Last Fish Supper

The last dish I made in Sydney was fish in green curry. As I’ve said before, I never follow recipes to a tee. For this one I sautéed an onion and garlic in green curry paste, then added what seemed like appropriate amounts of chilies, ginger, lemongrass and lime zest.


I continued to add coconut milk until the whole thing wasn’t unbearably spicy.


I threw in bamboo shoots, bell pepper capsicum and green beans. I mostly cooked the angelfish separately so it wouldn’t absorb too much heat when I tossed it in the pot.


We didn’t do anything fancy presentation-wise, but the whole thing was tasty with just enough bite. The fish was perfect in texture and flavor, so I thank the woman at the fish market upstairs above Paddy’s Market for telling me which one to get.


The real star was dessert, custard-filled puffs from Puffy at upstairs Paddy’s. I could watch the workers at the custard machines fill those baked puff pastries all day. I bought a dozen, and let me tell you, best $16.80 I ever spent.

Tropical Dinner

After my friend Nicole and I went to the Sydney Fish Market and made tuna steaks one time, we decided fish dinners should be a more regular event. We didn’t make them quite as often as we'd hoped, but still had a few nice meals. For the second dinner, I wanted to try cooking fish in lemongrass and coconut milk like a recipe I’d seen once. What better to go on the side than pineapple fried rice? Ok, I’d really always wanted to fill a pineapple with something and this was my chance.


I’m not huge on sticking to recipes. I usually look at a bunch of different ones, write down ingredients and a basic plan of what to do with them, then wing it from there. Unless I'm baking, I never know how much of anything I'm supposed to put in. So I can’t tell you exactly what I did with this fish, but I’ll give you the gist. I took some white fish (forget which kind) and marinated it in fresh limejuice, ginger, cilantro, garlic, green onion, chilis and lemongrass (all really cheap at the Paddy's Market in Chinatown). Then I put it in a long deep pan, poured coconut milk over the top, added more lemongrass stalks and baked it till it looked and felt done.

As for the rice, I added broccoli, shredded carrots, sprouts, an egg, probably some onion and fried that up with soy sauce, then tossed in half the pineapple chunks from the hollowed fruit and served it.


Everyone enjoyed the dinner, though I couldn’t help but feel something was missing from the fish. It needed some spice, but we didn’t have any at our disposal. I’ll have to try it again now that I’m home with a well-stocked kitchen. (Also, maybe the lighting will be better than it was in the university apartment.)

Someplace Fishy

The Sydney Fish Market, located in Pyrmont, is the second largest in the world. If you want to get specific, it’s the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, while one in Tokyo claims the world title. But none of that means much does it? The point is the Sydney Fish Market is huge.


The market sells wholesale seafood to restaurants and individuals, but also includes several take-away stands where you can get everything from sashimi to stuffed clams and lobster. One day for lunch, some friends and I got a big spread so they could try octopus and some other seafood for the first time.


It was good, but I preferred the meal I cooked myself. My friend and I got a great deal on some tuna steaks, which I marinated in soy, ginger, fresh orange juice, chili, garlic and green onion, then seared and served with Chinese long beans. It was the first dish I prepared in Sydney.