Hi folks,

I posted this on my BlueSky account the other night (https://bsky.app/profile/pgjonesvenice.bsky.social) and a few people asked me for the recipe. So here we go!

First a little bit of background. Following a dinner of spare ribs a week ago, I find myself not having quite the full complement of teeth. Emergency dental work has improved the situation a little but suffice to say I wasn’t up for eating anything particularly challenging. They were good spare ribs though so, you know, swings and roundabouts.

Anyway, I’d picked up some splendid sea bream (orate if you prefer) on Giudecca. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten to buy anything to go with them. It was a rainy, blustery evening and I didn’t really feel like going out to the shops again. Hopefully there’d be something in the kitchen that I could cobble together dinner from.

I found a few potatoes and some cubes of frozen spinach. I thought I could do something with that…

Sea Bream with a Spinach and Potato cake

Serves 2

Ingredients

2 good size sea bream
400g potatoes (approx)
4 cubes of frozen spinach
30 – 50g grated Parmesan
Oil for cooking, salt for seasoning

Method

You know the preliminary drill by now. Mix a brace of Spritz Nathans, put something on the headphones, and get to work.

1) Preheat your oven to 240c / 220 fan. This might seem hot, but you want the skin on the fish to crisp up nicely.

2) Fillet your sea bream. I’m not bad at this, but every time I wonder why I just didn’t ask the fishmonger to do it for me. Anyway, you want to end up with four nice size fillets. Wrap them in kitchen towel until it’s time to stick them in the oven – you want them as dry as possible on the outside in order to help the skin crisp up.

3) Peel and chop your potatoes into medium size chunks, and then steam them for maybe 20 – 25 minutes. Then let them steam dry – it’s important that your mash isn’t too wet.

4) Defrost 4 frozen spinach cubes. Obviously a microwave helps with this. When they’ve cooled, wring as much water out as possible – again, this is important.

5) Mash the potatoes and spinach together. Don’t be tempted to add milk (a little butter at a push, but I didn’t), we’re looking for a nice dough-like consistency here. Grate in a couple of tablespoons of Parmesan and a sprinkling of salt. It all helps to add umami, and also to bring the “dough” together.

6) Bring the dough together with your hands into a vaguely circular shape, no more than an inch thick. Get some oil warning in a pan, and fry for perhaps five minutes each side, or until it’s nicely browned. The spinach on the outside of the cake will catch and char a little, but that’s okay.

7) Give the fillets a drizzle of oil and a grinding of salt and put them in the oven. Now, I baked them for ten minutes, skin-up, without turning. That was enough to crisp the skin and cook them through. You could, of course, simply grill them. Personally, I find baking more forgiving. There’s always the risk with grilling that you’ll take your eye off things for a second and your nice crispy fillets are now, in fact, slightly less nice charred fillets and your kitchen is filled with burned fishey smoke.

8) Cut the potato cake into four wedges, and serve with the fillets, arranging things to make them look a little cheffy if that’s your thing (it is my thing).

9) Glass of wine on the side and enjoy. It’s a nice straightforward recipe and good for using things up as well.

Happy eating and drinking everyone!