29th March 2026

Today week cooked James’s Fideuà - a feast of fish from A Cook’s Book by Nigel Slater

We love seafood and love fideuá usually cook it with little noodles so I thought this would be good to try as we always have macaroni in the house.  This was delicious although for us needed a few tweaks.

I was chatting and stupidly shelled and headed all the prawns - never mind. I did ponder putting them into the stock in order to flavour it more but I wanted to do the recipe as written with its first outing.

Although I started to follow the recipe I noticed that he doesn’t mention when to put the onions in so I put them in first and then put in the diced squid and carried on.  Before we put in the pasta I tasted the sauce and it was just a bit meh, could be our tomatoes were just not flavourful enough so I added a tbsp of tomato puree to give it some oomph.  It needed to be seasoned fairly heavily.

Unfortunately our mussels had not cooked in the 2-3 minutes specified so we needed to cook for another couple of minutes. Sadly this meant the crust on the bottom of our pan was too dark so we could not eat it.

We did all really enjoy this, next time I would probably keep stirring until just before adding the seafood and I think it would be perfect. Very delicious.