Ingredients

• 8 medium potatoes
• 1 large onion
• Bunch of corriander
• 2 cans of tuna in oil
• Salt and pepper

First off peel and quarter the potatoes, boil them, let them cool, then mash them. Chop the corriander and the onion finely and add them to the mash. Strain the tuna to get rid of the excess oil and mix that up with all the other ingredients. Lastly add the salt and pepper – plenty of pepper.

Heat up some groundnut oil in your pan (that’s peanut oil for our American cousins). Make lovely fishcake shaped patties out of your mix, and fry them up taking care not to burn them. Have your oven on, so you can keep the cooked ones warm, cos you won’t fit them all in your pan, unless of course you are sadly eating alone. Don’t forget to do a test patty, in case you want to add more seasoning or turn the heat down a touch.

Like I said, I’ve never been that hot on fish but, i have already made these again they were so damn good. Especially with Rocinantes Red Pepper Sauce (Homage to Barney) and Sensi’s patented Vegetangles

Pin the fish down by its tail on a board , & using the back of a knife scrape the fish from tail to head. Rub your fingers up & down the body to check for any rogue scales, the skin should feel smooth.

Tip within a tip…To avoid the scales-a-flyin’ do the above under a cold tap, collecting the scales in a colander underneath.

To gut a fish slit the belly open, cutting from its bumhole, up to the gills and pull out the innards. Rinse off any residue blood etc. with cold water.

Fins can be cut off with scissors, just open them up with thumb & forefinger & snip away.

Alternatively, don’t do any of the above & impress/shock/alienate your nearest & dearest by swallowing the fish whole.

The Sensi and I do a bit of a mad one in Sainsbury’s and go on a mad fish bender. We start with the raw deveined prawns. I wasn’t sure what “deveined” meant , apparently it’s when the all the gak gets removed from the spine, you know all the brown nasty bits.

So this recipe is the simplest and most flippin’ delicious dish that you can imagine for such little effort. I can honestly say that this is probably the nicest prawn dish that I’ve ever had… Not bad considering Pat just made it up on the fly.

Anyway. Here’s what we need for the spice mix.

• Teaspoon of Paprika
• Teaspoon of mild Chilli powder
• Pinch of Cummin
• pinch of crushed dry chilli
• pinch of dried oregano

The remaining ingrediants are

• 12 RAW fat prawns – Tiger will do
• Olive oil
• half a Red onion
• Clove of garlic
• half a lemon

Ok, so grab a decent sized frying pan, pour olive oil into the pan until it’s fully covered to an even shallow depth. Heat the oil up until it is very hot and then chuck in the finely chopped red onion.

Let the onions cook for a minute until just before they go brown. This confused me a little, how do you know they are going to go brown? Essentially if a few of the little bits are browned then that means the rest are about to follow. Now chuck in the spices and stir around, shake the pan, until the onions are infused with the spices. Now add the coursely chopped garlic clove, wait about ten seconds and bung in the prawns.

As the prawns lay there looking sexy in their red bed, crush a little sea salt over each prawn and then stir and flip them for a minute. Don’t be afraid of the pan, give them a good tossing (nothing like tossing a good prawn!). Squeeze the lemon into the pan, over the prawns. Toss and stir again.

Serve. Make sure you get all of the sauce out of the pan and cover the prawns, garnish if you like and make sure that you have some crusty bread to soak it up with.

There you have it. Ten minutes of preperation and cooking and a really nice dish with a bit of poke. Really nice for a starter or to impress your mediterranean mates.
The pictures were taken with a Sony-Ericsson W800i, we were listening to some nice old Jamaican reggae, the Doors and a tune we really need to find the name of. Pat who was the old dub?