Saturday night fish recipes

A few weeks ago, I tried this salmon recipe from the Coles website: ginger and soy glazed salmon with buk choy.  The glaze and the salmon worked a treat, but the coconut rice (which I had never tried cooking before) burnt thoroughly on the bottom of the saucepan despite my attempt to use as low a gas flame as I could, and was unusable.   Maybe a heavier based pan next time?  I didn't realise coconut rice could be tricky.

Tonight, it was an old favourite, from an old recipe book I've had for maybe 20 years - The Macquarie Dictionary of Cookery.

This book, which I see was reprinted in 1991, is truly remarkable for the terrible quality of the illustrations.  There are no photos at all, just the occasional bad black and white line drawing.  For example, the entry on Spanish cooking  is illustrated thus:

Yet, despite the terrible look of the internal pages, it has proved to be a pretty reliable resource for your basic household recipes.  If you want a straight forward recipe for scones, stews, or (as in tonight's case) trout with almonds, it's very reliable, even if you have no idea at all what the final result should look like.

I've made the trout with almond recipe before and always liked it.  Strangely, given her general love of all seafood, my wife eats trout but without great enthusiasm.  I've always liked it, and I just can't work out why she downplays its qualities.  So I get to cook it only once a year or so.

Tonight, the kids ate this too and had no complaints.  Farmed trout is always available and (I see with pleasure) a reliably cheap-ish fish too. (About $16 a kilo today for filleted trout at Coles, and one big fillet each is plenty for this dish with lots of butter.  I cringe at buying fillet fish which is more than $30 a kilo, as many are these days.)

Anyhow, for each of my future reference, in case my crappy Macquarie cook book ever falls apart, here it is:

I don't worry about whether it's fresh parsley or not I use with the almond sauce; tonight I used oregano (which grows permanently and reliably in our garden, unlike parsley) in its place, although I also had a bit of thyme and its flavour works well in a butter sauce I think. As I indicated earlier, I just buy rainbow trout fillets if I can, and don't worry about extracting the bones.  They are so fine they are not going to chock anyone, and even my kids didn't bother pulling them out as they ate.

Maybe I can work up to having it once every 6 months, or 4, if I am lucky!