Venice has a huge and famous fishmarket near the Rialto, but there are many little local ones, like this one that sets up every morning (except Monday) at the end of the street I'm living in.

It can become challenging around 10-11am when high tide approaches. Purchases have to be negotiated in wellie boots, and the produce often looks in danger of returning to it's natural home. Maybe I'll get some photos of this, but these were taken while waiting on the early morning water bus at around 6.30am

Leica M8 35mm Summicron

No, not that sort, but the almost forgotten original sort, providing this weeks favourite German word.

In Switzerland, and I suppose German speaking countries, we have "Fleischkäse". This is a sort of luncheon meat, but also a meat-loaf type of hot dish.

I've been amused by the various translations into English which do the rounds at the ex-pat pubs. The literal translation is "meat-cheese" - a term which would probably turn a Texan ranch hand vegetarian.

Today I saw it on a menu billed as "liver cheese". It looked quite tasty served with gravy and mashed potatoes actually, but I demurred.

I blogged about my steamed fish, ginger and baby spinach recipe a week or so back. The photos were crap, but I liked the dish so much that I recreated it tonight and ate it again. Before I ate it I photographed it again. And before I photographed it I tarted it up presentation wise.

Photograph is better, but still room for improvement - beginning to respect these food photographers. Voila - bon appetit!

NB I blogged about the photo process on my photography blog

... it must be fish!

It's a while since I posted my first "cooking" article, but it is quite stressful cooking eating and photographing simultaneously. However, here's another one.

Steamed fish and baby spinach with ginger and lemon grass

Steamed fish makes me think of invalids and watery cod, but recently my oven went on the blink so I turned to steaming for a while. I cook vegetables this way quite often, but not normally the main attraction.

For this I used some white fish fillets, chopped some ginger, split some lemon grass and added a nob of butter and seasoning.

Now just fold up the fillets, and top them with some lime leaves, snipped with scissors to let the flavours out. No need to tie the fillets up or secure them, because the next phase will take care of that.

Dump a large amount of baby leaf spinach on some foil, place the rolled fillets on top. My trick here is two-fold. To keep everything together, to capture the juices and flavours and make the steaming process a little gentler. (that's three fold I think)

Now fold up the foil loosely around everything. Put the whole lot in a steamer, as shown below.

For a couple of fillets, I find this takes about 12-15 mins to cook - depends on the fish of course. After this time the while lot will be moist, the spinach will have wilted to almost nothing and have taken on the flavours from the fish, ginger and lemongrass. Take the fillets out and leave them in the steamer, off the heat, to keep them warm. Meanwhile take the spinach and bash it around a bit with some more seasoning if required to form a serving base for the fish

I served this up with some potatoes, roughly mashed with olive oil and french parsley.

Actually the last picture is pretty crap - it tasted better than it looks here!