Day 2 of Light and Natural Cooking

Day 2 of Light and Natural Cooking was to make fish dishes with its garnishes.

I have the pleasure of announcing that in this practical, we made 4 out of 4 dishes that Chef demo'ed!

First, is a Smoke-Infused Milk and Saffron Risotto, Haddock Petals with Asparagus.

Second is a Skate Escabeche, Fennel in Salt Crust. It's an interesting way to cook vegetables (and fish too! except it's more a salt/eggwhite crust) in a salt/dough crust. It's slowly baked till golden on the outside, and when you cut through, the vegetable, in this case, a fennel bulb, remains juicy and full of aroma in the interior.

You can eat the dough, but it's not that tasty.

In SG, we call skate, ray, or stingray, it's fileted and light pan fry, finished cooking with a sour sweet onion/tomato marinate called escabeche which is popular in S.American countries.

The third dish is Hake, Green Sauce with Shellfish.

You can use any shellfish, but today, we've only cockles (unfortunately, I don't like cockles so much, years of watching my parents devour bloody half boiled cockles gave me bad dreams!) But it seems that French cockles look and taste almost like baby clams, with a more iron aftertaste.

We don't find hake in SG (or Fr: Colin). It's a long slender quite a large fish, very tender flesh.

Last but not least, is the Grilled Sole, Little Gems (like a mini Tianjin cabbage) a la Plancha and Meat Jus.

To be honest, we didn't exactly grill both of them, we used the pan with very little oil. After the sole has been cooked, it's neatly filleted, the centre bone carefully removed, and pieced together again. The way the Sole Meuniere would have been done!

There, I proved myself the impossible to finish 4 dishes in 2.5 hrs!