Rick Stein's Seafood Odyssey [Paperback]

Exotic spices, traditional fare and flavours from throughout the world can be found in abundance in the latest Rick Stein offering-Seafood Odyssey.

From the classic cookery of France to the Far East and Thailand, Rick Stein has undertaken a personal journey to bring back flavours from Europe and more exotic climes. Travelling with his curiosity and the childlike delight in discovering new flavours, he has sampled each country's unique cooking styles, tastes and textures and bound them up in a book to enjoy in all kitchens and, of course, on all dinner tables! Culinary classics like the Charleston Seafood Gumbo, Baked Whole Sea Bass (with roasted red peppers, tomatoes, anchovies and potatoes) and Kedgeree of Arbroath Smokies, are mixed in with more unusual dishes such as Indian Sardine and Potato Curry Puffs, Singapore Chilli Crab and the French Tarte aux Moules (highly recommended).

In addition to providing clear and concise recipes with mouth-watering pictures of the finished dish, there are also delicate watercolours illustrating the groups of different fish and shellfish. Rick Stein's love of the many varieties of fruits de mer shines through as he describes each ingredient and recipe with loving flair and encourages the reader to experiment with seafood in the kitchen. --Rebecca Loades --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Britains number one bestselling seafood cookery author embarks on a world tour of seafood cuisine and creates over 150 fabulous new fish dishes inspired by his travels. Having sold over 100,000 copies in hardback, Rick Steins bestseller is now available in paperback. This title, along with Rick Stein's Taste of the Sea and Rick Stein's Fruits of the Sea, has been re-released with a modernised cover to bring a fresh look to the series. Rick travels to some of the worlds main centres of seafood excellence, picking up recipe ideas, sampling new ingredients and gleaning new techniques for preparing and cooking fish. Armed with the fruits of his travels, he returns from each destination to Padstow to create his own specially adapted and inspired dishes. Among the places Rick visits on his seafood quest are Chesapeake Bay on the east coast of America where he goes in search of the blue swimming crab, the small town of Noosa in Queensland where he finds some of the most innovative seafood restaurants in the world and the delightful fishing village of Hua Hin in Thailand where he enjoys Thai seafood cookery at its best and most authentic.

Rick Stein and his wife Jill own The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, which attracts thousands of fish lovers (from Britain and abroad) every year. Rick’s first book, English Seafood Cookery, won the 1989 Glenfiddich Award for Food Book of the Year and Taste of the Sea won the 1995 André Simon Food Book Award as well as the 1996 Good Food Award for Cookery Book of the Year. His latest bestseller, Seafood Odyssey, has sold over 100,000 copies. Rick, Jill and their three sons live in a house overlooking the sea near Padstow in Cornwall.

The Dinosaur Hall at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, is an odd place in which to think about a new cookery book. Last October, I was at a lecture there given by Sir David Attenborough to celebrate fifty years of the BBC’s Natural History Unit. There were film clips of bears sliding along the polar ice, lions and crocodiles fighting at a water hole in Africa, and killer whales snatching sea lions from a beach in Argentina. The hall was filled with the tanned and the fit, all famous in the world of nature and geography and all just back from exotic adventures in Borneo or Patagonia. In that splendid hall, as I watched their films and listened to their stories of foreign places, a germ of an idea for a new book was born.

Isn’t this, I thought, an endearing British enthusiasm? We love to explore the world and, like magpies, bring back objects or knowledge, ideas and memories to share and enrich our own lives. As I thought more about this, I realised that this is exactly what I do, too. I spend all my spare time travelling on a seafood odyssey in search of new and exciting dishes. But my quest is not just for the new. In Britain, because we don’t have a great tradition of time-honoured fish recipes, I have had to look elsewhere in the world to build up a satisfactory repertoire of dishes that would keep my Seafood Restaurant customers happy. At any point in time the menu in Padstow will contain a number of dishes I have lovingly collected and brought back from my travels.