Fish

Seafood and pasta are just made for each other, but having developed allergies to shrimp, prawn and crab in 2020, I am having to revisit what I can eat and therefore some of our standby recipes too.  Getting that ‘seafood’ taste is relatively easy if…

Kippers are a speciality of the North East of England though other areas of the UK (rightly) claim them as their own regional food too!  A cured gutted herring is split ‘butterfly fashion’ and then cold smoked, usually over oak.  Traditionally eaten in the UK…

A very quick post!  This dish is based on an original dish by Theo Randall, we modified it to make Fettuchini with courgettes and salmon. That recipe can be found here We had been cold smoking different white fish and for this dish we used some…

We have really enjoyed exploring pasta dishes that are some distance away from those based on meat ragù although these will probably always be a bedrock of our Big Green Egg cooking.  This recipe was inspired by a dish of Theo Randall’s that we had…

This week we had too many French beans to cope with and so we needed to be a little inventive!  We therefore combined some of the dishes we have tried over the last couple of decades travelling over Europe and were delighted with the outcome.…

Just after we thought we had perfected the smoked mackerel dauphinois dish we decided to try yet another different potato!  Classically, dauphinois potatoes is made using a floury potato – but we had found the waxy potato Linda 1974 made a great tasting dish –…

The 2020 health crisis has given us time to think as well as having frightening implications on our lives.  In that thinking time we have been reconsidering amongst other things what we eat and how we prepare it.  We are trying to reduce our food…

This recipe is based on an idea for a seafood pâté that we first saw on Jamie Oliver Christmas Cooking programme in 2019. It is a very simple recipe. It can be made from ingredients normally easily available in your local supermarket but we had…

This is the second of the series of making more of your food – this way we waste less and go to the supermarket less frequently! We have some pasta which we brought back from holiday last year and a couple of jars of pesto.…

It is 2 years now since we did the Sea Bream and Sea Bass cook when on holiday in Italy.  I remember it as a delightful evening as we sat out overlooking the local valley with a herby smoky aroma wafting towards us as we…

Whilst it is often great fun cooking complex meals, there are times when very simple food just can’t be beaten.  I think this is one of those recipes.  Sautéed herring fillets!  We were doing some non food shopping in our local supermarket and the fish…

This is the first video we have included in our blogs but it seemed the easiest way to show the BGE Wok in action!  We have had the BGE Expander system for some time and have warmed to its versatility.  It certainly brings some further…

In the UK if you refer to smoked salmon, then we are usually talking about ‘cold smoked’ salmon.  This is very much the traditional way of smoking salmon – and is often referred to as the ‘Scottish or Nordic method’ in countries where ‘hot smoking’…

One of the real delights of the Big Green Egg is that it makes a really good ‘cold smoker’.  Clearly this was not the original intention but 

I know it shouldn’t, but it always comes as a bit of a surprise to see the wealth of available seafood when travelling around mainland Europe.  I suppose a lot of this surprise is because there is so much seafood caught in the UK and…

Salmon is such a versatile fish. This is a very simple hot smoked dish but one that looks rather impressive and can also be served on the wooden planks on which they were smoked for a slightly different ‘twist’. Using a cedar-wood plank is a…

One of the triggers for me first buying a Big Green Egg was the possibility of using it for cold smoking as well as all the other things the Big Green Egg excels at. It was also something that, at the time at least, very…

Having said that we had only come across grilled octopus once in Tuscany, the very next time we went out to eat – there it was on the menu.

When is a sardine not a sardine………..? Out shopping I saw what I thought were some lovely looking fresh sardines – only later when I checked the spelling of Acciughe (also often called Alici) did I realise that the sardines were in fact anchovy!!   I…

Grilled Octopus is not something commonly found in the restaurants of Northumberland!  As yet I have only come across it on one occasion in restaurants in Tuscany but perhaps we need to get out more!!  Anyway, octopus has the reputation of being tough and chewy…

Wandering around the village on Friday we found that Friday here too was fish day – at the end of the car park there was a man selling fresh fish from his van.  Well this was too good to miss!  So amongst other things we…