Photo slideshow!

Ok, 6 months worth of photos dumped here for your viewing pleasure!!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Vegan fish with soursop

So I saw this recipe for vegan fish made with soursop on Taymer Mason’s blog and knew I had to try it.  Taymer is a Bajan food scientist and cookbook author, and St. Lucia has essentially the same fruits and vegetables, and generally very similar cuisine overall to Barbados so I was excited to try and cook with soursop.  I had heard Lucians talk about soursop but I didn’t really know what it looked like or what it tasted like!   As soon as I saw this recipe I started asking around and looking for soursop, a fruit I had never even noticed or looked for before.  I’m not sure if it’s just luck or if I just completely blanked and never noticed it before but as soon as I started looking I found them all over Castries!  At first I only found ripe soursop – which I still want to buy so I can taste it, but then yesterday I was walking through the market, going to buy some sulphur powder (to make more deodorant 🙂 )and I saw a lady with a table full of green unripe soursops!  So I bought a small one for $5 EC ($2.50 NZ) and decided to try the recipe last night.

This is what the soursop I got looked like:

 

When it’s green like this it is firm but easy to slice and remove the skin, though removing the seeds was a bit annoying, they went flying everywhere as I poked them out and I am pretty sure there are still some on my kitchen floor.

I’m going to apologise in advance for how awful these photos are.  Remember how my camera is out of service?  Well now my phone is broken too and barely working, so I am coping as best I can until I get some $ for a new device.

I sliced the soursop into 1 cm thick pieces and sprinkled them with salt, set them in a strainer and let them sit about 1 hour as Taymer suggests.

After an hour there was a lot of water that had drained out of the soursop and they were floppy.  I washed them very well and then dried them very well trying to get as much salt and moisture as possible out of the slices.

I didn’t have any fresh herbs to make the green seasoning paste Taymer suggests or any nori so I made a seasoning paste out of:

2 fresh green thai chilies

3 cloves of garlic

1 tsp of dried oregano

1 tsp black pepper

2 tbs flour (all I had on hand was whole wheat)

 

I minced up the garlic and chilies very finely and then added them to a bowl with the flour and pepper and oregano.

I added the washed and dried sliced soursop and shook them around to make sure they were entirely covered.

I then made a batter based on my favourite batter recipe but a very quick easy version which was:

1/2 cup flour (again, I only had whole wheat on hand but it still turned out awesome)

1/3 cup corn starch

1 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp baking soda

and then because I didn’t have any sparkling water or beer on hand I thought I would try adding some ginger beer since it’s fizzy and I though the ginger and sweetness would be nice… and yes, it was!  It wasn’t too sweet or too gingery but just gave the batter a really nice flavour.

So I took my seasoned soursop slices, dipped them in the batter, and then fried them in a shallow skillet of oil.

and WOW.  I seriously don’t understand how an unripe tropical fruit can have the taste and texture of the mildest most delicious fish.  Taymer this recipe is blowing my mind right now!!!  When I saw the pictures on her blog I was like “no way, that’s a fruit? and it looks like that?”.  I couldn’t believe it… but ladies and gentlemen let me tell you it is real!  It’s a cruelty-free sustainable happy fish fry!!!

The only snag I ran into was that my fillets were pretty salty… so maybe next time I need to use less salt or make sure I really wash the slices more thoroughly.  But even so, they are delicious.

I totally am having a soursop fish sandwich today for lunch.  So excited!

I will try and get a not-awful photo.