

• One small tetrapack ( ~ 300g?) of pulped tomato, or two tomatoes grated, or half a tub of baby plum tomatoes chopped finely
• One tin of coconut cream
• One onion (or another onion)
• Coconut oil (optional)
• Corn oil or other 'flavourless' oil e.g. groundnut oil.
• Fish sauce (possibly optional, but I think it's really quite essential - I use Blue Dragon)

Fish

As Felicity Cloake says, you can do almost any white fish here.  The reason I started doing these fish curries is that in my local supermarket you regularly get packets of hake marked down from £4.00 to £1.00, so I grab a couple of packets of those and freeze them until I need them.  Here's a picture of the two packets I used today:

Actually, that's a picture of most of the sauce ingredients, only I changed my mind at the last minute and used a tin of coconut cream instead of the tetra pack. 

The two packets of fish probably come to about 500g in total.  You could use more, but if you used less then you'd probably need less sauce and should use the smaller pack of coconut cream.

Method.

Put a glug of coconut oil (if you're using it) and another glug of corn oil or flavourless oil in a saucepan, and put the saucepan on the heat. 

When the oil is well hot, throw in chopped onion and let that fry for around fifteen minutes, to let the water come out of the onion and let the carbohydrates caramelise.  The saucepan doesn't need to be on top heat for this slow frying, but the heat under the saucepan should be turned up again for the next bit if you've turned it down to fry the onion more slowly.

Throw in the mustard seed and cinammon stick (or whatever whole spices you are using) with the oil hot, and stir for thirty seconds.  Then add the paste, and turn the heat down again if necessary.  Add the spoonful of amchur a minute or so after the paste.  Keep stirring - the mixture will probably 'catch' on the bottom; that's OK because a little bit of catching adds to the flavour.  Keep stirring to loosen the catching so it doesn't burn.  If the catching bothers you, add the amchur later, as you add the tomatoes, because I think the powdered spices are responsible for the catching. 

Fry for two - three minutes or until the oil starts coming out of the mixture and all the water has evaporated.

Throw in your pulped tomato, which ever version you are using, and stir and cook for another two to three minutes.  Add the creamed coconut and the fish sauce. 

This is where I have to make a warning; the fish sauce probably is essential, but be careful not to add too much.  I nearly did that this evening, when I put in a large 'glug,' which, in hindsight, I estimate to be about 30 ml - you're probably best off starting with half that, or two to three teaspoons (15 ml).  Fish sauce is smelly, but a little bit of the type of smelly that fish sauce is enhances the flavour of the other stuff in the mix.  The smelly works best when the amount added means that your tastebuds are just under the edge of knowing it is there; add too much and you've got something that smells and tastes like bad socks.

Let this mixture simmer away for ten minutes (turn the heat down again), stirring all the time, reducing in volume.

Then add your chopped fish.  One of the problems with the cheap hake is that it needs to be checked for bones and the skin taken off.  That's not difficult; just tedious.  Here's a piece of hake half-way through the deskinning:

What I would do now, after having separated enough skin from the fish, is press down firmly on the white bit and just pull at the skin; it comes away quite cleanly.

Here's a picture of the roughly 500g of white fish skinned and chopped:

Add the fish to the tomato and coconut curry mixture.

Let the fish simmer away for ten minutes or so, so that the fish is cooked through, stirring, then turn the heat down to keep the curry warm while you cook your rice.

I eat it with a dollop of yoghurt, but then I eat everything with a dollop of yoghurt:

I would have squeezed half a lemon over, if I had remembered.

And that's your basic fish curry.  It might be Goan.  It might be Thai.  It certainly contains coconut.


*If you haven't come across Felicity Cloake yet, then you are missing a treat.  She approaches recipes with the zeal of a postgraduate scientist who likes her food and is being paid to do what she would do anyway; she writes columns in which she tries to distill the essence of a dish, and some of those columns have ended up in a boo, Perfect, which is kind of a short-cut to everything you wanted to know about cooking.  My only gripe with this book is that it actuallly doesn't contain everything you need, althouigh you certainly need what is contained within it; it needs a second and third volume to cover everything that Felicity's investigated - a lot of the stuff I've found useful (a perfect beef wellington, for example) is still only findable online.

Butternut squash, ham and feta pasties

Sorry for the long absence.  This recipe isn't particularly anti-cholesterol, except for the huge quantities of vegetables and therefore soluble vegetable fibre involved, but it does include a very large amount of sage, and I'm sure that that's good for something.

The resultant pasties are, however, very very tasty.  Very tasty, and the key to that is in the industrial quantities of sage that you need to use: don't stint on the sage!  Actually, that's pretty much my guideline for life.  

OK.  So, what you need are the following things (I'm using my usual philosophy of going for one of everything, but if you do that you might find that you have a lot of the filling left over, in which case, go for two of the packets of pastry):

Ingredients

• One onion
• One packet of feta - doesn't have to be particularly greek.  'Salad cheese' from Sainsbury or Tesco is fine.
• About 250 g of ham.  Actually, sorry, this isn't a 'one'. The cheapest (and best) way I've found to do this is to get a packet of ham trimmings or ask for ham trimmings at a deli counter.  You're going to cut it up anyway, so it doesn't matter if it's not pretty when you buy it.  If you get sliced ham from a deli, ask for it to be cut quite thickly
• One packet of fresh sage leaves.  Alternatively, go to the bush in your herb garden and cut off around 20 or so (if in doubt, cut more) of the medium sized leaves
• One butternut squash, medium
• One packet of shortcrust pastry (or two)
• Some olive oil
• An egg
• Some sea salt
• Pepper

You do probably also need some specialised equipment ie a rolling pin and a pastry brush and a potato peeler.

Method

1. Roasting the squash with the sage

Switch the oven to around 200 C and leave it to heat up while you get the squash ready.

Prepare your butternut squash.  You do this by peeling it first (hence the potato peeler). 


Using a fairly hefty knife, slice the peeled squash in half, vertically and use a spoon and a knife to scoop out all of the seeds and fibrous bits (you do need to get rid of the seeds, but don't worry too much if a couple of the fibres are left).  This can get quite messy.

Then dice the flesh into 1 - 2 cm cubes, or as near as you can.  

Put the cubes into a large bowl, large enough so you can stir the cubes with a spoon without spilling the cubes out.

Take your packet of fresh sage leaves and shred the leaves.  You do this by putting four or five leaves on top of each other, rolling them into a sort of tiny swiss roll, and then cutting strips off the roll about 1 mm thick. 

Put all of the shreds into the bowl with the butternut squash cubes.

Add a glug of olive oil to the bowl and a hefty pinch of sea salt and a substantial grind of pepper, and stir everything up so that all of the cubes are coated in oil and shredded sage. 

Tip all of this into a roasting tin and stick in the oven for 20 - 30 mins, until the cubes are soft (they'll mash if you press them but still have a little resistance) and perhaps charred at the edges (the charring adds sweetness). 

Take the roasting dish out of the oven and let the butternut squash cool.  You can do this the day before if you want.

This is what the squash will look like when cooled and put back into the bowl:

2. Making the filling

Chop the onion up finely.  Tip that into another bowl.

Chop the ham up so that it's in 0.5 - 1 cm cubes.  Add that to the bowl with the onion. 

Take the packet of feta and chop that up into 0.5 - 1 cm cubes (it will crumble - don't worry about that) and add those to the bowl with the ham and the onion. 

You don't have to chop these things in this order, incidentally; you just need all the chopped stuff in a bowl, to which you will add the now-cold butternut squash, and stir. 

Stir quite roughly so that some of the squash disintegrates, to give some sort of cohesion to the mixture.

3. Making the pasties

Dust your work surface with flour and unroll your pastry onto it.  I then use a rolling pin to roll out and  flatten the pastry slightly. 

Get a sideplate and place it upside down on the pastry and cut around it.  You need to do this as many times as you can from your one roll of pastry - I usually get about three out of one roll, and I then roll out the left over pastry again to get a fourth.

Break the egg into a small bowl or cup, add a splash of water (one tablespoon or less) and beat with a fork to make an eggy mixture.  You are going to use this to seal your pasties and also to brush onto the top to make them brown.

Take one of your circles of pastry.  Brush eggy mixture over the top side, and then add two to three tablespoons of filling mixture to one side of the circle.  Like this:

You might need to add some more eggy mixture to the edges before you fold it over.  The eggy mixture helps stop the pastry going soggy a little bit, and acts like a glue when you fold the pastry over.

 Fold the pastry over so you have a bulgy semi circle, and crimp the edges so that they are stuck together.

You can find all sorts of videos to show you how to crimp the edges.  I just use a fork and press it down quite hard.  You'll find your pastry stretching a little over the filling - that's OK.  Just try not to break it.

Put your uncooked pasty onto a non-stick baking tray (or add some baking parchment if your baking tray is crusty).  Brush some egg wash over the top,  and use a knife to cut one or two slits into the top of the pasty to let the steam escape while the filling cooks.  Repeat with the rest of your pasty circles.

Put the baking tray into the oven at 200 C / Gas mark 6 for about ten minutes, and then turn the oven down to 180 / Gas mark 4, and leave for another 25 - 30 minutes.  Make sure you check, though, and take the pasties out if it looks like the pastry is burning.

Take the pasties out and let them cool on a wire tray before eating.  They should look like this:

It is important to let them cool before eating because the filling gets very hot.  They're actually best quite cold. 

Here's another picture of a different batch:

I'm not very good at applying egg wash.

The butternut squash prepared in this way can also be used to make a brilliant risotto.  I'll blog that soon.