Seafood Minestrone with fried fish fillet

The inspiration was loosely Gordon Ramsey's seafood minestrone with salmon.Only I did it with 0.5kg of venus clams and 0.5kg of the smaller clams and an approximately 1 kg red tilapia.

Fairly pleased with this one. Hence the detailed record.

1. The fish was bought for $8. I filleted it into 4 portions, and set the fish bones aside.

2. The clams for about $4.80.

3. In a large pot, toast a generous handful of dried fennel. Then add a mirepoix of sliced onion, carrots and sliced celery.

4. Saute for a while until fragrant, then add garlic (about 4 cloves sliced).

5. Turn to high heat. Add the fish bones and stir it around till fragrant.

6. Add a generous dollop of white wine and let it boil. Then add about a litre of water, boil. Then add the clams. Squeeze a medium lime into it, and add the lime flesh and all.

7. When clams start to open, pick them out of the stock. Let the remainder simmer for another 20 mins or so.

8. Remove the clam meat and refrigerate.

9. When the stock is done, sieve it to get the semi-clear stock.

10. step 1-9 can be done ahead of time.

11. Prepare a minestrone mix. In my case, frozen green peas, frozen corn kernels, frozen brocolli, some shredded wong bok, diced bell pepper, halved cherry tomatoes, and small sliced celery. Squeeze more lime juice to taste.

12. Bring the stock back to the boil, add the minestrone mix, and noodles. Boil till noodles are soft.

13. When stock is done, turn off heat and add back the clam meat.

14. For the fish fillets, dry comprehensively with paper towels, then salt both sides, keeping skin side up. When sweat beads the skin from the salt, wipe it down with a paper towel. Score the skin (longitudinally - head to tail). Heat pan to high heat, lower fish fillets. After a short while turn heat down to medium high and cook until skin is browned (approx 6-7 mins). Turn over and briefly cook the other side.


15. To serve, ladle noodle soup into dishes. Grind black pepper. Then layer fish fillets over. Squeeze more lime juice over the fish.

mushroom soup

Mustapha sells a 1.3kg packet of portobello muchrooms for about $20. Quite cheap. Bought it to try mushroom soup.

Used homemade vegetable soup stock.

1. Cut mushrooms roughly.

2. In a big bowl, thoroughly mix dill pesto, olive oil, butter, dried thyme, and rosemary leaves.
(dill pesto recipe: from https://www.thespruceeats.com/lemon-dill-pesto-with-scandinavian-twist-2952900 - found it a bit overpowering by itself, but using it with the mushrooms seems ok. Dill is really cheap - can get a huge bunch from Mustapha for $2).

3. Spread on tray and roast mushrooms at 200C until mostly dry (about 40 mins), taking out the tray and stirring the mushrooms around halfway through.

4. Use the vegetable stock and pressure cook with dried mushrooms for about a few mins (buy from Chinese medicine shop - get the fragrant tea leaf mushroom or other - do not use shitake).

5.Put roasted mushrooms, stock with soaked dried mushrooms, and a dollop of plain yoghurt (creme fraiche for the richer version) into a blender and blend till fine. Add more water if necessary to thin it out.

Roast Chicken Redux

Updated and improved version of roast chicken. Recording this.

Chicken Thighs have improved - juicy and tasty with a not too tender texture.

Breasts very slightly drier because of the slightly higher ending temp than last time - not a breast man, but mw is.

Skin is delicious and crisp, though not shatteringly so.

For further improvement, I'd try kampong chicken to see if the less fat chicken affects taste. The skin is much better now, but I suspect hard to improve because of the wet brine. I'd keep the wet brine, as opposed to injection, coz I like the coca cola brine.

Recipe for repeatability.
1. Brine chicken 10 hours in 5% brine solution composed of 0.5 litre water with 100g salt and 1.5 litre of classic coca cola.

2. Take out chicken, dry it out with paper towels as much as possible. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight to dry the skin out further.

3. Carefully use fingers to separate skin from meat starting at the breast without breaking the skin.

4. Insert longish rosemary twigs under the skin. The purpose being to keep the skin away from the meat as much as possible. During the slow roast, this bit of skin will turn translucent and during the high heat phase, will be paper crisp.

5. Stuff cavity with orange or lemon. Tie or sew up any exposed flesh as much as possible.

6. Roast in oven at 90C for about 1.5 hours until temp of flesh near skin is about 50-55C. Then turn the heat down to 77C and roast for about 2.5 hours. The idea being to bring the meat temp up as quickly as possible while still at low temp roast. Then at 50-55C, you want to really slow roast it.

7. Once the chicken temp hits about 64-65C or so (the 2.5 hours in step 6), turn the heat to 69-70C. You want the chicken meat to slow roast in the region of 66-69C for 1 to 1.5 hours. Even with the heat equalised during the slow roast, you still need a bit of temperature gradient.

8. Take out chicken and rest a bit. If this was all done right, there will be very little dripping because the moisture has been retained in the chicken.

9. Turn oven temp as hot as it will go. Mine goes to 275C convection.

10. Pop chicken in for about 4 mins or so. Watch it very carefully to avoid burning.

11. Take out chicken. It may be unevenly browned. Complete the browning with a blow torch.

Beet bread

Instead of using water, just use slightly diluted beetroot juice.

Looks rather like a root vegetable itself....