Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish

Yesterday’s silence was due to utter but happy exhaustion after a day at the Billingsgate Seafood Training School . Rising at five is not my favourite way to start the day, and I wouldn’t normally consider eating jellied eel before eight o’clock in the morning, but it was all part of a wonderful day learning more than you would have thought possible in a single morning on the subject of fish.
Among the fruits of my labours was a pair of Dover sole, skinned and with the fillets ‘lifted’ by myself, so that I could stuff them with pesto made in concert with Dean, who got stuck with me as a desk partner. Inspired by instructor CJ Jackson’s accounts of adding langoustines to the mix, I put prawns down the centre, with the result you can see above.
At a later date I will write at greater length about how tuna is sampled with a cheese iron, the fennel scent of fresh seabass, the filing cabinet full of live eels and most of all CJ’s inspiring teaching, but for tonight I will just leave you with the image of snapping off a gurnard’s head so that the swim bladder suddenly pops up, a tiny opaque white balloon emerging from the body cavity with a sickening squelch. Perhaps you’d rather not know about how much fun it is then to turn the head back on the body, pulling it down so that the skin peels neatly off the body like the paper from an ice lolly.