Recipes: A Seafood Feast

Stories of travel-related food adventures coming up soon, but in the meantime…

K’s grandfather turned 90 late last year, and we spent a while trying to think of a present to get him. But what do you get someone who’s been wearing the same clothes for the past thirty years, likes going to the same half a dozen restaurants and has already been everywhere and done everything?

I finally came up with the idea of going over on a weekend and simply cooking him a meal of his favourite things – shellfish!

For lunch, we ended up having:

• Raw oysters with a soy, coriander and ginger dipping sauce
• Mussels in an Italian-style tomato-based white wine sauce
• Prawns in the same Italian tomato sauce
• Crusty bread to soak up the sauce
• Mixed salad with cherry tomatoes, cucumber, sweet corn kernels and grilled haloumi

The sauce for the mussels and prawns is super simple to make. We made a huge pot of it to cook four kilos worth of mussels and a kilos worth of prawns, but you can easily halve or quarter this recipe for pasta or something similar.

Ingredients: Half a bottle of white wine, eight cans of crushed tomatoes, a bunch of basil, one onion, one clove of garlic.

1. Chop up the onion and garlic and brown in a big pot with a generous drizzle of olive oil.
2. Add the cans of crushed tomatoes until it comes to the boil.
3. Add the white wine and cook it on high for a few minutes to burn off the alcohol.
4. Reduce to a gentle simmer, then add chopped basil and stir.

You can then add seafood if you want it to be a seafood sauce, or just have it with pasta (or anything else!). Super simple, but the wine really makes it tasty, especially if you soak up the sauce at the bottom of your bowl with some fresh crusty bread.