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Time for entry #4 in my Food Project Competition, which (if you don’t know by now and you SHOULD know by now so haven’t you been paying attention?!) is running up until the end of August and details of which can be found here. Get thinking, get submitting and I look forward to eating!

Floatykatja over at Kudocities submitted her recipe for Linguine a la Vongole, and I have to say, it totally hit the spot. I mean, I like linguine. I like clams. I like tomatoes. I love garlic. How was this not going to be delicious?!

Momma Lee is my main taste tester at home, whenever I cook something she’s there with fork (or spoon, or knife, or fingers) in hand (ha, fingers in hand), ready to dig in and give me her best opinion. Momma Lee is also very critical of food, so when she says it’s tasty you know it’s pretty darn tasty.

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Yet another pretty recipe for you all from my Food Project competition. Remember, if you want to get involved your recipes must be in by the end of August. See this page for further details and if you want to get involved, you know what to do!

The very funny MarkE over at Kudocities submitted the following recipe to me: a summery fish stew. Now, I know what you’re thinking, fish stew? In the summer?! It cannot be! But it’s not super heavy and it’s packed full of flavour, and I don’t know about you guys but summer in the UK is less than awesome, so this is actually a pretty good dinner dish for those cool summer evenings. It also tastes great, did I mention that? This post is rather image heavy, purely because the light was really good so I found myself taking a lot of photos – just a head’s up!

The only real “flavours” of the stew come from these three ingredients – tomato puree, mixed herbs and cayenne pepper. I was surprised by the depth of flavour, though, and the cayenne packed one heck of a punch which I wasn’t expecting.

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Is there actually anything better in the summertime than a lovely piece of fish? I think not. Fresh fish is just so awesome. I mean, I’m a big seafood fan anyway, but something about summer just screams, “EAT FISH”. Don’tcha think?

My bestie Jun, of the Great Brownie Disaster as it shall forever be known, came over to hang out on Sunday so we spent the day cooking and baking, perfecting my muffin recipe (pretty good but needs something extra, I shall experiment further), making butterfly cupcakes (to come soon) and this lovely fishy dish for lunch.

I did my usual wander around the supermarket creating a recipe in my head for this one. I actually wanted to get some scallops, thanks to the ever wonderful Dan’s recipe over at IslandEAT (darn you for creating these currently unsatisfiable cravings!), but the scallops in the supermarket were pretty sad looking and expensive to boot, so I turned my nose up at them and found these lovely pieces of Cornish lemon sole instead.

Lemon sole is a beautiful fish – well, in taste, at least. In actuality they’re pretty ugly.

Photo courtesy of the BBC

Argh! Ugly fishy face!
Sorry. Anyway.

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The other day I was wandering around the supermarket in a bit of a daze, trying to figure out what I was going to do for lunch, and I saw these beautiful little prawns. Usually I don’t like to buy fish from the supermarket because I’m not sure just how fresh it is, I’d rather buy it from the fishmonger’s, but some of the supermarkets have some fantastic stuff these days.

I love prawns but the key to cooking them is making sure that you only cook them for a couple of minutes max – nothing is worse than overcooked prawns. You want them to be pink but retain that crunch.

When I made this there was something missing and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then it hit me: garlic. So re-write has garlic, my one didn’t. Boo for me, yay for you. And as for it being over polenta, on the one hand it’s because I love polenta and I’d probably eat anything with it, on the other I have a vague memory of shrimp and grits? Ayway. This is awesome.

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This is entry #1 in my new project, details of which may be found here. If you want to get involved please email me!

The ever-lovely CravenMaven over at Kudocities submitted this recipe for me to try. She claims to be a terrible cook (with a certain pink-curry incident in her culinary past) but guaranteed that this recipe was a doozy.

I love salmon, I think it’s awesomely tasty, it’s low in saturated fats and calories, and a fantastic source of Omega-3. Add to that a handful of B-vitamins, phosphorus and magnesium and you’ve got yourself one heck of a super fish. Also, I love that they spend their lives swimming upstream. Jus’ sayin’.

Anyway, the recipe that CM gave me tied together a whole bunch of ingredients that I like (tomatoes, basil – super combo, by the way, you can’t go wrong – salmon, spinach and pasta), all served alongside a nice bit of crusty bread. Ideal summer supper, or, in a smaller portion, summer lunch. I added a little extra seasoning (sea salt & black pepper and chilli flakes, mhmmm), substituted spaghetti for pappardelle (I do love my pappardelle), fancied it up with some basil olive oil and served it alongside some lovely sundried tomato crusty bread, and there we had it!

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Holy-Crap-These-Are-So-Good, originally uploaded by jaxies.

I’m pretty much a fan of all things fried. I say ‘pretty much’ because it doesn’t matter how you prepare ‘em, I refuse to eat bugs of any kind or oysters. The former because the idea freaks me out, the latter because I hate the flavour of oysters. Ick. For a girl who eats everything my ‘no-can-do’ list is pretty short, but for anything else, I’ll do it. I’ve even been known to eat fish eyeballs and chicken’s feet are a regular on the menu when we go out for dim sum.

Anyway, we’re getting off-topic here. Fried food. Delicious, gorgeous, crunchy fried food. What’s not to love?

A while back I read on Chubby Hubby’s blog that he had found the most amazingly beautiful creamy crab croquettes so of course I bookmarked it immediately, earmarked for consumption. Then I forgot all about it. That is until the other day when I was browsing through my (many) food links and decided, heck, enough time had passed, it was now summer – I was ready to tackle the crab croquettes.

I adjusted the seasonings a little, adding a little chilli to the final mix, and although my first few were definitely a frying failure (burnt, burnt, underdone, underdone, underdone) after that I managed to get into the swing of things. I took one bite and despite the fact that the panko was a little too crispy (aka. burnt) my mouth literally exploded. Okay, not literally. That’d be ridiculous. But helloooo mouth orgasm. Holy majoly. My photos do NOT do it justice at all. It was amazing. It was all I could do to stop myself from eating all ten before Momma Lee got home. She took one bite and fell in love too, as did Brother and my bestie Jun (of the great brownie fail), whom I invited over for dinner (I made copious amounts of food that day). Also, apologies for not taking more photos, but as you can imagine these disappeared into our mouths so quickly there just simply wasn’t enough time.

If you try one recipe this week, make it this one. You won’t regret it. Just please use fresh crab meat – it makes all the difference. Om-nom-nom…

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