eating locally

Posted on | June 30, 2008 | Comments Off

my husband has been obsessed with fish farms for years.
they’ve always seemed a bit unnatural to me.
here we are MILES from the sea…and yet, you can catch a fresh barramundi…..bizarre.
i’ve always subtly vetoed the fish farm dinner….but every time we drive past one, he makes a comment or he just stares wistfully out the window, like a deprived cat.

late this afternoon, he roared off on his motorbike and came home very smug and triumphant, with two plate-sized barramundi…..caught and cleaned earlier today.
frrrrresh.
i groped around the vegetable garden and scrounged up two sorts of parsley, sweet basil, lemon thyme and regular thyme, rocket, cos, red coral (lolla rossa) and buttercrunch lettuces.

maurice decided it was time to harvest ALL the asian greens….we are now inundated with greens, so i took half the crop over to my parents and with luck our marvelous gardener will score one of the pak choys.

back to the kitchen.
we washed the barra, slashed their sides to the bone, salted-peppered-and-italian-herbed inside and out.
olive-oiled the skins and laid on a very hot barbecue for about seven minutes each side.
no fancy fish frames or any other nonsense…the fish were just slapped onto the grill.

while they cooked, i whipped up our standard salad of greens, herbs, red onion, tomato, and i dressed it with our own lemon juice and australian olive oil.
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper naturellement!
then i quickly made a simple mayonnaise with a local free range egg yolk, lots of my just-picked herbs, a gherkin, more of that lemon juice, a mix of rice bran and olive oils, and a dab of this fabulous FABULOUS german mustard that we buy six jars at a time from a delicatessan in innisfail.

we ate the fish with our fingers and cleaned the bones pretty thoroughly.
all the salad was gone.
most of the mayo was also gone.
and there was a bottle of rockford estate alicante bouchet to wash it all down with.