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Fresh Ketch Restaurant, Tahoe Keys Marina

It might be a mile above sea level and a hundred miles from the coast, but Lake Tahoe has a sprinkling of accomplished seafood restaurants. Fresh Ketch, a few miles’ drive from the casinos at the Stateline on the South Shore, is an elegant restaurant on a private marina, overlooking the blue lake.

The menu offers a wide selection of seafoods alongside meat and vegetarian dishes. A ‘Treasures from the sea’ section was full of selections with special ingredients, to have instead of one of the excellent starters. Green-lipped mussel fritters, oysters on the half shell, a scallop and spinach gratin and a little dish of clams all jostled for attention. I opted for the clams.

These were fresh New Zealand clams, in a broth of white wine, garlic, herbs and butter. They were delicate and scented; the waiter very thoughtfully brought an extra utensil for Mr Weasel, who was enjoying a hot-smoked trout salad. We mopped up the rich broth with bread. This was a promising start to the meal.

Skiing all day is a killer. It’ll do peculiar things to your appetite, convincing you that what you really, really need is a chunk of protein the size of your head. I don’t do my best ordering when I’ve spend the day skiing, and given the choice available (King crab, Ahi tuna, Tilapia) I should, if I’d had my head screwed on properly, have ordered some of the excellent fish. I didn’t. I asked for an Angus filet. Fortunately for me, it was a beautiful piece of meat, perfectly cooked. (One of my favourite things about dining in America is the ease you have in ordering a steak. Steaks you order rare actually come rare; in England, asking for a rare steak is a gamble. You’ll either end up with something so raw it’s still twitching, or a greying lump of cooked-solid tissue.)

The steak was wrapped in a piece of pancetta, served with a port and shallot jus and garnished with the great American onion ring. I love onion rings, and this was a fine example; soft and sweet inside, and crisp outside, with a golden shell of crumbs. The steak was well-hung and tender.

Mr Weasel’s main course was that day’s special; Albacore with a mango salsa. Delicious.

The food was so good we were compelled to finish everything on our plates. These being American-sized portions, we were barely able to move by the time we finished the main course, and didn’t make it as far as dessert. We’ll make the effort to go back next year and save some room for pudding.

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South-Asian spiced fishcakes

My Mum recited this recipe, which she had just conjured from thin air, down the telephone the other evening. I’m always in the market for good store-cupboard recipes, and this sounded excellent: something to use up that can of good, fatty fish; some mellow and fiery curry spices; last night’s mashed potato; the eggs left over from my last cake; and some of the herbs clogging the fridge. This is a recipe where you need a canned fish rather than something fresh; it’s rich and moist but flaky, which is exactly what you require here.

I love Mummy’s fishcakes. They made a regular appearance on the table when I was a little girl, and since then she’s refined and tweaked them into something quite fantastic. They’re also very quick to prepare if you have some mashed potato hanging around, so next time you prepare some as an accompaniment, make a pound or so extra so you can try these the next day.

The little patties are dusted with cornflour to make them crisp and golden; we eat them with rice and some very serious feelings of gratitude. For about 16 fishcakes you’ll need:

1 can Alaskan red salmon (I went for Alaskan salmon because I’d just been reading Legerdenez, a perfume blog from Alaska which I commend to you – if you’re not in the mood for salmon, a good fatty tuna will also do well.)
6 small shallots
4 cloves garlic
1 large handful fresh coriander
1 ½ teaspoons curry powder (I use Bolsts)
1 red chilli
Zest of 1 lime
1 ½ tablespoons grated fresh ginger
2 eggs
1 lb mashed potato
1 teaspoon salt
Cornflour to dust
Butter and olive oil to fry

Put all the fishcake ingredients except the potato in the blender, and blitz until everything is roughly chopped. (The fish is quite salty already, so be careful not to oversalt.) Remove to a mixing bowl and use your hands to combine everything until well-blended.

Shape the mixture into patties the size of your palm, and dip in cornflour. Refrigerate for half an hour, then fry for five minutes each side until golden. Serve with rice and a sweet chilli sauce, or a wedge of lime .

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Otak-otak – spicy Malaysian fish patties

This is a cold-weather otak-otak. In Malaysia, you’d be wrapping your fish mousse in banana leaves and grilling the filled leaves over a charcoal fire outdoors. In England in January, you’re going to be wrapping it in home-made banana leaves (tin foil and greaseproof paper), and, unless you’re the masochistic sort who doesn’t mind hauling the barbecue out in the sub-zero night, dry-frying in a pan on the hob.

This recipe still shouts loudly that it’s from Malaysia; it’s packed with zingy spice. If you’re somewhere where they are available, use the banana leaves and add some galangal and candlenuts to the sambal (the paste at the start of the recipe), and some slivered Kaffir lime leaves to the fish mixture – even if you’re not, I think you’ll find this surprisingly authentic. You’ll need:

Sambal
1 ½ teaspoons blachan (fermented shrimp paste – available in Chinese supermarkets and from Seasoned Pioneers)
5 sun dried chilis
4 cloves garlic
2 knobs ginger
Zest of 2 limes
1 stem lemongrass
5 shallots
2 teaspoons turmeric

Fish mixture
6 mackerel, skin and bones removed
1/2 wine glass water
1 tin coconut milk
1 teaspoon sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons coriander seeds, roasted
Salt

Put all the sambal ingredients in a blender, and whizz until they’re a paste. Set them to one side. This will pong – blachan is very strong, and when it’s raw has a distinct and non-charming smell of dead things. Suspend your disbelief and keep cooking – it starts to smell better very soon. Remove your finished sambal to a bowl.

This sambal can form the base to a lot of Malaysian recipes – it’s strong, and it’s delicious. You can vary the amount of chili that you use depending on taste (I used a lot here – these are chilis that I bought in Malaysia last year, and they’re not particularly strong). As you become more used to the flavour, you may find yourself wanting to use more blachan. It is very strong – I keep ours in the garage, in case I offend the in-laws.

Remove the skin and the spiky backbone from the mackerel. In Malaysia, this would be a threadfin – Sainsbury’s don’t carry threadfin, so you’re stuck with mackerel. Any meaty, oily fish will work well. If you have two kittens, the skins will find a good home if you chop them up and stick them in a bowl. Put the flesh in the food processor with the water and blend until you’re left with a pale puree.

Add the coconut milk, the sugar, the eggs, coriander and salt. Pulse until everything is combined, then add the sambal you made earlier and process until you end up with a thick paste.

Cut rectangles of foil and greasproof paper measuring 15 x 30 cm. Put a piece of greaseproof on top of a piece of foil and lay three dessertspoons of paste down the centre. Fold everything up carefully. It’s not meant to be airtight; the packets are there to help your otak-otak both steam and grill, so you’ll have a lightly steamed mousse with a golden, grilled bottom.

Put your little packets in a frying pan without any oil over a medium flame, and toast them for between ten and fifteen minutes, until the mousse is wobbly but firm. Serve with rice and imagine you’re sitting in a Malaysian restaurant with zinc-top tables and dripping rainforest outside.

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Onuga ‘caviar’

Caviar. It’s expensive, it’s delicious, and we’re being encouraged to avoid it to save the Beluga sturgeon from extinction. Being an impoverished fan of the pressed salted stuff, my little heart leapt on reading that Waitrose were stocking Onuga, a ‘completely natural . . . caviar substitute’, which, according to their advertorial piece, has a ‘smoky. . . clean, fresh taste’. The man behind it, Patrick Limpus, is full of the ethical values contained in his little black pots, and says: ‘I love caviar, which is why I’m so proud to have come up with a worthy – and delicious – substitute.’

What follows is entirely my own fault. I used to work in magazine publishing, where one of my jobs was to edit adverts posing as real articles like this; I knew what the Waitrose magazine was doing, but I was still intrigued. I remained intrigued even when I looked at the tiny (and relatively expensive at £6) jar and read the words ‘reformed herring product’. It’ll be lovely little herring eggs, I posited. Dear little herring eggs that the nice man from the magazine has made salty and tasty for me. I love fish roe. I will walk miles for flying fish roe (tobiko) sushi (which is also a pretend fish roe product, not tasting of much on its own; the Japanese flavour and colour it until it’s something approaching manna), and I’d sell my soul for proper caviar. I knew I was going to be on my own at home all day on Sunday (Mr Weasel has to hand his thesis in on Wednesday, after several years of hard mathematical slogging, and is hiding in the lab polishing his diagrams), and decided I deserved a lunch of dear little herring eggs on blinis to cheer myself up in my solitude.

It started promisingly enough; the little black dots did look like fish roe, and on opening my precious jar I put one on the end of my finger, and licked. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, expecting the little egg to pop and release its delicious, oily juices . . . nothing. I chewed. Ah. That’s what they mean by ‘herring product’.

A little further reading revealed the true nature of my little jar of fishy punctuation marks. They’re reconstituted herring meat mixed with a seaweed product to make them gel into little balls, which are then salted and coloured with ‘vegetable carbon’. They taste like chewy taramasalata.

Onuga’s website makes it pretty clear that the emphasis in developing the product was on the mimicing the appearance rather than the flavour (or the incredibly important texture) of true caviar. ‘Onuga . . .’, they say, ‘. . . not only looks like the real thing but it tastes delicious too’. Delicious. Not ‘like caviar’. They claim it’s effortlessly superior in taste and texture to plain old lumpfish roe, which at least pops for you, rather than rolling round and round your mouth like pellets of fishy denture fixative.

The flavour is pleasant, but I feel I’d have been a bit better off with a tub of Waitrose’s very good premium taramasalata, or with a pack of smoked salmon. The texture is a disaster.

I’ve made twelve blinis. After piling all of them with creme fraiche, Onuga and chives, I eat three, and then I do something unheard of in this house – I throw the rest away.

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Smoked mackerel gratin

At work, my lunchtimes are regularly spent gossiping with friends over a pub baked potato. There is nothing wrong with baked potatoes; indeed, a baked potato can be a thing of wonder (something I hope to demonstrate in the coming weeks). The pub baked potato, however, is a sad, microwaved thing, whose cheese has been melted under heat-lamps as it waits to be served. More often than not, this means that the salad which has been shoved on the side of the plate is melting too.

Salads shouldn’t melt.

So. It’s time to rehabilitate the potato.

I love gratins; especially at this time of the year, when it’s getting cold, there is nothing nicer than lovely, starchy potato which has absorbed its own weight in scented milk and cream. You can make a whole meal of a gratin by adding extras – I had some smoked mackerel from Spinks in the fridge. A mackerel gratin is just the thing to start me feeling good about potatoes again.

I start out by infusing 240ml of milk with some thyme, a bay leaf and some parsley from the garden. This is a great application for the woody flowering tops of the parsley I can’t use to garnish (and which I should remove to make the leafy part of the plant more bushy). They’re very fragrant, and are perfect for this. I also add some celery leaves from the centre of a bundle in the fridge, a crushed clove of garlic, a clove, three peppercorns, a quartered shallot and some salt. The milk comes to a simmer and is taken off the heat while I slice the potatoes.

It’s important to slice the potatoes very thin. I wish I had a mandoline – a device to slice vegetables very evenly, and very thin. I make a mental note to go to the kitchen shop soon.

Slicing the potatoes thinly increases the surface area that’ll be exposed to the wet ingredients, and so increases the starchyness of your finished gratin (your sauce will be thicker); it’ll also result in a crisper finish. I layer them in a thick-bottomed, enamel dish, which has been buttered to within an inch of its life. One fillet of smoked mackerel goes on top of this, flaked, and then a final layer of potato goes on top.

I strain the infused milk through a sieve, then add 350ml of double cream to the herbs and spices that are left in the sieve, and simmer that on the stove too. The potatoes, fish and fragrant milk are covered with tin foil and put in an oven preheated to 220c. (Yes, I know I have sloshed milk all over the counter. And everything looks strangely glaucous because the light in my kitchen is atrocious and I have to use the flash.)

The house begins to smell very, very good.

Once the cream has come to a simmer, I remove it from the heat, and strain it into a jug with a tablespoon of grainy Dijon mustard. Twenty minutes later, most of the milk has been absorbed into the potatoes. I pour over the cream, sprinkle a little finely grated parmesan over the top, dot with butter and return the dish to the oven, without the tin foil. (I love my Microplane grater; I spent years sweating over grating solid chunks of parmesan, but I got a Microplane after I saw one being used in an Italian restaurant and asked what it was. It also does a beautiful job of pulping garlic and ginger.) I’m careful not to add too much parmesan; it’s there to flavour, not smother.

The gratin sits in the oven for another 25 minutes. When it comes out it is crisp and golden, and the creamy sauce is bubbling gently between the slices; the underside is golden too, and there is a soft, smoky layer of unctuous, creamy potato and mackerel in the middle.

This is how autumn food is meant to be.

Thankfully, I do not own a heat lamp, so the (bagged) salad is crisp and does not go wet and stinky on me.

Those particularly interested in the lore of the gratin, and the reasons for the wonderful, lactic taste that all of this messing around with potatoes and cream produces, should go directly to Amazon and buy everything Jeffrey Steingarten has ever written. This will not only inform you in wonderful, systematising detail about the miracle that occurs in your gratin dish, but will keep you implausibly happy in the bath for as long as it takes you to read it all, and then for the half hour (turn the hot tap on at this point; things will be getting a little clammy) it takes you to bemoan the fact that there isn’t a third volume.