Dublin Bay Prawn Festival - fried hake & greens; seafood chowder

Dublin Bay Prawn Festival @ Howth

The last couple of months, I've been on a seafood binge.  You'd be amazed at some of the bargains you can get at the budget supermarket section, if you're willing to go pescetarian.  And I pretty much have during the last two months.  It beats red meat and junk food.

At the end of April I went up to the northernmost point of Dublin Bay to Howth, and their annual Prawn Festival.  This was definitely not a budget trip, but it was delicious, and it *did* still give me some cheap ingredients, and ideas.

Oysters, langoustines (Dublin Bay prawns), and a host of great entertainment in a wonderful little town. Couple of non budget foodie pictures first...

Howth's finest rock oysters served with red wine vinegar and shallots, tabasco, and lemon & black pepper.

Moules mariniere.  A.k.a. Mussels in cream sauce

Langoustine po' boy

This fella was NOT on today's menu, but he did look cool.

 So after my day out, I got a budget haul of fish from the supermarket the next day.  First, about a kilo of hake for €2. If you're not familiar with hake, it's not as sweet as cod, but has a similar texture.  "The chicken of the sea" the fishmonger told me...

Fried fish, soft steamed egg and greens.

The hake first of all, did me a very simple fried fish supper consisting of:

• The fish itself, dredged in flour and seasoning.  Fry that.   
• Now put a saucepan of water on to boil, and get a metal colander or steamer for...
•  Steamed veg - 1 bunch of asparagus for €0.80 and some sprouting broccoli for about €0.75.  Using a steamer if you have one, or just boiled in water if not.  
• Cut the stems off the Cook those for about 10-15 minutes until tender. 
•  A couple of soft boiled eggs, added to the steaming water pan 3-4 minutes before the veg is cooked.  
•  Good pinch of salt but lots of pepper on there, a few herbs from the garden, a little butter, and this is done. 

I expect you could make a nice dressing for this and make it even better.  (Mental note, plan budget sauces post...)

Fried Hake, sizzling up until just opaque.

Steamed veg and soft-boiled egg.  The egg's burst a bit there, I should have turned the heat down(!)

Fried hake, boiled egg, served with sprouting broccoli and asparagus

So today's main recipe is something very special:

At Howth, for a small donation to the RLNI, a cause very close to my heart since my first job was writing software for them, folks at the festival could watch a fish filleting demonstration, and take home the leftovers.  Lots of nice , almost free, fish fillets were produced.

My interest was in something a little more obscure...


Langoustine shells

Trust me, these are going to taste amazing, given the right treatment!

  I took home 3 big bags of shells in order to make myself some fish stock for a bisque and for a seafood chowder, which is today's recipe.

Chowder Ingredients

• Fish (obviously) - So I had my hake, but I also got:
• smoked cod, 1 nice fillet reduced €1.20
• two big haddock for about €1.90 
• 4 Potatoes. - Chop into quarters and boil.  Once cooked and drained, I like to leave two of them in small chunks, and puree the rest with a little milk, using the good ol' SupermarketValue hand blender I showed you a few weeks ago.  That gets you a nice creamy texture base to work with.  
• Mirepoix - the holy trinity, well, quaternary today, of veg: 
• The white of a leek 
•  1 carrot
•  the top half of a stick of celery
•  half an onion.  
• Half a tin of sweetcorn.  Can't have a chowder without sweetcorn. 
• Parsley and cream to finish but before that....

  Fish stock:

Fish stock ingredients

• 1 big bag of prawn heads, crab shells, oyster shells, leftover fish, etc.  Make sure it's fresh of course, you don't want to break out in hives or have to go to casualty... 
• Any leftover fish scraps you have (I used the leftover hake and haddock skin) 
• 1 vegetable stock cube.  
• Mirepoix veg:
• 1 carrot
• the top (green) half of the leek
• Te bottom half of a stick of celery minus the root, chop that off 
• 1 good big splash of brandy  (don't worry, it's worth it...) 
• Herbs.  Usually I'm using about 3 tbsp of dried herbs but if you have fresh; dill, parsely, and (a little) oregano go well with fish.
• Half a pan of water plus a good slug of cider or wine.  Today I used cider.

Fish stock method 

• Add about a tablespoon of oil to a frying pan until it's screaming hot.  Start to fry the seafood shells.  This will give it a really intense flavour.   
• Now, *carefully* add the brandy to the fried prawn shells.  It will sizzle like crazy and, if you're lucky enough to have a gas stove, you could flambee the brandy off ... just ... be aware you may start a fire!  
• Meanwhile get the vegetable side of things going by throwing in the chopped carrot, celery and leek in with some oil to soften
• Now add your water/liquour and the stock cube
•   You want it to reduce down to a very intense looking and tasting, and smelling, liquid.  

Also, open the windows.  Did I mention that you should do that before you start, unless you want to make your home smell like a cannery...

I like to give the shells a bit of a bash with a blunt instrument while this is all boiling down.  You'll notice in the picture, the Dublin Bay prawn has those long thin claws and while they are not worth the effort to pick the meat out of, they are nothing but pure flavour if you smash them up. When cool, filter through a colander and muslin if you have it, into a sterile Kilner jar. 
 

The finished prawn / fish stock

Not as clear as I'd like.  You can avoid cloudiness by reducing the cooking time so the bones don't start to cook, but I didn't really mind too much to be frank. If you let it settle it'll look a lot better, and you can just carefully spoon off what you need, or filter it if you don't want the sediment.

Now to the main dish... 

Chowder Method 

• Soften the chopped carrot, leek and celery in a tablespoon of oil in a hot pan.   
• Take the veg stock, and add a few tablespoons of fish stock to it. 
• Taste the results - very important!  The fish stock and the stock cube will make this dish quite salty, but the potatoes we're about to add will draw the salt out, so you shouldn't really need any extra.  However, taste and taste again.  
• Add a little black pepper.  And/or chilli powder or hot sauce.  You should have gathered by now I like my spicy food... 
• Add the boiled potatoes, pureed potatoes, the chopped veg, and the sweetcorn to the stock. You now have a vegetable and potato chowder with some really nifty fish taste to it. 

Now it's time to add the hake, smoked cod, and haddock.

Chopped fairly chunky, this will now be ready in about 10 - 20 minutes, depending on chunk size.

Fish doesn't take well to overcooking so please keep your eye on it and don't take my timing as foolproof.  When it just turns opaque in the centre of a chunk, it's ready to serve.  Remove from heat.

• Now it's time to let it cool for a few minutes...
• ...and add the cream and the parsley garnish.  We add the cream at the end so it doesn't split.

*munch*
Oh my word... if this isn't one of the best things I've made to date...  Silky, filling, sweet - and the home made fish stock just gives it the edge it needs.  Definitely worth the effort pulverising and boiling up all those prawns.  Cruise liner dining, on a Holyhead ferry budget.

Bonus Post: On bread, sandwiches, wraps and pittas

Bread & Sandwiches - the ultimate budget food

This was my Christmas leftover sandwich.  Sadly I don't get to eat that well all the time...

The thing with budget value shopping, is that a lot of times, you get a lot of similar produce.  By that I mean, sandwich fillings.

But, the haul I scored in February, made me very glad to eat everything that could be put between two slices of bread.  You'll see below.


Bread and its cousins, the pitta, the wrap, the flatbread, are eaten all over the world in all their forms - they're cheap, portable, and the perfect carrier for tasty fillings.

In Ireland, the most common reduced items for sambos that I've seen during my exploits in the Clearance section are: 
 -  "luncheon" meat, ham, turkey, chicken
 - Salad  - it makes a great partner to meat, or even on its own with toast.  Given a little mayo or your own homemade sauces, it's worth a try between two slices of bread.
 - Coleslaw always works well as a second filling, I've seen many a pack for a mere €0.50.  I've even eaten it on its own on toast.
 - Cheese  - Sometimes there's a wedge or two if you're lucky.  Usually it's Edam or Leerdammer, but occasionally I've seen some nice Cashel Blue.
  
In the non-reduced sections, there's the supermarket value sandwich "pastes" I used to love as a kid, but, really, if I was to recommend eating that, I'd say, make a cup of Bovril and put it on toast.  Those weird spreads do NOT make a good sandwich.  Snack, yes, sandwich, no.


So, as John Montagu may have said "Shut up, give me something satisfying between two bits of bread, and let me get back to my card game!"

Delicious home baked ham for 39% of original cost.  That was tasty...

This was some dang fine ham at around a quarter of the normal cost as well.

Ham, cheese and mustard pitta

Pittas are potentially my second favourite thing to fill up with taste.  Mine were a little stale, so...
 
 - Dunk the stale pitta in water briefly
 - Bake or grill it until it's nice and toasty / steamy
 - Split and fill with ham, cheese and mustard
 - Stick in back under the grill / oven, until the cheese is melted.  

I also like to add a little salad and tomatoes, maybe a bit of mayonnaise, or of course, anything else you like.  Leftover curry goes well in a pitta too. 

  Reuben

A Reuben sandwich is Pastrami or corned beef, sauerkraut, Thousand Island dressing and cheese.  It's a staple of New York deli culture and ever since I've seen it on TV, I've wanted one.  

I nearly wanted to make a Vine video featuring "The Ecstacy of Gold" by Ennio Morricone when I found this motherlode!

€11.10 worth of spicy beef for €3.33? How much is that?

Seriously, that much?!  Good job I love pastrami!

  For mine I used this slightly dry but absolutely tasty chunk of pastrami, red cabbage & my home made pickles, and a bit of Leerdammer cheese ( €1.50 for 6 slices)

For the dressing 
 Mustard (1 tsp), mayo(2 tbsp) and ketchup(2.5 tbsp) make a nice cheat's Thousand Island dressing.  

Sloppy Joes

 A great way to use up leftover bolognese or chilli, is the Sloppy Joe.  A certain English chef who lives in North London and who likes toast, introduced me to this in his book "Real Fast Food" , which is one of the best cook books full stop if you want cheap, quick, and delicious food from scratch.

So...
  - Chop and fry a bell pepper in a little oil.
 -  Once it looks soft, add a mushroom or two to the pan.
 - Now add your leftover chilli / pasta sauce / mince beef mix, and heat through
 - Add 2 tablespoons of ketchup
 - Add one of English mustard, two if using Dijon or American
 - A little chilli or paprika.  Or hot sauce.  However hot you like your food...
 - A bit more tomato puree if you have it will keep the thickness at the right level.  
 - Worcestershire sauce.  Mandatory.

Once it's heated through and has a consistency that looks like it could *almost* spill out of the side of a wrap, baguette, or two bits of pan loaf, it's ready.  Ladle a big spoon into your bread of choice, spill, enjoy.

Leftover burritos

 And you know leftover chilli works well in a burrito too?  No?  Boil a bit of rice, put your leftover chilli in there, season with more sauce and chilli, maybe a bit of that cheese and salad, and prove me wrong!

Leftover bread

We've all had to throw out stale or mouldy bread.  I hate doing it.  Budget bread has a habit of going off more rapidly than full price or locally bought loaves, so I tend to only buy what I need, or what I know I can use quickly.  I normally just buy myself a few rolls for my local baker, and if I do buy a supermarket value budget loaf, it's sandwiches for lunch every day, before it goes off.

That said, stale bread can be dried, shredded up and kept to use as breadcrumbs for burgers, stews, soups, stuffing, or as a topping for Macaroni and cheese maybe?  Or chipped into croutons for things like French Onion soup, or the Caesar Salad I made in this post .  Damp and moisture is the enemy of fresh bread, so make sure you have a paper bag and a space in your freezer.

 Now what to wash it all down with?  Oh wait... a 12 pack of diet soft drinks for €2.34!

Aw yeah.  Let's get another picture of that massive slab of pastrami...

Somewhere in the background, Also Sprach Zarathustra was playing.  On a budget trumpet.

Getting the bread nice and toasty with the super pan my brother bought me.

Can't describe how tasty this was, using mere HTML.

A glut of mushrooms

A glut of mushrooms  - 3 good recipes

The thing with reduced items is that you can never tell what you've going to get. You have to make the best of what you have*.

On this occasion, there must have been some sort of fungal explosion over in Leinster,  as two supermarkets I went to had lots of cheap mushrooms.

So the three things to do with these mushrooms today are:

A) Chop and fry in butter, fresh herbs, brandy and cream, and spread on toast.  That was basically the first thing I did.  

B) Pickle them to preserve punnet number 2, as suggested by Hayley  I highly recommend you read her blog if you like utterly amazing food made from scratch, and the odd fascinating article about marine science too.

C) Today's recipe: 

Chicken and mushroom soup

Ingredients:

 - Half a punnet of chestnut mushrooms

 - Half a punnet of button or closed cup mushrooms

 - Stock.  I'm using some of the miso I used for the ramen last week, plus see below...

 - Butter

 - Olive oil

 - Stale bread, to bulk the soup out.  Say about 1+1/2 slices.

 - Cream / creme fraiche / yoghurt , or even some milk

 - Herbs: parsley, thyme, or your own favourite mixed brand.  Fresh are always best but again, even a good pinch of the dried ones work.

 - The "Trifecta"  - 1/2 carrot, 1/4 onion, 1/4 leek.  For the stock.  See below...

Chicken Stock for soup

OK, looks a bit nasty, but it was €0.60 and full of chickeny goodness.

Today I have another secret budget ingredient, courtesy of the “victualler” in Dun Laoghaire.  Chicken carcass, complete with lots of meat on there, should add a good bit of flavour to the soup, Obviously you can omit this if you want a veggie or vegan option, try miso or a budget veg stock cube.

Method

For the stock

• First up chop your carrots, onions and leek roughly, and bring to the boil with the chicken.  
• Let that simmer for a couple of hours, then give the whole thing a squish with a potato masher or similar to get all the flavour out, and strain through a sieve, colander, or muslin cloth, depending on what you have and how clear you like your stock.  
• I'm going with the colander for this batch - tends to let more meat through but still none of the bones.  

For the soup 

- Wipe the mushrooms with a damp cloth or similar, first up.  Also, if you're going to store mushrooms, put them in a paper bag, not a plastic container.  They won't spoil that way. 

 - Chop the mushrooms and herbs.  Fry the mushrooms slowly in the oil and butter, until soft.

 - At this point I'm adding a little splash of brandy, as I will be using it in next week's recipe, which I am rather proud of.  

 - Add the stock and simmer.  

 - Shred in the stale bread and chopped herbs.  

 - Lastly add the cream/milk/creme fraiche.

A new addition to the SupermarketValueFood blog kitchen is this nifty hand blender, which, while not as good as a full food processor, is compact enough to fit in the cupboard, and versatile enough to justify a €10 outlay.

A €10 hand blender, yesterday.  Useful for more than soup as well.

So, the whole soup gets nicely pulverised, but not too pulverised as I like some texture.  And there you go.  

It goes well with a bit of that stale bread toasted into croutons or brushed with oil and heated up, or put in the toaster.

Less value but more flavour

•  If you're feeling really flush you can add a drop of red wine or brandy into the soup.  Today I shelled out for some brandy as I am planning something a little special for the next post...Just remember to cook the alcohol off, nothing tastes worse than boozy food.  Believe me I've tried...  
• Best thing to do is to add a splash to the pan just before you add the stock, as the pan will be a lot hotter and you'll hit the magic 86°C where the flavour stays but the alcohol aways...

Links and ideas

Other fun things to do with mushrooms are

1.  Mushroom and bacon ravioli – Inspired by my aunt I might have a go at rolling my own pasta again... Here's a recipe I found online which looks pretty good - it uses ricotta cheese but I'm fairly sure you could use most any soft kind, and add bacon to it.  Everything is better with bacon*
2. Spaghetti carbonara also works well with mushrooms.
3. I'm deadly sure Hayley will have done something amazing with mushrooms at some point as well.