Results - Roast Wild Barramundi with King Prawn and Fennel Salad

My first EPIC fail! Woo hoo! I can get it behind me and move on! For a while, every time I attempted a new restaurant recipe I though, "Is this the one that's going to end my wining streak?" There were a couple there where I though the degree of difficulty was a little higher than what I was used to, surely I'll fail there, but in the end it was the easiest recipe of all that made me come undone. I even had a video to watch and I still managed a royal muck up of it!

Lets look at the positives first. It tasted delicious! Fennel and prawn are such a great combination, The salad so impressed me that I will never eat them apart again! Except maybe in tempura prawns, garlic prawns oh cant forget prawn dumplings!...hmmm maybe every prawn dish imaginable, just take my word for it....it tasted good. The tomato and basil salad was pretty tasty too. Who could beat the awesome power of tomato coupled with the sexy aroma of basil? It was such a spring dish, and considering the extremely warm weather we've been having around Melbourne, it was a great way to say goodbye to spring and hello to summer, a whole month early!

Basil and Tomato Salad

Fennel and Prawn Salad

I hear you say what went wrong?, how did you stuff it up? Well thanks very much for totally over seeing the ugliness of the dish, you're so kind. I vividly remember Michael Lambie saying in the video to be extremely careful about skin sticking to the pan and ruining the crispy skin texture. I've never really had this problem before, and I LOVE crispy fish skin so I do my best to get the money shot. But this time, I don't know what happened, I sprayed my pan with non stick oil, waited for the pan to get really hot, I even dried the barramundi skin to make sure it would turn out extra crispy. But I guess the skin gods were not on my side this day, and I suffered from bad skin even after I'd gone through puberty!

Getting the fish out of the pan was disaster number 2. I planned on presenting it the wrong way up, but some how I managed to put a big great gaping hole in the nice fish flesh. I did make two portions of this dish, and the other fish faired even worse! Poor Daz, he always gets the rejects.

Everything chopped up ready to go!

The last issue with the dish was more of an oversight than an error. When making the tomato basil salad I cut my tomatoes up and put them in the bowl without removing any seeds. The Dressing ended up being quite watered down by the tomato juice. So I would suggest only using the tomato flesh and try to scoop out as much of the seeds and innards as possible. I always try to make the best of a bad situation, so turned the tomato juice/left over salad into a delicious dipping sauce. I added a little extra olive oil and Daz and I dunked out bread like bread had never been dunked before! It was like a deconstructed brucchetta.

Sliced fennel

Despite the few mishaps, the dish was actually very tasty. Its extremely difficult to get Daz to eat something that isn't capable of mooing, fish being one of the worst! But he really enjoyed this dish. The Barramundi has a pleasant un-fishy smell and that seemed to appeal to him. I was really shifty and didn't explain any of the components of the dish to him before he started eating, he didn't realize he had eaten fennel (his arch nemesis of the vegetable world) until he was taking his last bite. *insert evil laugh here* I have some left over fennel in the fridge, I might try my luck again and see if I can get the same results.