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20th December 2016
12:18am GMT
Spring is in the air in Dublin. With a little heat on my back I ventured out into the garden and decided it was time to eat al fresco for the first time. It wasn’t the worst winter ever but thank fucking god we are through it now and we have long days and summer walks and balmy nights to look forward to. Either that or it could just piss it down with rain all summer with last year being a fluke. So with warmer temperatures comes different food. This dish is really simple to make, takes it’s inspiration from Italy and will work great in a dirty big bowl to be eaten out in the garden or on the terrace. Give is a lash.
The ingredients have a nice spring feel about them. Get a couple of sea bass fillets and make sure the fish monger cleans the bastards up for you.
Lots of shops have them pre-packed and cleaned like this. Take them out of the packet and they'll be ready to cook.
Drizzle oil, pepper and salt onto them. Chopping them into smaller pieces makes them easier to cook.
Lash on a frying pan and crank the heat up as high as you can. Lash on the water for your pasta at this stage too. When the pan is smoking hot lash the fish in skin side down.
After about a minute flip the bastards over and cook for a minute on that side before taking them straight off the heat.
Chop the shit out of your garlic. Nice and fine and don't be shy with it.
Lash the pan back on with a generous amount of oil and slowly cook the garlic extracting the flavour from it.
Cut the super woody end of the stalks off the asparagus. About an inch or so of them are usually too hard. Bin them.
Chop the spears off.
The cut the rest if the stem into little round pieces.
Fuck the little round pieces into the pan with the garlic and cook them slowly for about 4-5 minutes. Should be smelling like spring all over the house by now.
Fuck in the artichokes and the semi sun dried tomatoes. All you are doing here is warming them up as they are both already cooked.
Last bit of prep is to grate the parmesan and slice up the basil. Not rocket science that bit.
Lash the pasta into the water to boil along with the tips of the asparagus. You should be using fresh pasta which takes about 2 minutes max to cook.
Pop the fish back into the veg mix. All you are doing here is warming it up again. Be careful as fish is delicate.
Strain the pasta and asparagus and fuck it in with the fish and veg.
Lash in the parmesan and basil. Starting to smell whopper now you'll notice.
Stir the whole thing together and take it off the heat. You need a light touch here to gently mix it all together but not to smash up the fish and make it look like shit.
Serve it up and watch your mate's jaws drop. One of the tastiest and simplest little recipes you'll ever make.
I think people get seriously intimidated by cooking fish and they also tend to stick with the same old plain jar bought sauces for pasta. You don’t need to be a fucking nuclear physicist to rustle this bad boy up and what I usually do is cooking about 3 times the portion size I need so as I can lash it into a lunch box and heat it up for dinner the next night. Will blow your mind just how good this is.
