The Unexpected Trout, and How To Approach It

As I mentioned in my last post, my good friend S was kind enough to phone me up and offer me a spare, VERY freshly caught, trout.  Even more kindly, she actually delivered the glorious offering!  It was fresh as.  Still stiff as a board, clear and bright of eye, and in need of very little in the way of being buggered about with.

Being an entirely unexpected trout, I also didn't have obvious in the cupboard with which to tart it up - which was very good news as I may otherwise have been tempted.

So here, in a nutshell, is what I did with it.  I pass this information on in case you, too, should ever be the recipient of an unexpected, but by no means unwelcome, trout.

First, you will need to gut your fish.  This is neither difficult nor unpleasant.  I know that may come as a surprise, but provided that your fish is nice and fresh, fish guts just aren't that smelly.  Disappointing, eh?!

So, incision down its front, hand in, guts out.  They'll be attached to the fish up the top end, so you can snip them out with scissors, or just slice with a knife (but mind you don't nick your knuckles - it's a bit tricky to see what you're doing up in there, if you don't want to ruin your fish).

Clean out the fish by giving it a bit of a wipe with a clean cloth or some kitchen towel.  It shouldn't need more than that.  Remember, fish guts: Disappointingly unsmelly.

I would recommend bagging them up, though, and tying the bag firmly before binning, as although they're not that smelly yet, once they've sat in your dustbin in the sunshine for a couple of days, they will MING!  I hate smelly dustbins, so if there's a bit of a wait until bin day, I tend to freeze anything potentially ghastly, and chuck it straight out on bin day.  At least, that's the theory.  In practise, I regularly stumble across bags of frozen fish guts, chicken skin, old bones...  But anyway, I digress (makes a change... or not).

At this point, I put the oven on (about 180c) and Maddy and I took a stroll up the garden.  We're not in full flow yet, but there's still plenty of fresh stuff growing out there to be going on with.  We picked flat-leaf parsley, chives, fennel tops and wild garlic.  Together with a whole sliced lemon and a knob of butter, these filled our fish very nicely.  A rummage in the fridge produced some celery, so that got chopped up and scattered about, too.

Then it's the papillote bit, which sounds complicated.  Here's how.  Greaseproof paper on to baking tray, fish on to greaseproof paper.  Slide fish down to bottom half of paper, bring top half over fish and roll the two edges together like a Cornish pasty.  Thassit!  If you don't have enough paper, it won't hold, and if you've got too much it's liable to come unfurled, so make sure you've got about 3 - 4 times as much paper as fish - one to sit it on, one to bring over the top and one full one (i.e. two, because it's doubled) to roll up.  See, now I've made it sound more complicated than it is - don't worry about it.  Just do it.

Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes.

Remove.

Eat every last bit, including the herbs you stuffed it with, and the cheeks, which are particularly delicious.

Fish.  Board.  Knife.

Incision.

Guts.

Guts coming out.

Nice clean fishy.

Stuffed.

Greaseproof paper.

Papillote.

Unwrap.

Eat.

Keep eating 'til all gone.

The Merry Old Month of May

Another large gap in the blogposts.  Tut.  Well, what can I say?  Fits and starts, my loves, fits and starts.

The weather, as you may have noticed, went through a long patch of ghastliness.  In fact, until this week, it has been an absolute shower in every sense of the word, since The Worm Post.  Curiously, despite the non-stop month or six weeks of rain, two days of sunshine has already produced cracked ground.  Just goes to show, they boooys at Met Office don't tell no looooys.

SO!  What have I been doing during this spate of non-blogginess.  Well, there was a frenzied spate of needle-felting, for the craft stall at the school fair:

Needle-felted brooches

Which resulted in a gush of creativity, and pins everywhere, which resulted in:

Pincushion

And led to iPad cover production:

I have also spent no small amount of time laughing at my daughters.  I mean "with", of course.  The post script of this, in particular, made me guffaw.  It is from our 7 year old daughter, inviting us to the Brownie Jubilee celebration:

Cooking wise, I am minded to enter our local farmshop's amateur chef competition.  I think I will, but am dithering over my menu.  It has to be two courses, including as much local produce as possible.  Of course, truffles feature very highly in my ideal choices of dishes - but will the truffles cooperate?  Will there be truffles by July?  Nobody knows.  In 2010 you couldn't move for truffles by May, but in 2011 they didn't put in an appearance until August.  Dicey.  Equally, I can't make my mind up over starters or puddings (a main course is compulsory).  Oh decisions, decisions.

Meanwhile, my friend S has just popped over with a large, freshly caught trout.  What an absolute treat - I can't wait to cook the chap.  Or chapess - how does one sex a trout?  Only remains to see if we can wait until dinner time, or scarf it down for our lunch (*update - didn't have it for lunch - decided not to rush at it with fork in hand).  Mmmmm.  Am picturing it stuffed with wild garlic flowers, and baked en papillote with lemon and butter, but something else may spring to mind.  Oh, hmm.  The fennel is just coming up beautifully frondy.  Damn.  Hmm.  And damn and hmm again.

The Players' Summer Play (performances to take place tomorrow night and Saturday, complete with barbecue and Pimms tent) has also been taking up no small portion of my time and attention.  We are all still finding the play and each other very funny, so are all rather concerned that unscripted giggling may be a problem during performances.  We have also only just started rehearsing with real liquid in our glasses, so are constantly sloshing Dandelion and Burdock all over ourselves, each other and the set.  I think I might rethink my costume, and wear a cheaper, machine-washable dress...

Set building

Set built!

And now to the real, proper stuff!  The Veg Patch!


Everything in the greenhouse has been going swimmingly.  Rather too swimmingly, in fact, given the state of the weather outside and the fact that nothing has been able to go out until now.  Or at least, I have not been tempted to get outside with a spade, in wellies, raincoat, hat etc.  But things have moved on while the weather stopped person progress.  The courgettes are covered in flowers and buds, although I can't see any bulgy bits behind any of them, so I am concerned that they may all be boy-flowers.  There could be a lot of courgette-flower fritters coming our way.  I've never tried these, but this could be the year.  I think you're meant to stuff them with ricotta, which I've always found to be an almost entirely flavourless thing, so I'm tempted to go for a spiced paneer, instead.  I'll let you know... (must stop ending sentences and indeed paragraphs with three little dots - sometimes a full stop just seems too final, though.  See what I mean?!).  I'm looking forward to letting some of the courgettes go over into marrow status, and stuffing them with eastern spiced minced lamb, too.  Stuffed marrow sounds so utterly pedestrian, but is so utterly divine if you stuff it with something sufficiently flavoursome.  But first I need courgettes.  I have read that you take the boy-flowers and rub their pistils on the stamens of the girl-flowers.  Good GRIEF!  The sheer, unadulterated sexuality of it all!  No wonder the Victorians preferred ferns.

Which reminds me - look at this fab fern just getting ready to uncurl its fronds - isn't it GORGEOUS?!

The runner beans were also doing too well in the greenhouse, with the result that they were all twined around one another and rambling all over the place, risking their tender little tips being trodden on.

Strawberries are on their way nicely - I do wish they'd talk amongst themselves, however, and all try to ripen around the same time so we can get a full pudding out of them!

I always find the tomatoes peculiarly satisfying.  Perhaps it's because they are expensive in the shops, and very easy to grow.  Perhaps it's because they justify the greenhouse all by their little round, red selves.  Or the profusion of varieties.  Maybe it's the MASSIVE glut of tomatoes from August, resulting in endless salads, meals of roast tomatoes all melting with olive oil, and fresh bread, and the sheer stupid luxury of being able - no, HAVING - to make your own tomato ketchup before they all go off.  It could also be the gentle contentment of usually still being able to pick the last stragglers well into November.  Either way, as soon as it's cool enough to work in the greenhouse (there's no pleasing some people, is there!?), they will be put into their final growing spaces.  Magic!

I put a couple of trays of broad beans, peas and mangetouts (I suspect I get rather too much fun out of referring to these as "the legooooooms") outside the greenhouse to harden off.  In the event, this was more of a case of chucking them in at the deep end, as they never went back in the greenhouse overnight, and pretty much had to learn to fend for themselves from day one Out In The Cold.  The pea and mangetout contingent had followed the runner beans' examples (they must have been peering through the glass at night) and were all cuddling and twined around each other like the teenagers they had clearly become.  One even had a pod on.  Stop it.

Legoooooms in their so-called hardening off position

and broad beans in their proper place.

Anyway, this sudden bout of decent weather (26 degrees centigrade - yesssssssss!), out of the blue (clear blue skies, that is), has obviously led to some phrenetic heavy gardening.

This is what the near end of the veg patch looked like on Monday morning:

This is what it looked like on Tuesday night:

Impressive, eh?

Yes.  I am knackered.  My hamstrings are like bowstrings (not bowed, TIGHT), and don't even talk to me about my back.  It is stiff and sore and SUNBURNT!  Damn it.  Hence skulking inside blogging on a sunny day.  I can only thank my lucky stars for Zumba.  It has kept my muscles moving.  Without it, I think I would have convinced even a decent coroner that rigor mortis had set in, today.

My lovely husband heroically dug the area over, but obviously it then needed breaking up, and several bucket loads (no, I am not exaggerating, I promise you) of DEVIL'S GUTS (see a previous post) roots needed pulling up, digging up, teasing out and generally removing.  I think it was actually four buckets full by the time I had finished, and when I dug the trench for the beans, another bucket load came out.  Initially, I figured I must have missed these first time 'round, and was tutting at my lack of care.  It was hard, however, to see how I COULD have missed the bastards - there were just so many.  So a second, rather more worrying, hypothesis posed itself:  The bastards (yes, I know that's two bastards in two lines, but they ARE bastards - oh, now that's four bastards in three lines - oops, five) (where was I?) - oh yes - the bastards (six) had Grown Overnight!  Hoping I'm wrong on this, or I'll never beat the ... bastards (shhh, seven).

SO, anyway, this large patch of ground then needed breaking up.  The fork works to a certain extent for this, but in my experience, it still leaves clumps too big to actually plant small plants in.  The best way, again, in my experience, is to break it up with a cultivator.

The patch which needed breaking up measured about 2m x 8m.

This is The Cultivator:






















This is the blister caused by the shotgun wedding of the Large Patch and the Small Cultivator:

















In my experience, the best way of breaking up a large patch of ground is NOT a bloody tiny little cultivator.  I shall try to improve my experience and report back.  Some kind of large mechanical device or Some Staff, I suspect, would be better.  Where's that bloody lottery ticket gone?

Anyway - here's how it was looking this morning, before it was too sunny for me to haul my crimson body outside:

Peas:

Runners:

I tell you, if slugs get any of this lot, the repercussions will be severe.  Pleasant boozy death by slug pub:  No.  It will be scissors for the sods.  And then, curtains.  Not in a nice, soft-furnishings kind of way.

Oh... and I've put in a bid on a hen house on eBay...  Shhhh and watch this space.........!


p.s.  God Save The Queen!