I've got one hand in my pocket

And the other one is holding a plate of smoked mackerel with gougons of flounder. Mmm thanks ever so much to Jaid Smallman from the Wordsworth Hotel in Grasmere, my chef and saviour for the weekend at Country Fest - I'm not kidding about saviour, this guy fed the five thousand with just a few fish and didn't even need the loaves to eke it out.

So last week we had chef Nick Martin making fantastic pan-fried coley at Cumbria Wildlife Trust's Garden Bonanza. Not intimidated by the rain and 50 mph gusts, we had a great day and Nick's delicious coley went down an absolute storm (hehe). Despite being snubbed for years and fed only to cats as a punishment, coley is very cod-like, but cheaper and with healthier stocks. It is also called saithe and coalfish and while it is sometimes landed locally you're more likely to see it from the North Sea or northeast Arctic. Never mind, but look for line-caught if you can get it.

In preparation for Country Fest, Jaid had me reaching for the gin (alright so I was already slicing the lime) when he sent over a recipe which included preserved lemons - "dead simple to make at home" he says, "really?" I say, "yes" he says, "only takes three weeks" - and another which required cooking potatoes 'sous vide'. Big curly head in hands, I enquired what one might substitute for preserved lemons, just in case one had run out... thank god for capers. And it turns out that while a fine-dining chef can sous vide his way through life, you or I can roast. The sauce, I mean source, of all this fanciness? Inter-chef competition! Apparently chefs like to out-chef each other. My shrimp is bigger than your shrimp...

I digress.... so Country Fest was a rip-roaring success. Kendal Fish and Seafoods donated line-caught Cornish smoked mackerel and Jaid's (sans sous vide!) recipe for it was simple and tasted incredible. What a fantastic little British fish; mackerel laugh in the face of fishing pressure that would send a cod swimming into the depths of decline and we can definitely afford to eat a few more of these bad boys, particularly if you can get line-caught champs. Jaid's flounder dish was also totally brilliant (I know, I ate a lot of it). More commonly known as a fluke, flounder is a flatfish, BFF to Ariel the Mermaid and is an example of a local (Irish Sea and UK-wide) fish that we don't see on our menus (or anywhere else) very often. Or ever, unless you like to hang around lobster pots, since in Cumbria it is only really used as lobster bait. Although flounder can be caught by foot (no joke), they will mostly be trawled or possibly caught in gill nets; as a delicious and under-exploited local fish, it's definitely worth a try (avoiding beam trawled if you can - otter trawled is preferable).

During the course of the weekend I spoke to 324 people at the Cumbria Wildlife Trust stand, attested to by the clicker counter I keep in my pocket to track these things. If you do find yourself talking to me at a show this summer please don't be put off if I have one hand in my pocket and appear very interested in its contents!

Highlight of the weekend? Not Martin Platt from Coronation Street selling cheese in the next tent (or his Gordon Ramsay hair do), not the pygmy goats, the close proximity of the wine-tasting stand, or the three-for-the-price-of-less-than-one banana cake I got from the Ginger Bakers. Nope, it would have to be the little girl who said 'Mummy, can you make this at home?". Score! Wild Oceans 1, fish fingers 0.

I hake to boast but...

Donnan Quayside Fisheries in Whitehaven has joined the party and, in what is becoming an enjoyable tradition, gave me free fish. *Smug face*. Three weighty hake steaks from an individual landed in Whitehaven. Local? Tick! Sustainable? By all reports, yes! Can I have a whoop whoop?

Quick hake lesson:
The Goods: northern European stocks of hake are being fished sustainably. Hake can be caught with gill nets which is relatively undamaging to the marine habitat, and it is landed locally (which I was surprised to hear!).
The Bads: Some other stocks, such as southern European hake, are depleted (so I hope the fisherman didn't catch my dinner while on holiday in Portugal). Also it is a deepish water fish which grows and reproduces quite slowly, making it vulnerable. And it can be caught using trawlers, which are more damaging to the seabed.

Goods and bads, goods and bads. I hope my hake, which I have named Jake, wasn't caught locally because Jake was in shallow water getting ready to breed. Must learn more about this.

So thanks very much to the two Richards (Jr and Sr) at Donnan's. I now have 10% discount cards for three Cumbrian fishmongers which I am giving out to any unsuspecting member of the public who makes the mistake of catching my eye and proceeds to patiently listen to my waffle.

Sainsburys in Cockermouth have an interesting couple of signs up in their fish counter area. One is a big picture of a traditional local British fishing boat and a Union Jack, the other is a chalk board with "Regionally caught" printed in the corner and on the day I visited it had haddock and lemon sole written on. Great I thought! They are promoting local fish! I wonder exactly how local they are ...

Me: "Hello Mr Sainsburys Fishman. 'Regionally caught' - does that mean the fish is local to Cumbria?"
Mr Sainsburys: *looks blank*
Me: *indicating the board high up over the counter* "It says 'regionally caught'. I just wondered which 'region' it means"
Mr Sainsburys: *rubber-necks his head to look up and read the board* "Well, it might not mean Cumbria"
Me: "Oh right. So what does it mean?"
Mr Sainsburys: "Well, it might be...north..."
Me: "...of the UK?"
Mr Sainsburys: "...I expect so..."

Deciding to move on I indicate the big Union Jack:

Me: "That's a nice picture of the flag. So you sell a lot of fish from the UK then?"
Mr Sainsburys: "Yes its nearly all from the UK"
Me: "Apart from the tiger prawns?"
Mr Sainsburys: "Yes apart from the tiger prawns"
Me: "And the tilapia?"
Mr Sainsburys: "Yes, and the tilapia"
Me: "And the tuna?"
Mr Sainsburys: "Yes. And the tuna"
Me: *beginning to enjoy myself and hunkering down to read the labels* "And the bream which is farmed in Greece?"

I could make a fun day out just going round supermarkets fish counters.

It is interesting though that a supermarket is starting to show signs of applying the same 'buy British' message to fish as they do to meat and dairy. Good news hopefully! And I don't mean to have a go at Sainsburys and the poor man I harrangued there, but it does show that you still have to look at the labels and that you probably can't rely on the knowledge of the counter assistant.

Donnan's at Whitehaven have a lot of local fish on sale but mentioned to me that they are getting some nice line-caught halibut coming in soon. "Where from?" I asked. Thinking to myself, line-caught is great but it would be even better if they're from the Pacific as I've heard that other stocks of halibut are less well-managed. "The Faroes" they tell me. "Oh right" I say.
Note to self: find out where the Faroes are.

A dab hand! (chortle chortle)

Ah I think there must be endless fish and fishing related puns out there. Despite being too embarrassed to bring myself to listen to my 2 minutes on the radio, I was secretly quite pleased with myself for getting in a comment about the cod stocks being battered. Not enough credit given for that little gem.

So I was right, fish is going to be one of the perks of my job! I went to Cranston's Food Hall in Penrith on Saturday to collect business cards from The Fish Cellar's little counter there. (By the way if you see me on a show stand this summer ask me for the business cards I'm carrying for some of our fishmongers - they've got a discount on them). I got talking to the guys about dab - they're selling them for a pound a fish, it's mad really, so cheap, and apparently marking them as "only £1.00" (that old chestnut) is the only way they can sell them; people won't buy dab if it's marked with the equivalent price per kg. Why is that? I heard one customer ask if they were plaice. They weren't, so she didn't buy them. So it would seem that we have to recognise the name of the fish before we'll buy it? In that case, I will write 'dab' every other sentence, and by the time you have finished reading this you can never again avoid buying dab because you haven't heard of it. You may also be due an award in the category of "persistent reading of a blog about fish".
Dab. I'm going to use it as a paragraph separator, brilliant.
So I was going to buy a dab, to prove a massive point to the world, but The Fish Cellar gents donated one to me without charge bless them. I am in the process of reading The River Cottage Sea Fishing volume, and the fishing legend author has included a recipe for flatfish such as dab, which essentially goes like this: "put it under a hot grill for five minutes". I'm not kidding. So I did! Here is a picture of the result:

I kid you not, it was awesome. Unbelievable. Just call me Delia. And the bones were not a problem, I promise. The meat (do you call cooked fish "meat"??) just lifts off the study skeleton and you can eat the skin, it has almost got no consistency at all.
Dab.
Try it, or another species of largely ignored but very tasty flatfish, I'll even come round and cook it for you, although I predict that my 'self-appointed expert' help with turning the grill on high and putting the fish underneath it will not be necessary. The greater challenge would actually be opening the bag of pre-picked, pre-washed and pre-packed salad. I am trying to grow my own lettuces but so far I am only succeeding in boosting the local slug population....
DAB.

Nearly pooed myself didn't I

Well not literally, but being on the radio this morning was pretty scary. For those of you who were lucky enough to miss it, I was live on Radio Cumbria's breakfast show for a few precious minutes today, during which I tried to waltz neatly around the direct "can I eat this fish? What about this fish?" questions, because as I may have mentioned once or twice... it's rather hard to say.

Take the Solway salmon fishery for example, which was one query raised this morning. So, if I've got my facts right, it's a local fishery managed by the Environment Agency and the season is only opened and fishing permitted once enough fish are deemed to have passed up the river to spawn to enable the fishery to be sustainable. It is also a traditional fishing method (called haaf netting), conducted by individuals on a small scale. But in general Atlantic salmon stocks are considered so severely depleted that common advice is to avoid all wild-caught Atlantic salmon. So what to do?


Not having the exact "right" answer (is there one?), my response would have to be what's probably better known as distraction. Watch me dance, here I go...
Forget about the salmon, pah salmon schmamon. Try something else, something different, look at this shiny new range of gurnard in the fishmonger counter...
See me twirling away into the distance!

In all seriousness, if you can't face the stress of trying to work out if it's better to support a local small-scale, selective, traditional salmon fishery, or to buy fish flown in from Alaska (where you can find sustainably managed wild stocks of salmon), or to purchase farmed salmon (the issues of farming can wait for another day) then just buy something else. Anything else marked as local and/or sustainable. Something line-caught or hand gathered is a good place to start. Which is where your local fishmonger comes in handy. On that note I would like to thank Nik at Kendal Fish and Seafoods (who was on the radio alongside me) for the hand-gathered scallops he presented me with. Are fishy presents going to be a perk of this job? I do hope so!

Now if you'll excuse me it's Friday night and I have scallops to eat, accompanied by Grandpa's pinot, which I may or may not already have started...

A great mystery

Hmmm. Well today I discovered that fishmongers shut shop early. So my trip to Bells in Carlisle was not overly successful, although apparently the guy (Mr Bell?) starts at 4am so I (who got up at 9am) can hardly blame him. Plus I should really have checked opening hours before embarking on my mission. Anyway I digress... I did manage to speak to a very helpful fishmonger by the name of Mark at The Fish Cellar in Penrith's Devonshire Arcade. The Fish Cellar supports Hugh's Fish Fight which is great, good on them, and they sell shrimp from Silloth and, when in season, salmon from Solway. I think I am right in saying that they would sell more locally-landed fish if it were feasible, but there are problems with continuity of supply because of the small amounts being landed. The Fish Cellar would be open to a local fisherman who approached them, but in general but there doesn't seem to be much of a link between the fisherman and the fishmonger.

On my way home from a cup of tea with my Grandpa (who sent me packing with a bottle of Pinot Grigio, don't mind if I do, thanks Grandpa) I nipped into Morrison's in Kendal for my weekly purchase of food for one, and had a chat with the man at the fish counter. Now, I have been lead to believe that there are healthy stocks of plaice and dab in the Cumbrian Irish Sea, but the counter contained plaice and dab from the north east Atlantic. According to Mr Morrisons, in repetition of Mark at The Fish Cellar, the Cumbrian fishermen just don't catch enough.

So what's going on? Is it the case that the fishermen are not landing larger numbers and a wider range of fish because there is no market for it so they catch under quota for some species and discard others? If this is the case then would an increased market for locally-landed fish allow them to land more of their catch (within quota limits), saving the waste of some fish and an increased catch for the same fishing hours?

Or are we already catching what we can and it simply is not enough to supply Cumbria's food outlets?

While I work on this, one of life's great questions, let's pile the pressure on our MPs to pursue the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy with vigour! Lobby your MP via this link: http://www.fishfight.net/blog/fish-fight-debate-in-house-of-commons/

Wasn't Simon King good!

Wanted to say hello and thanks to all the lovely people I met at Rheged yesterday, it was an absolute pleasure! I gather the quiz may have been a little challeging (answers coming on here soon I promise), but that just goes to show how little even people who are interested in wildlife actually know about our marine creatures.... I feel a personal challenge to fix this coming on...oh dear wish me luck!

I was totally heart-warmed by the number of people who care enough about our marine environment to sign a scale for our Petition Fish, and even more by those who stopped to talk with me about the lack of support for local produce when it comes to seafood. Well I'm working on that, let's see what happens.

Next time I'll be out in the public arena is at Hutton Plant and Food Fair on Sunday. I wonder if any local fishmongers or fishermen would be interested in joining me... anyone know of any fishy businesses in Penrith??