A Village Life








Wednesday, September 15, 2010

more culinary conquests

So my hubby's obsession with kaimoana continues.  I forgot to mention the paua he brought home from work the other day.  Paua is the Kiwi name for abalone although in true fashion abalone are much more American sized and paua are a smaller variation.  Anyway, they are setting up for a big paua experiment at Pete's work.  He made a trip north to pick up 400 of the suckers for the lab.  Thinking they looked pretty tasty and they probably had more than they required, a co-worker and Pete set about picking out some prime eaters to take home.....only to get caught red handed by the academic who was in charge of the experiment.  No worries, he said, so Pete brought home his little stash so he could taste the goods.  Thinly sliced and fried in butter.  Delicious, he proclaimed!  Then a few days ago Pete was out spearfishing at work......as you do.  Of course he had to bring home something from the day so he proudly showed off these guys: a butter fish and a yellow eyed mullet (I could be wrong with the name of that one but I will carry on with the story anyway). 

Butter fish are vegetarian so they only eat algae or something like that which gives their flesh and bones a greenish blue tinge.  Quite intriguing.  We've yet to fry this guy up but Pete's parents cooked theirs up using a recipe from Al Brown's Go Fish book, a must have for any Kiwi fisherman.  Parmesan crusted butter fish fillets with butter bean puree, tomatoes and basil. 

The yellow eyed whatever it was proved to be tasty by just grilling it on the grill pan and serving it au naturel. 
Ever so thrifty and frugal, my husband cleverly threw together a smoked fish pie (with the leftover fish from the weekend) for the girls last night, once again following a recipe from Al Brown.  It was topped with a kumara and mashed potato mixture with buttered croutons on top of that!

I am watching a seafood culinary obsession unfold before my eyes.  What will be next?

1 comment:

  1. I have this awesome pic in my mind of Pete with a sinister little mustache being like "I know we're studying how to preserve this population of endangered species....but damn, those are good eats.....i'll just stuff a few in my pockets."

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