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!

There’s not much left in the fishmonger’s at Palanca. My fault, I’d got up late, and midday on a Saturday morning is not the time for buying fish as they’re running down the stock.

I took a look around, but nothing is really grabbing my attention. But there’s always San Pietro (“John Dory”) something of a luxury fish in the UK but seemingly more common – and certainly cheaper – in this part of the world.

I only need two fillets but, as I said, the boys are trying to clear everything, and so I leave with three instead. That’s nearly half a kilo of fish.

Fried in breadcrumbs is always an option of course, but that seems a little unexciting for such a fine fish. Then I remember I’ve got a few pieces of salmon in the freezer that I was saving for a basic pasta sauce. I’ve probably got all the parts I need for a fish stew. And so, that evening, I set to work.

You know the drill by now : I mix us a brace of Spritz Nathans, and cook to Steely Dan’s “Can’t Buy a Thrill” as I’m doing a complete Dan relisten.

Ingredients (serves 3….yes, I know, there are only two of us)

One small onion

One fat clove of garlic

About a dozen small tomatoes

One medium-size potato

Pinch of saffron

Two fillets of San Pietro

Maybe 50g of salmon. More won’t hurt if you’ve got it.

Half a litre of chicken stock (you could probably get away with water, but stock is better if you have it)

Parsley if you’ve got it, some fresh chilli if you’d like, salt to taste

Method

Stick a pan on a low heat with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.

Sweat the (finely diced) onions, and then halve and add the tomatoes. Cook them down. You can take as long as you like over this. When they’re nearly done, finely chop the garlic and add that as well.

Chop the potato into small-ish cubes and add to the pan along with a pinch of saffron. Give it all a good stir together and then add the stock. Cover and let it simmer for about 15 minutes, or until the potatoes will take the point of a knife.

In the meantime, chop your San Pietro and salmon into chunks. When the potatoes are done and the stew is about the right consistency (add a little water if you need to), add the fish to the pan – you don’t want them to be cooking for more than five minutes as they’ll overcook and start to fall apart, so go easy on the stirring. Season to taste.

And that’s pretty much it. Add parsley if you’ve got it, chilli if you’d like it. Some lightly toasted bread rubbed with olive oil and garlic would be nice; but the potatoes are there to add carbs and so it’s non-essential. Also I forgot. And didn’t have the right kind of bread anyway.

And that was Saturday. We managed about 2/3 of it. The rest, I thought, would do us for Sunday.

The trouble with that is that it left one spare fillet of San Pietro which I could probably do something with at a later date, but it’s a slightly annoying amount of fish to have left over. Also, reheating the stew risked the fish falling apart.

So what I did was kind of a variation on a fish chowder.

Ingredients (for two)

Remains of yesterday’s fish soup (you kept this in the fridge, didn’t you….please tell me you kept this in the fridge…)

One fillet of San Pietro

Dozen prawns (it was Sunday, so I went to Conad – they were perfectly good)

140g sweetcorn (or thereabouts- this just happened to be the size of the tin I had in)

Splash of milk

Parsley

Method

Blitz the existing soup in a blender or food processor.

Scrape it into a pan, and let it down with some milk

Add the sweetcorn, and cook it through until the consistency seems about right

Chop the remaining fillet of San Pietro and add it to the pan together with the prawns

Again, you don’t really want to give this much more than five minutes. Season to taste, and dress with parsley (I don’t think chilli would have worked in this case. Coriander might have been nice though?)

Toasted bread on the side if you’ve got it.

Straightforward cooking, probably reasonably healthy, and two fun meals to prepare. Doesn’t have to be San Pietro, I imagine any firm-fleshed white fish would be fine – cod, haddock, even monkfish if you’re pushing the boat out.

Happy eating, everyone!