Fish and Tomato Nosauce

This is a dish in progress again. That’s a lot of stuff in progress, but it doesn’t mean its all heading for a big hurrah. Ha, ha.

Well there the main experimental part of this dish is to try to use mousses to transform/supliment flavors that we Sri Lankans, know well – so that they are recalled but not repeated in a dish. Is that a mouthful? Hopefully it’s a tasty one.

When I was a child, growing up in Colombo, we always had issahara kame (dinner eaten in the front of the house/ anglicized food) for dinner (which I guess is/was kind of common, among the middle classes) – and my sister and I would always fight over the tomato sauce. It was MD, cos that was the only one there was, I think, and you had to jam the bottle top in the door, tighten carefully, just in case you crushed the neck, holding the bottle with a kitchen towel before you got it open, and then of course, it would not want to pour out, until it was beaten soundly on its hard glass bottom, for a long time. But it was good, and we would finish our ration of a bottle a week, our mother had us on – well, for she said, its not really food, and you shouldn’t have too much of it – some times by mid week. Oh! Well, I dunno about every one else, I still love tomato sauce. Now that MD just a brand, and there are tons more, they have a ‘traditional’ line. Which is the old fashioned stuff, for people like me, who were raised in the tasty cusp of colonialism and socialism.

In this dish, which like I said before, is part of an effort to recall taste with out repeating it (Why? Why not just repeat? Well, for some thing different, is all!) I use tomato mousse to replace MD tomato sauce. The main dish is grilled seer, with garlic and olive oil, with a sweet sour tomato onion garish, with a side of pickled cumber. That much is straightforward, the tomato mousse is new. I have been working through mousses recently, with straightforward ones in the bag now. But my tomato mouse is complicate cos its got invoke the right taste, with out well, mirroring it. I opted to use tomato paste (that’s very pure, usually, taste wise, just tomatoes and salt) and chili pieces, almost in a 2:1 ratio, but it could have been hotter. I also added ½ teaspoon of geletine to ½ tablespoon of hotwater mixed well, into the paste. It was fine, taste wise, folded into cream that already sweetened (I couldn’t get the other one), but the graininess was annoying. Next time, I will try it with chili power and finally, break down and simply use a sauce.

The rest of the dish was simple; I will post a how-to on the grilled fish stuff later.

PS: In the evening, I re did the tomato mousse; with some left over sauce, tomato paste and chili powder. about a 1/3 each, and added a little less cream, about another 1/3 may be little more. Kept the geletine at the same level. It was stunning, absolutely stunning.