Herby grilled sardines - gore warning!

Those Padron peppers have got me thinking about Spain, sunny weather and booze, so last night I made a selection of tapas and a big jug of sangria to eat in the garden.

It rained, so we ate indoors.

Some fat sardines, marinaded in olive oil, lemon, garlic and herbs, formed the core of the meal. (More recipes, including one for sangria, to come next week.) If you're fortunate enough to be able to find some really fresh sardines, which are sweet and tender, this simple preparation really makes the most of them.

Sardines come with a built-in set of biological zips, and can easily be cleaned, gutted and filleted with your bare hands, without any need for a knife until you come to the end and chop the tails off. It's all a lot less unpleasant than you might think; really fresh sardines don't smell at all fishy, just sea-like and delicious, even when raw, and I think there's a real satisfaction that comes from doing this kind of thing yourself.

You'll need to start by removing the scales from the whole fish. This is very easy - just run a cold tap and gently rub the fish with your fingers under the running water. The scales will come away as you rub. They are quite large and might block the plughole in your sink - scoop them out every now and then and put them in a bowl or a bin bag at the side of the sink. You'll need this bowl or bag to put the heads and guts in as you prepare the fish.

To gut and clean the sardine, hold the head in your dominant hand and the body in your other hand. Snap the head off downwards, towards the fish's belly, and pull it away from the body. Most of the fish's innards will come away easily with the head, as in the picture. You'll find that some of the sardines are rather fuller than the others; these are the greedy or pregnant ones.


Stick a thumb into the cavity that has appeared where the guts were, and slide your thumb along the underside of the fish to open up the cavity. You'll find the fish unzips easily up to the point about a quarter of the way from the tail where its digestive tract ends. Run the opened fish under the tap, pulling any remaining bits of gut out of the cavity, and rinse the cavity out until it is clean and no longer bloody.

Your emptied fish should look like this.


You can stop at this point, and go straight to the marinading stage if you don't mind pulling the fish's spine out on your plate with your knife and fork. I prefer to fillet and butterfly the fish before cooking - this means that it has the maximum surface area available to soak up the lovely marinade. Removing the backbone is, again, very easy (and probably the most zip-like bit of taking apart this strangely zip-like fish). To open the fish up, put your thumb in that cavity and push your thumb along the underside of the fish to the tail. The fish can then be laid flat on a board. Starting at the head end, pull the spine out of the fish, zip-style, and chop off the tail with a knife.


You'll be left with some tiny, hair-thin bones in the flesh, but you can leave these alone; they are so fine that you can eat them, and they won't prick your mouth. I like to trim the edges of the filleted pieces of fish for neatness, but you can leave them ragged if you like.

To make enough marinade for eight sardines (enough to serve two as a main course), you'll need:

1 wineglass olive oil
Juice and zest of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons each finely chopped parsley, oregano and basil
1 teaspoon crushed dried chilli
2 cloves garlic, crushed
8 turns of the peppermill

Mix all the marinade ingredients in a large bowl and submerge the sardine fillets in the mixture, adding a little more olive oil if necessary to cover. Marinade for at least three hours.

Sprinkle the sardines with salt and cook for about three minutes per side over charcoal or under a conventional grill turned to high, starting with the fleshy side and doing the skin side last. Use a wide spatula to turn the fillets carefully - they will be quite fragile. Baste the fish with any remaining marinade as it cooks. The skin should turn crisp and golden, and start to blister slightly.

We ate this with Padron peppers, chorizo al vino (recipe to come next week), a hunk of good bread and a jug of sangria. Not quite as good as going on holiday, but close.

Honey-mustard pork steaks with onion and apple pilaf

I'm going to the US for ten days tomorrow for a friend's wedding in MA and my first trip to New York. (Yes, I am almost pathologically excited about the restaurants.) Posts may be a bit thin on the ground while I'm away, but I'll try to update occasionally.

Today's recipe is a nice easy marinade for some pork shoulder steaks (a lean cut that benefits from some robust marinading), and an onion and apple pilaf to accompany them. What is it about apples and pork that works so well together? I've used Braeburn apples here - although they're an eating apple rather than a cooking one, they hold their shape well when cooked, especially if you leave the skin on, and that skin is a pretty pink, so they look good too. Being an eating apple, they're also nice and sweet, which is fantastic with the salty pork. This is an economical dish to cook for a lunch party. You can often find pork steaks on sale at a low price, and although rice is more expensive these days, it's still not crippling. Serve alongside a nice lemony salad to cut through the sweetness.

To serve six, you'll need:

Pork
6 pork steaks
3 heaped tablespoons grainy Dijon mustard
3 heaped tablespoons runny honey
4 tablespoons light soy sauce
Juice of 1 lemon
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Pilaf
800 g Basmati rice
2.25 litres chicken stock
2 large onions
3 Braeburn apples
5 cloves garlic
1 cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon crushed dry chilli
8 fresh sage leaves, finely chopped
1 small handful parsley
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon soft brown sugar
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper

Pork method
Marinade the pork in the mustard, honey, lemon, soy and olive oil overnight. Cook under a hot grill, about 7 minutes per side, basting frequently with the marinade.

Pilaf method
Slice the onions thinly. Core two of the apples and chop them into dice. Chop the garlic. Sauté the onions, garlic and apple pieces with the chillies and cinnamon stick in the olive oil and butter until soft. Stir in the balsamic vinegar and sugar with a teaspoon of salt, and allow the vinegar to bubble and reduce for thirty seconds. Tip the dry rice and the sage into the pan and stir well to make everything is mixed. Pour over the hot stock and bring to a fast boil, then immediately turn the heat down low, put the lid on and simmer gently for 12 minutes. Season to taste and dress with the remaining apple (diced or sliced - it's up to you) and some fresh parsley.

SealSaver vacuum tubs

Finally - a gadget I really rate! If you're a regular reader, you'll know that I am not always a huge fan of gadgets in the kitchen. I know that a lot of you have limited storage space your own kitchens, and this means that owning a special great hunk of plastic and metal which is only useful for coring and peeling pineapples is an irritation rather than a help. Most kitchen tasks can be achieved with good knives; a really good grater also helps, and I will also admit the usefulness of a collection of measuring jugs and cups, and perhaps the odd silicone spatula or medical syringe.

I have welcomed another worthwhile gadget into regular use in my kitchen - and this happens very seldom. A few weeks ago, I was sent the SealSaver system: a trio of storage vessels in varying sizes with a cunning vacuum pump mechanism built into the lid. I agreed to review them, expecting to find them diverting and perhaps helpful. I wasn't expecting to fall in love with them, though; and my whirlwind affair with these plastic cylinders isn't over yet. I've been marinading, brining, storing stinky things and pumping, pumping, pumping as if my life depended on it.

SealSaver tubs allow you to store foods in a vacuum, which retards spoilage, especially if you then place the tub in the fridge. You suck the air out using a sort of bellows mechanism built into the lid - everything feels very solid and well engineered. A valve pops inside-out when there is a vacuum inside the tub, and no top-up pumping is necessary. The whole assembly clips apart and can be washed in the dishwasher (hurrah!); the bowl is also microwave-safe. Storing your bits and bobs in one of these in the freezer also eliminates freezer burn. And the bowls are also thoughtfully marked with liquid measurements.

A fan of the scientific process, I carried out some experiments involving raw, chopped onions, coffee grounds and washed salad, using my usual method (bowl, cling film, fridge) as a control and comparing with the same refrigerated ingredients in the SealSaver. (Not all in the same tub.) There's definitely something in this vacuum storage malarkey - my elderly control onion stank of brimstone after a week, while my SealSaver onion stayed fresh and lively. Coffee retained its flavour and odour for a whole week even outside the fridge, and the salad wilted long after its friend in the bowl with the cling film.

So I'm absolutely sold on the SealSaver for storage. The moment, for me at least, the tubs really came into their own was when I started dabbling with vacuum marinading and brining.

If you marinade meat in a vacuum, some magic occurs whereby the marinade is pushed into the meat in a fraction of the time it would take at normal pressure. I'm not 100% sure of the science behind this - I've heard explanations which have taken in expansion in the meat's pores (pores - surely not?), crazy speedy osmosis and a kind of reverse squashing effect from the low pressure. I am still none the wiser on how it works, but I can inform you that it does work, and it works like a dream. I was able to cut down on marinading time for chicken pieces by an eighth (an hour rather than overnight), and brined a whole chicken in the largest of the three to perfection in twenty minutes. Spare ribs took half an hour. (Recipes to follow in later posts - I'll include marinading times for those of you without a vacuum-in-a-pot.) The meats were tender and moist, and had taken up the marinade beautifully.

This is more than convenient. It's lunch-changing. How often have you picked up a recipe, thought: 'My, that'd be great for supper,' and then failed to cook because it needs marinading for four hours and the family is becoming fractious and grumpy through lack of food? You can reduce those four hours to half an hour if you buy your own tubs at the SealSaver website. I heartily recommend cramming a small chicken into the largest one.