Chilly Fish

Inspiration - Cooking And Me

We eat fish a lot, and now fed up with these Kerala Style fish curries. So one day i tried this and it came out well. I served with chapathy, so didnt make it more dry.

Verdict: Malu gave a 9 for this and she had it with fried rice the next day afternoon also. She told me it resembled a restaurant dish :) B also liked it, but since he is not a big fan of these chinese sauces he gave only 6.

Prawn Roast

My husband likes this sea food items very much and thats why i see my posts are mostly related to fish, crab, squid etc. And for all curries i have a roast/masala recipe too :) Anyways Prawns are very good to roast and luckily Malu also likes this. She doesnt eat fish /crab, but prawn is her favourite.Thank God, i dont have to think about other menu for her whenever i make prawns at home. Its very difficult to decide the menu with seperate item for each. Father is happy with fish while daughter is very unhappy, prawns make everyone happy. Long live Prawns :)

It's nice to have some cocunut slices in this gravy, but i didnt have that.

Crab in coconut gravy

My recent explorations are again with Crab. This time i was fed up with the usual roast/masala recipes so tried the regular coconut gravy and this was a hit. BJ liked it better than the roast one , but i like the other version. This goes very well with chapathis, kuppose or even with some plain rice.

Crab Masala

Crab came into our house menu very recently, not more than 6 months. In my childhood or till i got married i never came across a single crab dish in any of my/relatives house. Pappa had a strong dislike for these stuff like crab, squid etc and i also considered them as some dirty creatures.

After coming to Kuwait we stayed for sharing accommodation with one Telugu family. They used to cook crab every now and then and i had to run out of the whole house due to this stingy smell and i stayed away  from the crab section in the fish market. To my horror BJ was interested in these items, but he never forced me to buy and try. Last year when we went to Dubai, i told my sister about this Crab Mania and then she ordered Crab masala from some hotel, i tasted a little and it was amazingly delicious. It was more to the sweet end and i liked it. But the cleaning part made me hesitant to make a try. Recently i learned my maid is an expert in Crab. Wow, so here starts the explorations!!

I bought crab 2,3 times now and she cleaned it very nicely , the cooking part is not that much tough, but i felt the eating part is much more difficult. Still i havent tasted the good crab flesh taste because i take long time to break all these shell and after a few minutes i gets irritated and chew all the stuff together. Anyways BJ is having a good time , thats enough for me .

I followed Mishmash's Crab Roast  with some instincts from myself and it turned out really good .

Karimeen Mappas

Just tried to make some Karimeen Mappas and it was not that bad. I have very nostalgic memories of karimeen and other backwater fishes. In our childhood, one guy brought fresh backwater fishes  in a small pot  exclusively to our house. Though i hated that guy, his fishes were really good. We (or mostly amma) always had a tough time to clean and prepare those fishes. They were still alive, so amma had to kill them with the back side of the knife, it was hard. And cleaning was old fashioned, we have to run the halfly cleaned fish on a rubble and tried to remove the scales. Though this cleaning process was tiring, the taste just removes all frustrations. We always had kappa(tapoioca) along with this fish curries and fries.

I have another embarassing memory with this backwater fishes too.. Just when i reached kuwait, in our honeymoon time, i found some varal in lulu and forced my husband to buy that. He was confused whether i know to cook that and i proudly declared i am a master in all these fish items. We bought a long varal and came home. Next day after he left to office i slowly took out the varal and stared at it, it was such a long and large fish and slowly it resembled like 'Anaconda' to me. I was alone in the house and i had watched anaconda very recently, though i told my mind to be calm , i couldn't control. The fear and loneliness just killed me and i became so scared and jumped out of kitchen.Soon i called my hubby and told him that im so scared because of that anaconda in the kitchen.. hmm ...later whenever we see this fish, my husband starts laughing and teasing me :)

We get Kerala Karimeen from our local store on thursdays and also the frozen one's. Sometimes it will be good and sometimes very bad. Initially i had too much difficlulty in cleaning the scales and however i cleaned, it always had some smell..Later i learned how to remove the skin. Its tricky and it takes away the majestic look of karimeen, but the taste comes good. So now a days i always remove the skin.I always think about karimeen pollichathu in a vazhayila, but never tried it..

Koonthal/Squid Roast

My parents are here and they had never eaten the squid. My husband is very fond of this dish , but i am not a big fan of this. I decided to try on this dish and fortunately it came out well. Hubby always search for nadan kudampuli (Fish Tamarind) in all dishes, so i purposely put 1 piece of tamarind in addition to the tomatoes. It should be avoided , I didnt feel much sourness , but as usual hubby's face was not lit to 100%  :( .. Amma liked it , but pappa didnt even touch..He is very peculiar in his dishes now a days, not even giving a try at least to taste a new dish.I felt he hate the looks of squid, even me hates that ..I dont feel calling this a fish, a fish with no good looking head and tail ..some other species or aliens, with  whatever techniques - inki , pinki, & pongi :) While i was cleaning this, i just wondered how God created this much wide variety of species in the world. What all new techniques HE is experimenting on different species, right.Anyways thank God, he did implemented other good looking fishes too ;)

Though i never tried & tasted squid dishes much, i just followed my regular recipe for other roast, didnt even get time to search blogs this time. Anyways somethings should be done by our own instincts too and in my personal opinion, most cases won when we put our own instincts rather than just copying someone else's recipes blindly.

Ingredients

Method

Squid Onion Ginger Garlic Tomatoes Chilli powder Coriander Powder Turmeric Powder Garam Masala

Clean squid removing the head, scale, inks etc until you reach a full white sheet like structure and then cut it into small pieces.. Heat oil in a pan and saute onion, ginger, garlic, curry leaves till it reaches brown. Add tomatoes and saute it well. Mix all powders in some water to make it a paste,add it  and saute until the oil seperates. Throw in the squid pieces and add some water if needed. Water will come out of squid so no need to add much water here. Cook well for sometime.