Antipasti and fish curry

Last night we had an enormous meal. It began with antipasti and sherry - we piled little plates with marinated garlic cloves, sunblush tomatoes, avocada salsa, cold, sliced ham, black olives, marinated white anchovies, pepperdews, warm ciabatta and many other goodies.

If that wasn't enough, we then got stuck in to the main course - a delicate fish curry with coconut milk and tamarind, served with white rice and green beans with a chilli/black mustard seed and garlic dressing.

And then we had cheese...

I was stuffed.

Oily fish on a Sunday

On the last few Sundays we've had a salad with oily fish for lunch and it's felt good. Today, we had a proper lunch so only needed a snack for supper (particularly after our mega-meal last night). So we finished off the meat and veg left over from our steak fajitas yesterday with some delicious Waitrose organic brown bread and marinated herring, for the oily fish bit. I think this Sunday oily fish thing we've got going is pretty good - it'll keep our essential oil count up, anyway.

NYE supper of prawns and Dover sole

Wow, our brains are going to be healthy in 2007 with this amount of seafood. We had an early supper to line our stomachs and allow enough drinking time. The starter was big prawns, simply cooked with garlic and ginger (see them in the pan below), served with a bit of the bread from the day before to mop up the juices and a squeeze of lemon. They were meaty and so, so tasty. Prawns (and scallops) are easily my favourite seafood - not the tiny, flavourless supermarket prawns, but big, fresh prawns like these that pack a bit of a punch.

For mains we had our big Dover sole, grilled with lots of butter and dismembered by me (sorry - I forgot to photograph it before I served the fish on our plates) with lightly mashed new potatoes smothered in garlic and olive oil (I'd chopped the garlic earlier in the evening and left it in the olive oil to flavour it and save time later - I was quite proud of that trick!), simple leeks and I thought I'd add some colour by finishing off the cherry tomatoes with a bit of balsamic vinegar.

We didn't have any pudding - having had a load more to drink and danced around we just forgot, I think, although we had bought some cheese to nibble on later.

Mussels for Saturday lunch

Well, we were by the sea, so fish was on the menu. We went to the beach-side fishmonger in the morning but sadly they didn't have mussels, although we did get big, raw prawns and a large Dover sole to share for our New Year's Eve dinner. The local Waitrose did provide the mussels though, and I felt a little foolish knowing those mussels had probably travelled most of the country before getting back to the seaside, but I guess that's how it all works. We also managed to buy some scallops at great expense in Waitrose, as the fishmonger didn't have any in.

For lunch I cooked the mussels in white wine and lots of garlic, adding double cream, a touch of butter and fresh parsley and tarragon at the end. We sliced a delicious organic brown loaf from Waitrose (look out for them if you live near a Waitrose) to dip in the sauce and eat on the side, thickly spread with butter. The mussels were good, but slighly flabby - I don't think it was my cooking, at least I hope it wasn't - perhaps it was something to do with they way they were rope-grown, as I usually buy 'wild' ones, if I can.

And... this is what you need on a Sunday morning...

A bacon butty. Best with brown or wholemeal toast, crispy back bacon and heinz tomato ketchup. People who like their butty with sliced white bread, floppy bacon and brown sauce are just wrong.