Adam demonstrates how to make a delicious seafood salad

We’re just going to make a very simple seafood salad. Today I’m using a bit of calamari and some steamed green-lipped mussels. These things are really, really fantastic, a great product and people love them. Be careful with them. Sometimes they’ve got that little beard that’s attached. Just pop that in the bowl.

You’d have this warm which works really well with the dressing. It’s not too cold so it should come out alright. So pop all those in there. I’m going to make this for two people, I suppose.

See how all the ingredients are laid out in front, now next time you cook at home, try and get all your ingredients out in front of you and you go “bing, bing, bing” and put it all together.

When you want to do something out of a book and you go - “I want to get some flour” and you go to the cupboard and get the flour, and go to the fridge... Try and get everything together and be organised.

We’ve got the mussels in there and the next thing we are going to do - I’ve just poached these calamari. This is calamari, squid. What I’ve done is cut the calamari tubes in half and on the inside you score it. It looks a little bit like a hedgehog. You go one way without going through then back the other way. Then you lightly poach it.

What I’m going to do is use a nice sharp knife and I’m going to cut nice little circles. When I go to peoples’ houses and they go, “I really hate chopping onions”. I know why, because you bust a knife out of the drawer and the thing’s completely blunt. The best thing you can do is - you don’t have to spend $200 - $300 dollars - that comes later. When you are earning very little money, you still want to buy expensive knives. Just spend $80.00-$100.00 on a good knife. Don’t buy a big set. Buy yourself one medium-sized. You can chop with it, do filleting and all that carry-on. Invest in that nice knife and you’ll know what I mean, later.

I’m going to cut these into little circles. This has only been put into a little bit of fish stock.

Briefly cook it for 30 seconds. One of the most common things people do is to over cook a lot of seafood. Especially white fish and salmon, everyone cooks it to death.

It doesn’t take very long for a 200 gram piece of salmon to actually cook.

I’m now going to grab my spoon, get it all mixed up.

Now I’m using white balsamic vinegar. This is what we’re making as a dressing. Normally this will come out of the steamer and we would have all these ingredients in front of us at work. I’m using extra virgin olive oil. What I like for this dish is raw red onions - very popular now. You can get them anywhere. A really nice fine ‘julienne’; not an identical julienne but we are cutting across the onion, just so. Another onion family: a little bit of chives, finally chopped. In she goes.

Then olives, calamata olives. The public perception of olives, not only in New Zealand but also in England, people didn’t like olives or anchovies. These are calamatas, beautiful, nice and crunchy, not too pickled.

We’re going to pop those in there, like so.

You can see the beautiful colours, coming through now. It has a Mediterranean look. What’s crucial is that there is nothing really masking this. I’m not going to throw in some ‘sweet Thai chilli sauce’ because it is kind of ‘cool’ and because it is kind of ‘pacific-rim’. We are keeping everything ‘regional’.

In go some capers. These are really small types. You can get them big but these little ones are not as salty or vinegary.

With these little lemon wedges, a few bits of lemon.

This is important too - not only if you own your own restaurant. You have got to keep up with crockery and cutlery and glassware. These are the new plates we have, and the dressing looks nice and green, and all the flavours are crisp.

It’s just a simple seafood salad.