Begin by peeling and boiling the potatoes in salted water until just soft, small potatoes can be left whole, bigger potatoes should be cut into halves or quarters. Drain, cut into thick slices and put to one side.

While the potatoes are boiling cut the bacon into strips and grill until crispy. Also heat a large saucepan of water to boiling point, keep it on the boil, ready for the poached egg.

Once the potatoes and bacon are cooked it’s time to cook the haddock fillet and poach the egg. Heat a tablespoon of oil in a frying pan and fry the haddock fillet for about 4 minutes, skin side up. Whilst the haddock is cooking add the potato slices to the frying pan to crisp up a little and turn golden brown.

Once the haddock is cooked remove from the pan and flake the flesh with a fork, removing the skin and discarding. Add the crispy bacon, and the potaotes to the fish and serve over a bed of lambs lettuce.

To poach the egg crack it into the saucepan of boiling water you prepared earlier – in good old Blue Peter fashion! Poach the egg for approx 3 minutes, for practically perfect timing begin poaching the egg just before you remove the fish from the pan for flaking. When everything else is on the plate the egg will just need placing on top.

Enjoy!

To begin with prepare the marinade, I finely chopped some chili pepper, ginger and garlic, mix them together with a little lemon juice and rub into the fresh mackerel fillets. You can ask your fishmonger to de-bone the fillets if you are not confident doing it yourself, which is what I did

Let the mackerel fillets marinade in the fridge for about 20 minutes, then wrap loosley in fin foil and bake in an oven, 180C, for about 15 minutes.

While the mackerel is cooking you can prepare the rest of the salad. I used some ready to eat beans, you can buy them in cans from most supermarkets. I used cannellini beans, black turtle beans and soyal beans, you simply need to drain and toss together in a bowl with the watercress and a little lemon oil.

Arrange the bean and watercress salad on a serving plate and top with the baked mackerel.

Enjoy!

To begin with make the sauce, a Marie Rose sauce, you will need 3 or 4 tablespoons of Mayonnaise, mix this with a little Tomato Ketchup , just enough to make the mayonnaise pink. Now add a little Tabasco Sauce, and a pinch sea salt and black pepper to taste.

The next part is even easier, drain a small can of salmon and flake into a bowl, add to this a good handful of cooked prawns, chop the prawns if they are large, small prawns you can leave whole. Mix together then add to the sauce and mix again. You could use a can of prepared crab meat instead of the salmon if you wanted, the result is just as tasty.

Finally, chop a little celery and red onion, mix together with the other ingredients and you’re finished. Leave to stand in the fridge for about half an hour before serving.

Enjoy!

Depending on how many mussels you’ve saved, you’ll need some green leaves (I used Iceberg). If you’re a proper bloke, go easy on the leaves but make em stick out so it looks like you got plenty.

Next, get some complementary veg… some firm veg that you can sautee. I’ve used cauliflower and I only cooked it for a couple of minutes, because I love the peppery taste of raw cauli. But you could use shredded raw carrot, sauteed onions, a shredded bulb of fennel of course or even some rösti-ed potato. Just make sure you cut it into bite-sized chunks and get some colour on it in the frying pan. Leave to cool slightly.

Now get your pestle and mortar out. Take a handful of fennel seeds and grind em down to little fibres. The smell will tell you if you’ve crushed the seeds enough. Then add yesterday’s cooked mussels. I must warn you at this point that it is NOT a good idea to keep mussels — even cooked ones — in your fridge for more than a couple of days.

Add the mussels straight to the mortar if it’s big enough. Then start adding fine breadcrumbs and toss, until they are all properly coated. Add a bit of seanoning, like for example sea salt, a bit of garlic powder and paprika or cayenne powder.
Again, heat up some oil in a frying pan and shallow-fry the mussels until they really start to colour. Don’t overcook em — remember they are already cooked.

Cover a nice little bowl or dish with your green leaves, then stack up the sauteed veg and a good heap of crispy but juicy mussels. If you’re bold, then drizzle some herb-flavoured oil over the lot, or add a splash of it on the side. Depending on the veg you chose, you could add thyme, dill or parsley. Coriander oil is really nice with mussels but it wouldn’t go well with cauliflower, so coriander lovers should stick to oriental type veg like bamboo shoots, Chinese cabbage or plain old cucumber.

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Once the sardines were prepared, two per person, wash under cold running water and leave to one side.

Next, wash some Jersey Royal potatoes, but don’t remove the skin. If you can’t get Jersey Royals any small new potato will be ok. Chop into bite size pieces and boil for about 10 minutes and drain.

Hard boil some eggs, 1 or 2 per person, cool in iced water, then peel the shells and chop into bite size pieces. Take some Sugar snap peas, wash and boil for a few minutes and drain.

While the potatoes, eggs and peas are cooking, shred some Romaine Lettuce and mix with some sliced spring (green) onions.

Once the potatoes and peas were drained, I placed them on a hot griddle for a few moments, just to brown them a little, then mixed them with the Romaine Lettuce, Spring (green) onion, and chopped eggs. I then tossed the whole lot in some lemon infused olive oil and arranged on a serving plate.

The sardines were cooked last, on the griddle for a minute or so each side. Don’t forget to rub them with some salt, pepper and olive oil first. Then they were placed on top of the salad.

Enjoy!

For the Crayfish and pea shoot salad, simply place equal amounts of crayfish tails and pea shoots into a bowl and lightly toss with some lemon olive oil. That’s it! Ridiculously easy but tasty and satisfying.

Pea shoots are the tender vine tips of green or garden peas and are eaten as a vegetable. They can be eaten fresh or cooked and make a good alternative to spinach. They have a delicate pea flavour, and are becoming more popular. You should be able to find them in any large supermarket.

To make the pesto, boil 250g of garden peas, for a few minutes, drain and allow to cool. Once cooled place in a bowl and blend with 50g of pine nuts, 50g of grated Parmesan cheese, a handful of chopped chives, 1 clove of garlic, crushed and enough olive oil to make a smooth paste. I used a hand blender for this, but you can also place all the ingredients in a regular blender, just remember to add the oil slowly until you get the right consistency. The pesto is now ready to eat.

Now, although the crayfish and pea shoot salad looks very pretty, the pesto looks like, well, a pesto, which in my opinion is a bit boring, I like a bit more colour. So I decided to follow instructions, from a magazine article, I had seen years ago and cut out to keep, to make a flower from a red pepper for decoration – an edible decoration of course

To make the edible pepper flower, cut a red pepper into 4, remove the seeds, cover in foil and roast for about 20 minutes. Once cooled remove the skin, and lay the pieces out flat. From them cut 5 circular shapes, I made mine about an inch or so in diameter. Then simply place them in a flower shape, slightly overlapping each other. I used a small dot of course grain mustard to make the centre of the flower, and used chives to give the impression of a stem and leaves.

To one side of the flower I place some of the pesto, topped with some chopped chives, and to the other side the crayfish and pea shoot salad.

You could also make some Melba toast to go with this if you wanted. I find it a bit dry, but I know others like it with pesto.

Enjoy

First, you will need to marinade the prawns in the sweet chili sauce, about 20 minutes in the fridge will be sufficient. To cook the prawns I used my George Foreman lean mean grilling machine, wait for the grill to get hot and then place the prawns on the grill and close the lid. The prawns take a couple of minutes to cook, but check they have fully changed colour before you remove them.

Remember to use the drip tray, as some of the sweet chili sauce will run off. If you don’t have one of these grills, you can grill them under a regular grill, the result will be the same, but remember to turn them after a minute, so that both sides brown.

while the prawns were cooking I quickly washed and chopped some iceberg lettuce, cucumber, spring or green onions and a couple of cherry tomatoes, mixed them and placed on a serving plate. I also added the remaining sweet chili sauce in a little dish, to the serving plate.

Once my prawns were cooked, I used a set of tongs to hold the prawns whilst I put a skewer through them to make prawn kebabs. Now you can skewer them before cooking, but I like to be able to pick up kebabs, hot wood is not fun to hold, so I skewer them afterwards.

Then place the prawn kebabs on top of the salad bed and dig in

Enjoy!

The first thing I did was prepare a salad bed for the seafood. I roughly chopped some Little Gem Lettuce, mixed it with some chopped tomatoes, and chopped red onion. Pretty easy so far

The next thing to do was cook the seafood, I had previously thawed some mussel meat I had in the freezer, I added that to some prawns and the squid rings. I left these to one side while I prepared a sauce to cook them in.

I mixed together a tablespoon of Oyster Sauce, a tablespoon of Olive Oil, a teaspoon of brown sugar, the juice from half a lime, and about 2 teaspoons of a sweet chili sauce. Once these were combined I poured the sauce into a wok and heated it until it was very hot, I then added the squid rings, mussel meat and prawns. I kept them moving in the wok making sure they were coated in the sauce, and cooked them for 2 – 3 minutes.

I then removed the seafood from the wok using a slotted spoon, so there was no excess sauce on the seafood, and placed it on the salad bed I had prepared earlier. Now if you wanted to use the left over sauce in the wok as a dressing that would be fine too, but I preferred to keep the salad bed crisp on this occasion.

Enjoy!

Coconut prawn salad, with fruit and a poppy seed dressing is one of my all time favourite salads, the prawns are deep fried in a batter made with beer and coated in flaked coconut. I serve it on a bed of iceberg lettuce with assorted fruits, today I chose melon, pineapple, grapes and strawberries. Ok, lets get started with the salad recipe, first you will need to make the Poppy seed dressing….

In a blender put 1/2 cup of clear honey, 1/4 cup of cider vinegar, 1 teaspoon each of dry mustard powder and salt, and 1 tablespoon of grated onion. Blend these together for a minute and then slowly add 1 cup of olive oil. When the oil is completely blended with the other ingredients pour into a bowl or jug and add 1 or 2 teaspoons of poppy seeds. You can leave the poppy seed dressing in the fridge while you prepare the rest of the salad.

Now you need to make the beer batter, in a bowl whisk together 1 egg, 2/3 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of baking power, a pinch of salt and 1/2 cup of your favourite beer or lager. whisk until light and fluffy.

Put some flour and flaked coconut into two separate bowls, these are used along with batter to coat the prawns. The flour helps the batter to stick to the prawns.

So, now take your prawns, I used jumbo prawns, and dip them first into the flour, then into the batter and finally into the flaked coconut. Fry them in a deep fat fryer for a couple of minutes, until golden brown.

Serve the coconut prawns straight away on a bed of shredded lettuce, and chopped fruit. Place the poppy seed dressing in a small bowl for dipping.

The quantities for the poppy seed dressing and batter will be enough for 4 servings.

Enjoy!

Coat 8 small anglerfish fillets (50g or 2oz each) in vegetable oil. Heat a griddle pan and grill the fillets for one minute on both sides. For a pretty chequered effect: rotate the fish 90 degrees when halfway. By the way, any firm fish like regular monkfish would do, but anglerfish (or goosefish) is best.

Quarter 80g of mushrooms, peel and finely dice 2 shallots, chop 2 spring onions. Cook all this in a non-stick pan using a tiny bit of oil or butter until almost soft. Make it “al dente” just like a perfect pasta. Then take the pan off the heat and add 2 tbsp. of balsamic vinegar. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Remove the woody bits of 12 green asparagus and peel the stems if needed. Boil them in salted water until you can stick a fork in without much effort. In the mean time, wash a good amount of cos lettuce and arrange the leaves on the plates. Add some curly lettuce for a bit of punch. I’d suggest rocket, but I won’t

Toss the mushroom mix onto a plate so you can use the pan for the quail eggs. Again, use as little oil or butter as possible and fry 4 quail eggs until the white has set and the yolk is still golden and wobbly. Put the mushroom mix on top of the leaves and asparagus, then add 2 fillets of fish per person, and top it off with the fried egg. If you’re really hungry, you could add a strip of crispy bacon to boot.