Saturday, 12th of May!

Oreste had been waiting for today the whole week! His new motorbike, Cartman, was going to arrive at 11am and he was extremely excited.

A celebration dinner was in place!

My day started incredibly early: I got up at 5.30 to go to Billingsgate Market. Good thing I had two friends to go with me, Qun and Ale, otherwise would have been incredibly difficult to get up 🙂

I love to go to Billingsgate. The variety of fish is fantastic and the prices are a lot better than in the supermarkets. Every time I go there I have an urge of buying every single thing I see!

‘Oh…look at those clams – I can do that clam risotto that I’ve been wanting to make for a while… or Oh…fantastic monkfish…I can do that amazing Moroccan recipe with monkfish and prawns marinated in a chermoula sauce and then skewed and grilled…’

Today the winner was a fantastic 1.2kg Wild Sea Bass

 

As soon as I’ve seen it I knew exactly what I was going to cook:

Sea Bass in sea salt and herbs crust.

From Billingsgate to my place to clean up the fish, task that I find quite amusing! Particularly the part of scaling it: if you’re not carefull there will be flying scales all over the kitchen – eheheh

Cartman arrived at 11:30am. Oreste was thrilled!

After a light lunch Oreste took me for my first ride! We actually had to go and pick up Leia, my scooter and Cartman’s new and little sister, from servicing and get rid of a few scratches at The London Scooter Body Shop http://thelondonscooterbodyshop.co.uk/ in Islington. This workshop is excellent and if you have a scooter I truly recommend it – Dave is the sort of person that really cares and likes what he does… and I feel Leia is in very good hands whenever she needs special attention.

My first ride in Cartman proved to be not only a wondeful experience but also very useful.

At around 19:45 I started preparing our dinner.

First thing was to prepare the crust / dough with sea salt, herbs ( a mixture of basil, parsley, rosemary and sage), flour and egg whites:

I then divided the dough in two halves, rolled it out into two similar parcels making sure the sea bass would fit in between them.

After making sure the fish was well enclosed, it went to the oven for approximately 45 minutes.

While the sea bass was cooking I prepared the balsamic vinegar sauce and the spinach.

 

45 minutes later the sea bass was ready….

…and our meal was served!

 

 

 

I decided to have it with a Vouvray Sec! I haven’t tried this specific one but knew it would go very well with white fish…and it did! The combination was perfect. As usual my favourite sommelier at Nicolas did not disappoint me 🙂

 

 

And that’s how Cartman was received by the M&M family! Welcome!