Jottage from Lancaster - Cooking from an App Part 2

My chosen meal for tonight was sea trout in sorrel sauce. Although I am a fish novice, even I worked out that the trout I bought wasn't sea trout, but I thought that it was some kind of trout, so that would be OK. I also remembered that on a tour of the field one rare sunny and dry day I had spotted some sorrel. So far so good. So then all I had to do is to try getting it right using the app.


First of all a trip into the field, which was still covered with a layer of rather large hailstones, even though the sun was shining encouragingly. The sorrel is still there in abundance, but looking more closely at it, it seemed to be a bit the worse for wear. I pulled out decent handfuls of the stuff and brought it into the kitchen, only to find that I had brought in a lot of grass with it, and when I weighed what was left I had about 20g of the stuff - some of which seemed as if it had half eaten by some creature that wasn't interested at all in having it with sea trout.

Only 20g of sorrel

I needed an egg yolk and a tablespoonful of cream so, in the interests of being economical I used the egg white and another egg, as well as the rest of the cream, to make ice cream. I make ice cream all the time in little individual pots. This gets round the difficulty of getting enough for one serving without defrosting the lot. And it gets round paying a vast amount of money for something which is just an egg or 2, a bit of sugar and some cream. What costs me just over £1 to make would be nearer £5 in the shops.

Home made ice cream churning

I cooked what I learnt from the packet was rainbow trout and made up the sorrel sauce, albeit with only 20g of sorrel instead of 100g or so. This was a mistake as in the end it really needed a stronger sorrel flavour but getting more of the stuff seemed too difficult. It just may be that when the weather gets a bit warmer there will be more it. And I think I may pick some for salads if it does begin a spring growth spurt. But I had come to the end of the app recipe and unlike last night, I didn't have any ingredients left over. What I did have was a thick and creamy sorrel-y sauce over some nice succulent fish. But next time I will follow the recipe and put much more sorrel in. 

Jottage from Lancaster - Fried Fish Fillets with Herbs and Lemon

I had the rainbow trout I had bought from the worst Sainsburys in the world - Morecambe - and it really needed eating. I decided to have a shot at the Fried Fish Fillets with Herbs and Lemon. I had remembered to buy capers at last and so the vital ingredients were all to hand - I even had the right herbs and a lemon. I decided to roast some carrots, baby potatoes and parsnips with it - making a nice veggie accompaniment. Hugh has had a big influence on me this - I rarely use only one vegetable and more often than not, potato takes a back seat. However this wasn't an unqualified success. I should have added some nice green veggies like leek or cabbage, which would have gone better, I think. And the herbs and lemon mix was very lemony. I'm not sure it was the best thing to have with the Rainbow Trout - it seemed to need thick fish to take up the real lemoniness of the juices. But even with these reservations it was very nice and I am pleased with myself for cooking fish twice in 2 days. I should have cooked the trout in the parcels and the haddock with the lemon and herbs and a more experienced fish cook would probably know that.

Jottage from Lancaster - Fried Fish Fillets with Herbs and Lemon

Fried Fish with Herbs and Lemon

I had the rainbow trout I had bought from the worst Sainsburys in the world - Morecambe - and it really needed eating. I decided to have a shot at the Fried Fish Fillets with Herbs and Lemon. I had remembered to buy capers at last and so the vital ingredients were all to hand - I even had the right herbs and a lemon. I decided to roast some carrots, baby potatoes and parsnips with it - making a nice veggie accompaniment. Hugh has had a big influence on me this - I rarely use only one vegetable and more often than not, potato takes a back seat. However this wasn't an unqualified success. I should have added some nice green veggies like leek or cabbage, which would have gone better, I think. And the herbs and lemon mix was very lemony. I'm not sure it was the best thing to have with the Rainbow Trout - it seemed to need thick fish to take up the real lemoniness of the juices. But even with these reservations it was very nice and I am pleased with myself for cooking fish twice in 2 days. I should have cooked the trout in foil and the haddock with the lemon and herbs and a more experienced fish cook would probably know that. I'm planning to buy more fish on Saturday and will try this again.

Jottage from Lancaster - A Tale of 2 Veggies

When Hugh calls his book River Cottage Everyday, you sort of assume that these recipes are good for, well, every day. And indeed they are in so many ways. Especially if you have fennel seeds, coriander and cumin as well as rapeseed oil and tins of white beans just there in your cupboard. (As an aside, I cleaned out my food cupboard completely yesterday and tracked down 4 bottles of wine vinegar, 3 bottles of soy sauce and an embarrassingly large amount of cocoa - don't ask). 


However, the sticking point for me isn't always the more obscure cuts of meat as we have a very good butcher nearby. It's the fish and the less obvious veg. I am a stranger to buying fish that aren't in packets (see my previous blog on this) and we don't have the big supermarkets up the road to sell us the likes of okra, durian and those big white radish things. But then I remembered that Sainsburys had opened a big new branch at Morecambe and I was sure that not only would they have a fish counter, but they would sell the amazing choice of veg I was looking for. Sainsburys do have a shop in Lancaster which isn't too bad, but it's an old branch and quite suffocatingly stuffed too full with narrow aisles added to which it's only half the size of most modern big box grocery stores. I haven't shopped there in years because I just don't like it somehow. The Morecambe one is big with wide aisles and free parking (unlike Lancaster). So off we go for a Saturday morning shop. 

'May contain bones'

It was built on the old Morecambe football ground - Christie Park. Surprisingly, the car park was barely a quarter full and the shop had a few desultory people wheeling trolleys around but it was almost empty. I went straight to the fish counter ready to be taught how to buy fish. I saw some Tilapia and I had heard of that but it was apparent that Zoe - who was our server for the day, didn't want us to buy it. I came away with a tiny piece of boneless, skinless haddock ('warning - may contain bones') and 2 rainbow trout - which I thought was really adventurous. Zoe confided in us that although she worked at Morecambe she shopped in Sainsburys in Lancaster. This seemed rather strange but it soon became apparent why she had decided to work in one store every day and yet she travelled the 6 miles to shop in another.

Not one fennel bulb - but TWO!

Celeriac

Sainsburys executives must have swept up the dross from the ruins of Christie Park and judged from the wrappers strewn about exactly how to stock their brand new store. Fruit and veg took up less of the floor space than crisps; and yoghurt selection was dwarfed by the seeming miles of aisles of beer. The shop actually had a very minimal stock of food we might want to eat - in fact much less than our tiny local Tesco. Increasingly furious about this, I flounced about desperately trying to find fennel and celeriac. I have to confess that John did find the fennel eventually but celeriac, a vegetable that is after all in season here, eluded us. Celeriac-less we ended up in afternoon in the pouring rain at Booths in Windermere buying the knobbly veg. Hugh will have us eating celeriac and fennel if not every day, then certainly every week so we will need to find some good stockists of these 2 worthy vegetables for next time.


Our little trip to Morecambe Sainsburys  ended at the till with a very pretty little girl and her dad behind us. They were buying 2 big cardboard boxes of pizza, a Fruit Shoot and a 6 pack of lager. I don't think we will be going there again.