What to do with mackerel?

If, like me, you have seen the film "The End of the Line?", you may be feeling thoroughly confused about fish. I used to love shopping for fish - all those shiny rows of delicious and fragrant things, poised beautifully on their bed of ice- but now I find myself standing in front of the fishmonger's counter and staring at it, totally baffled. For any one who cares about sustainability, all certainties seem swept away - so many of our most familiar and most delicious fish are endangered now, or farmed in vaguely disgusting conditions.

But there's always the lowly mackerel. They really are plentiful - I remember only a few years ago the children pulling their rods out of the sea near Teignmouth with five or six mackerel squiggling on the multiple hooks every time, and that hasn't changed. No one has yet suggested that there's any scarcity.

In cooking and eating terms, though, mackerel's a bit of a problem. It's an uncompromising taste, and it doesn't lend itself to many recipes. Very fresh and simply pan-fried, perhaps rolled in oats, and eaten with a squeeze of lemon, mackerel is great - but that's about it. Other ways of cooking it seem hard to come by. Here's one, though, that is a bit more unexpected. It's mackerel that is cured and pressed, rather than actually cooked, by the same method that makes gravadlax of salmon. It's eaten cold, so it's a perfect starter or lunch dish, but it's chunky enough to serve as a main course with potatoes, salad, whatever.

As with any cured fish, you need to be sure it's really fresh. That's not so hard with mackerel - it smells quite strongly even when first caught, so if your nose tells you it is a little overwhelming, it's not good enough.

Get fillets, with the skin on. Start the day before, or the morning before a dinner, as it takes a while to marinate in the curing mixture.

For six:

Six mackerel fillets

3 heaped tablespoons sea salt

3 heaped tablespoons granulated sugar

1 heaped tablespoon green peppercorns

2 bunches dill

All you do is to grind the peppercorns roughly, and mix them with the salt, the sugar and the dill roughly chopped, stalks and all. There's so much oil in the fish that you don't need anything else.

Line a low dish with cling film, and put a layer of curing mixture in the bottom. Lay the fillets, skin side down, on top, then put another layer of mixture over them, rubbing it well in. Wrap the whole lot up in the cling film.

Now find a way of putting weight on top of your packet of fish, to press it down quite hard. A board that fits inside the dish would be perfect: put a pile of cookbooks on top of the board, if you have't any old-fashioned weights. Now put the dish in a cool place for anything between 12-24 hours (longer is better), and once or twice turn over the packet of fillets and pour off the oil that will have accumulated in the bottom of the dish.

When you're ready to eat, take the fillets out of the marinade and rinse them in cold water to get rid of excess salt - and then go for it. Lime is nicer than lemon, if you want to squeeze something on them - but the ideal thing is a mustard/dill sauce or a very nippy dill mayo. I often cheat by taking a good shop-bought mayo and tarting it up with a bit of plain yogurt, lots of chopped dill, a spoon of grainy mustard and a big squeeze of lemon.

Organics, food miles, and other tricky questions

From Jan

Saturday morning, sipping coffee in the garden. I love it when it's early and quiet, the weekend stretches ahead, and my thoughts turn to - well - food. Look at all this stuff I grow and tend: hydrangeas spilling over the grass; roses still blazing; a vine already turning with tinges of autumn; tall white japanese anemones nodding on their stems. But why can't I eat any of it? Only the pots of herbs contribute to the kitchen.
Aisling is quite different - she has an allotment that runs the Garden of Eden a close second, with all sorts of wonderful veg and fruit. It's hard work, but a supply of perfectly fresh produce picked just hours earlier is the best thing for any cook.
Especially for any cook concerned about health, allergies, organics and the planet, as well as taste. The rest of us dither in front of the organic vegetables counter in the supermarket and wonder whether it's really worth paying double for those carrots; or worse (as happened to me the other day) we find in a local health food shop a tray full of miserably shrivelled beetroot, coated in soil as if to prove its bona fides, which promised to be unimpeachably organic - but had originated in Chile.
What on earth - pun definitely intended - is the point of sending root vegetables (and their dried mud) right across the globe and selling them with an air of self-righteousness just because they contain no chemicals? It's totally mad. These things grow right here. Apart from the fact that their nutritional value will be so much reduced by the amount of time they've been sitting in some cold store, the question of food miles is a really serious one for the environment.

So - organic or not? Local produce versus food that has clocked up frequent flyer points? Cooking involves all these moral choices, as well as concerns of health, quality and taste. Life is complicated . . .
What we've decided to do in the Choosy Food recipes is to leave the choice to you. Call that a cop-out if you like, but our own view is that freshness, using local produce wherever possible, and a concern for the way things are grown or reared matter to us more than a few chemicals. So if you want to use entirely organic produce for our recipes, that's great, but we won't tell you to. We will, though, urge you to find out about the origins of your food, especially meat. Animals that have had a good, free life and a humane end. Eggs that were laid by a bird free to move around. Fish that isn't as endangered as the leopard.
It quickly becomes clear that these big questions about food are the big questions about the world itself, and we can't solve them all. But we can ask about the meat we buy, go to farmer's markets and buy from local growers whenever we can, plan our meals round food that's in season. Best of all, I suppose, would be to plant a row of beans in among those roses. I'll have another cup of coffee and ponder those good intentions.

Mango and Salmon with red peppers

Ripe mango with fresh organic salmon is a marriage made in heaven. I've noticed the fragrant Thai spicing gets even more subtle if this dish is prepared in advance, covered and refrigerated for up to 24 hours. I remove it from the fridge about half an hour before the meal and serve it with brown basmatti rice cooked with a couple of cardamon pods and a tin of coconut milk added to the water.



2 large mangoes, peeled and cut into thick slices
A pinch of sea salt
Juice of 1 lime & 1 lemon

6 skinned organic salmon fillets, cut lengthways in thick slices
2 tbsp olive or sunflower oil
2 fennel bulbs, quartered and thinly sliced
2 peppers, red and yellow, sliced
2 shallots, peeled & sliced
2 garlic cloves,peeled & sliced
2 dried kaffir lime leaves, finely crumbled
2 lengths of lemon grass, finely chopped
1 large red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
5 cm fresh ginger, peeled & chopped
2 tbsps nam pla fish sauce or light soy sauce
3 tbsps white wine vinegar
5 tbsp hot water

To serve: some fresh mint, chopped
1 bag of small mixed leaves

Pour the citrus juices over the sliced mangoes, add a pinch of salt and set aside.

Heat the oil in a wide, thick bottomed frying pan (preferably with a lid which you'll need for the last 5 minutes of this recipe) and fry all the aromatic ingredients for about 2 minutes. Add the sliced fennel and peppers and cook for 10 minutes.

Add the vinegar, fish sauce and water and simmer for another minute or two.

Add the fish , tucking it under the vegetables to sit flat on the floor of the pan. Cook for a scant 2 minutes. Remove from the heat, cover the pan and let the fish go on cooking for about 5 minutes. Uncover and leave to cool.

To serve, divide the leaves and mango slices between six plates, top with equal shares of salmon, vegetables and the cooking juices. Offer a steaming bowl of coconut flavoured rice on the side.

Choosy Note: This is brilliant looking party dish to lay out on a big meat dish in all its colourful glory.