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Fish cookery is one of my hobbies. I love eating poached, pan-fired, broiled, baked and marinated trout, but really my favorite is smoked trout and salmon. Smoked trout is a delicacy and is rather expensive to buy. So why not learn how to make some more cheaply yourself?

If you have a patio area or balcony suitable for a small barbecue outdoors, or even on a high rise city apartment building, you can make and enjoy home-smoked salmon or trout. Smoking gourmet fish is an interesting hobby and does ensure unending invitations to your friends' parties if you share your creations with them by bringing along delicious tapa dishes.

First catch your fish! Not everyone is an angler and has a trout stream at their doorstep. Not to worry!

I regularly frequent the local supermarket and always watch over the deli section for fish on discount sale. Now and then I can buy salmon or rainbow trout fillets for half price i.e., $15/kg instead of $30/kg, probably when they have excess supply and a new batch has come in. So I buy a couple of packets.

Fresh fillets are great to cook as is, but the smoked variety are even more delicious and better than the thinly sliced smoked salmon usually available at a high price.

It is important to prepare the fillets properly for smoking and this takes a day to do. First sprinkle them with salt (go easy on this) then cover with brown sugar. Lie the fillets on a tray with a slope so that the brown juices drain off from the fish. After 3 or 4 hours recover the fillets, give them a quick swill under the tap, pat dry, and leave over night on a wire rack to dry further.

Next assemble your fish smoker. What, you haven't got one? Not a problem.

There are on the market compact rectangular steel smokers that use a spirit burner and sawdust to hot smoke fish in about 10 minutes or so which are OK. Also a lady friend told me of using a wok on the kitchen stove. She used tea leaves on the bottom with the fish above on a rack covered by the lid! Once I tried a similar thing with a large fry pan and wood chips in a kitchen at a backpackers in Morelia, Mexico. I wasn't very popular until my companeros tasted the result.

Back home at your leisure you have the opportunity to make a good "boutique Mini-smoker" for little cost. I shall explain my set up.

The base is a mini Weber barbecue, 14 inches in diameter which I bought at a Saturday car boot sale for $8. On the wire rack I place a steel plate 11 inches in diameter on which I put two hands-full of wood chips to

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