It’s good to keep up with foods from around the globe and new trends, it can inspire you to get creative at home…when recently in Lisbon we discovered this great place:
The Time Out market – a fantastic selection of pop-up stalls serving all sorts of delicious dishes, combining Portuguese cuisine with influences from around the world. My favourite was the sushi bar serving fresh local sardine and cod…
Mind you there were some fresh fish that were a little scary!
Met a very interesting bunch of folks this weekend, quite a collection of well-travelled people from all corners of our great planet with some amazing supercalifragilistic creative styles. What talents lie waiting beneath all our skins that we have not discovered yet? It is never too late to discover them. This one talented lady, Mickayla – mother of 4, has discovered she has a talent as a silversmith. How do I know she is talented? I have seen her amazing jewellery of course!! If I had my way I would not be sharing all this information online I would commission her just to work for me! But as I believe sharing is caring I guess I better let you in on how to get hold of her:
Now back to BBQs, here is a little number for you:
Fantastic Fish BBQ Salsa: Trout is a trendy fish to eat at the moment, earthy flavoured, rainbow by name, a fresh water fish full of goodness and very good source of nutrition and one of the least expensive environmentally friendly fish on the market. Lovely barbequed in a wire rack or cooked in foil with rosemary and garlic. Or try some flavoured olive oil such as chilli. Serve with a wonderful fresh salsa: 2 papayas, coriander, grated ginger and fresh mint delicious!!!
This week we have been making Omusbi (rice balls) they are great fun to make and easy for the children to do.
And here’s some of the “interesting” ingredients we’ll be using…
Most young children wake up snuggled to their favourite teddy but Valentis (chef extraordinaire) woke up surrounded by lobsters. Why? Because Valentis’s father is a fisherman and at the age of six he would take Valentis in his boat fishing with him. As Valentis slept in his hammock his father was busy catching lobsters. The noise of the clapping lobsters used to work well as an alarm clock to wake him up! I think I will stick to the traditional way of waking with an alarm clock and a very kind husband’s lovely coffee.
To prepare a lobster for cooking: when I was training as a young commis chef we were taught to use a sharp knife to dig straight into the lobsters head right between the eyes killing it instantly. For me this appears to be a far more humane way, others prefer to immerse them in boiling water.
Cooking lobster at Valentis’s grill bar: You can cook lobster in many different ways; in Halki they do a wonderful lobster spaghetti where all of the lobster, including the shell, is used to produce a most delicious flavoured sauce which soaks into the spaghetti making a most sumptuous, flavoursome meal. However I prefer mine grilled and at Valentis’s grill my lobster was cooked beautifully. The Greeks say that the meat in the lobster’s head is the sweetest. My lobster was also full of beautiful pink roe which tastes most delicious, a sweet delicate flavour, with a smooth light texture. The lobster was served with a sauce in a separate bowl of lemon and olive oil with oregano . Now lobster is one of my most favourite foods to eat and this was the best lobster I had tasted in 15 years. It was fresh Halki lobster, not brought in from another island, and was like a fresh fruit handpicked from a tree, ready and ripe to eat. It was truly divine and a thing of (unusual!) beauty to look at.
Valantis has an exciting new menu. Livanio Roditis, a chef with 24 years experience and specialising in fish, has joined them. He also kindly taught me a few things about his local fish dishes.
The Scorpion fish comes from the family of the world’s most poisonous fish. As it’s name suggests it has a sting – sharp spines coated in venomous mucus. However properly prepared this fish makes a delicious Greek fish soup rich and creamy. Red snapper and Sea Bream (which tastes a lot like Sea Bass) are two other fish prevalent in the Dodecanese.
Livaniosroditis@gmail.com