Well, I demonstrated last night that I emphatically cannot fillet a fish!
Steve next door had dropped off a beautiful brown trout after his most recent fishing expedition. I had popped it in the freezer and took it out for use yesterday. I decided to fillet it, marinate it in a ginger, garlic and sweet chilli sauce and then fry it and have it with rice and peas.
So far, so tasty.
I made the marinade with crushed fresh ginger and garlic, some sweet chilli dipping sauce and a very generous slug or three of Chinese rice wine. It smelled delicious.
It was only when I started to fillet the trout that I realised that I didn't actually really know how to do it!! And the trout didn't really want to be filleted. It took AGES to get the poor, hacked about "fillets" off. It took even more ages to get the rest of the bones out. Eventually I remembered that there was a pair of unused tweezers lurking in the bathroom cupboard. That helped. A bit!
Eventually I had something that almost approximated fillets and put them into the wonderful smelling marinade for a while. In the meantime, I put some Japanese rice on to cook with one of those fish stock cubes that Ian bought when he was here. I put some peas on to simmer. And then I fried the poor old trout in some sunflower oil, with the marinade which I allowed to reduce to a sticky sauce.
It all tasted lovely in the end. But I really need to learn how to fillet a fish properly. It can't be that difficult, surely.
(And Rick Stein, on one of his seafood shows a bit later in the evening, made it look extremely easy indeed!!!)
There won't be any fresh trout for a while now. Poor Steve is presently recuperating from an emergency appendectomy and is likely to be hors de combat for several weeks
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