The Skull Cinema

Or how the Pangasianodon lost its teeth. So I am making a stir-fry using a recipe from the excellent Chinese cookbook ' Ken Hom's Hot Wok .' It is a great book from which we have not had a bad meal after trying 30 of the recipes, and I now always use his 'one pint of water to 400 g of rice' method for steamed rice . The recipe in question this time was stir-fried fish with black bean sauce , which required procuring some white fish. So off to the supermarket to get some. Cod fillets were available at £14/kg and something called basa at £10.50/kg (or 25% cheaper). As stir-fry flavours are usually robust, cheaper is OK with me. But what sort of fish is a basa? The source of the fish stated that it was Pangasianodon hypophthalmus ; so that is the binomial name for a basa fish, yes? No, in Vietnam P. hypophthalmus is called tra and basa is a different, although closely related, catfish species Pangasius bocourti . P. hypophthalmus is preferred ...

What could be finer? And easier to make? Having done this before, you need a sack of pickling onions and some vinegar and that's it, sort of. As, when I went for the pickling jars, I discovered that last year's batch of onions hadn't all been eaten. So there weren't enough empty jars to deal with the sackful of pickling onions that had been bought from the local farm shop. In fact, there were still 3 L of onions to eat and now a further 4.5 L to pickle. Oops! A trip to Amazon was required to get some clip-top pickling jars . Once they had arrived and been washed, they were sterilised in the oven at Gas Mk I until dry, sealed and left to cool. The method followed was a mish-mash of three [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] without any spices as the pickling vinegar was pre-spiced.No sugar was added as we like 'em sharp; the lack of it doesn’t affect the pickling process though. Briefly, the onions were dunked into a large pot of boiling water for 30 seconds or so, then ...