You couldn't make it up.

  What happened today was one of the bizarrest moments in my cooking life. Firstly, an apology for interrupting the scheduled broadcast about sophisticated guacamole, I'll tell you tomorrow, I promise, but when you hear this you'll probably agree it was worth it. I'm going to start by setting the scene for you.

  My lawyer in Corfu is so helpful and lovely that I wanted to treat her to a bit of my cooking. This meant a trip to the food market just by the centre of the main town for some fresh local produce. A few years ago the sprawling stalls were replaced with some spiffy permanent structures. The improvement is phenomenal, it is has a more professional atmosphere than other markets full of the temporary stalls. There are a couple of cafes and some places selling a bit of stuff for the tourists but the rest is a pretty even split between fishmongers and fruit & veg sellers. 

Would you let this man fillet your fish?

  On the ice outside one place was what looked like a nice, large sea bream. The fishmonger spoke enough English to tell me the price and, once I had deftly performed the international hand signal for, 'can you please fillet it?', he acknowledged my request and passed the fish back to his wife, who I fortunately watched like a hawk. She took off one fillet like someone who had learnt to do it by looking at a comic drawn by the same inept folk who draw the ikea instruction pamphlets and started to wrap everything up.

  'No!, both fillets', I said trying to work out why she thought I only wanted one fillet removed. Did she even know there were two? My lawyer translated and from both of their expressions, I could tell I may as well have asked them if they could help me travel through time. This had the effect of confusing me, because last time I checked fishmongers fillet fish. Once I realised this was not a prank and they were genuinely baffled by my request, I did the most natural thing in the world; I asked if I could fillet it myself. This wasn't going to get any more surreal so what did I have to loose?

  The picture above tells you they let me and the best part was, once I had found a sharpish knife and started cutting, the fishmonger stood staring incredulously over my shoulder as if I was performing brain surgery on a unicorn using a feather duster. I'm still a bit gobsmacked by the whole episode and can only assume that either everyone on the island only cooks and serves their fish whole or that the actual fishmonger and all his staff had been killed by a couple of psychos who stuffed their bodies in the freezer and thought they'd have a go at selling fish instead.

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com