a roasted leg of lamb, or a rolled, stuffed pork loin carefully prepared and cooked for hours until meltingly succulent is a fine thing to enjoy with loved ones. a mushroom risotto with homemade stock or a paella carefully designed and fussed over are also wonderful things to cook for someone in the spirit of commensality. however I find that I most often turn to seafood when I want to cook and eat a celebratory feast.
I deny that this is any kind of leftover Catholic indoctrination, as any self-respecting atheist would, although maybe the Judeo-Islamo-Christ figure informs the specialty of seafood in some subversive way, like it forms the basis of the legal system and strangely just about everything else: Jesus shared fish; Thou Shalt Not Kill. hmm.
maybe it's a relic from the economic prestige attached to the shellfish of my youth ("it's your birthday, order the lobster". alarming given my size, but as a young child I could eat a whole lobster mornay at San Giorgio's on Cardigan St in Carlton. and on New Years Eve my father would always hold a prawn-feast and say "I don't know how the rich are living, but the poor are doing okay"). but I don't try to "mornay" anything these days and favour the heart and hospitality underlying peasant style cooking, not the bourgeois connotations of abundant seafood.
but there is something from the heart in a fish-fry. one of my favourite albums of all time is Uncle Junior's Friday Fish Fry, the first of this series, called the market - remixes by Djinji Brown. the son of saxophonist Marion Brown, Djini weaves snippets of stories and histories in a funky, illuminating electro-jazz-soul groove. he doesn't sing about fish, but the producer Wes Jackson writes in the liner notes that on special Friday nights in their Bronx apartment his Pop would have a fish fry-up and they'd all sit around and play music while waiting for another batch of scallops to emerge from the deep fryer. I like to muse on the details of this kind of commensality.
so last week a prawn fry-up seemed the best way to celebrate a none-too-frequent chance to catch up with a busy friend. the catch was big Australian tiger prawns, served whole with chilli sauce and a stack of napkins.
method
get the sauce ready first:
simmer a chopped onion in olive oil.
when the onion is soft add plenty of chopped garlic and fresh chilli, cook for a few seconds and add canned or chopped tomatoes.
a tablespoon of sweet chilli sauce and plenty of fish sauce enhance the tomatoes, as does a stick of lemongrass (pounded if you're energetic, or added in whole pieces and removed at the end if you're not).
simmer this for about half an hour, and then puree before serving.
for the prawns:
the prawns get fried head and all in really hot peanut oil. this oil, then infused with crustacean shell flavours gets added to the sauce. (at Claypots, Renan serves the cooking oil as the sauce, which is intensely rich and smoky and if you are decadent enough to soak your bread in that garlicky thigh-builder you'll know why it's too hard to stop and I've substituted the tomato base instead).
bearing this in mind, heat the desired amount of peanut oil in a frypan or deep-fryer.
when hot, add some salt and a few pieces of garlic to flavour the oil; remove them when they start to colour, and reserve for later if you're a garlic fetishist.
ensure the oil is really hot, then add the prawns (in batches if using a small pan or weak heat source), cooking each until their little legs start to turn crispy golden and the shells begin to blister, about two minutes or less each side.
if you're cooking in batches return them all to the pan at the end to heat them through.
now you have a smoky kitchen and crustacean oil; add some or all of the oil to the chilli sauce and serve with bread and a burns hazard warning.
(alternatively, Tetsuya Wakuda makes a crustacean flavoured oil which you can buy at David Jones; not nearly as fun as making your whole house smell like the Claypots strip of Barkly Street).
cauliflower salad
blanch florets of cauliflower in boiling water then drain and run under cold water to keep them firm.
in a bowl combine the cauliflower with a handful of toasted pistachios, a handful of chopped chives and one of chopped dill. dress with a mixture of yoghurt, olive oil, tahini and lemon juice, seasoned with finely chopped garlic and ground cummin, allspice, cardamom and salt.
roasted capsicum
a deceptively simply but punchy thing, this (also from Claypots); grill or roast whole red capsicums until the sugars caramelise and the skin blackens. peel and slice the flesh into thin strip then drizzle with a little sherry vinegar and olive oil. scatter with salty capers.
JG's two-bean dip
boil chopped green beans until just tender. sauté the beans in garlic and oil then add a little water, salt and pepper, and cook a further two minutes.
blend the beans and cooking water with a can of drained cannelini or white beans, lemon juice and ground cummin.
