Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a grain like crop, grown primarily for it's edible seeds. I am of course talking about quinoa, the nature of which I was as clueless about as it's pronunciation. I am exaggerating of course - eating quinoa is a crucial rite of passage for all middle class wannabes and although I had never tried it before, I knew that it was basically a posher variety of cous cous.
Anyway, as I mentioned in my last post, my trip to the farmer's market may not have contributed to Sunday's meal, but I did make one important discovery. My Twitter followers (all four of them - hello!) will be aware that that discovery was of course a punnet of rather exciting looking tomatoes - a variety pack if you will. There were red ones, orange ones, on-the-vine ones, cherry ones, big ones, smooth ones, knobbly ones... to me it was a discovery of almost Columbus level proportions. If it wasn't for the fact that Sunday is not a good day to be buying fish, I would have gone home and cooked this dish straight away. As it turned out, I finished work early today, so it worked out perfectly to visit the fishmongers on the way home. The fishmonger fixed me up with two huge mackerel (only me and Lolz for dinner tonight!) and later that evening I got to work...
I immediately ran into one problem. The instructions in the book tell you to add the quinoa to boiling water and cook for 10 minutes. The instructions on the pack however said to add it to cold water, bring it to the boil and cook for around 20 minutes, until the water has evapourated. I decided to put my trust in the instructions on the packet, and resigned myself to taking longer than 15 minutes - given that the fish were also considerably bigger than the 200g ones in the recipe, this may turn out to be a good thing. The big fish did actually cause a bit of a problem of their own as I couldn't fit them in the pan. I had to basically curl them around the outside of the pan and hope for the best. Other than that though, it's very straightforward - Lolz even remarked on how tidy the kitchen was!
Visually, the dish is certainly a hit. It's looks fresh, colourful and exciting. The mackerel lost a bit of it's structural integrity (i.e. fell apart) on taking it out of the pan but it looked crispy and delicious. Taste wise it didn't disappoint either, although Lolz did make a huge mess of attempting to remove meat from bone. I was a bit worried that the tomatoes and quinoa would be a bit bland, but the oil, vinegar and chilli ensured that was not the case. Mighty indeed.
Lolz gave the dish 9/10. Difficulty rating 2/10.
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