Pollocks to it!

I'm getting more lax than ever with these posts--nevermind, be assured that cooking is continuing and I'm grinding my way onwards to culinary enlightenment (or at least expanding my imagination beyond cooking pesto pasta three times a week). Although, the first of the dishes for this week is not so exotic: fish fingers.

Fish fingers are one of my favourites, perhaps because they were one of the few convenience foods that were allowed over the threshold when I was little (how I yearned for Findus crispy pancakes and chicken kievs [Mum I am grateful you didn't make me obese, really]). ANYWAY, there have been a few recipes around for home made ones and I've been, as a new age (desperately scrabbling for a word which isn't 'foodie') nibbler, I wanted to know if homemade meant better.

Whatever the taste may have been like the fact that I was using pollock and not cod automatically made the fish fingers 'better' than the vast majority of shop bought ones, as pollock are much more plentiful than cod. I used Jamie Oliver's recipe for fish fingers, from his recent fish supplement for the Telegraph. Jamie, I am sorry, I pillaged your recipe--I completely forgot to do any shopping, bar getting the fish--there was no parmesan or lemon for my crumb coating, middle-class disaster if ever there was one! Instead, I rolled the fish strips in flour (trick of my mum's for when you're coating things, makes the egg stick better), dipped them in a beaten egg and then coated them in a mixture of bread crumbs and parsley.

I failed to make them uniform in size, so Sam referred to them as goujons, H, who was visiting for supper as fish finger pieces. Anyway, they were good, despite the fact that they cooled extremely quickly and were tepid when we ate them. They were crispy, and the taste of the fish was much more present than in Captain Birdseye's variety. Excellent chips by Sam.

Sam, doing the only permitted eating on the day of making

The other dish for this post was in honour of F, who popped over from Australia for a visit. As it happened to be her birthday I created a sticky ginger cake with lime icing. It's this exact recipe, but I was using a cake pamphlet from Olive Magazine. The biggest problem with this one is the self restraint it requires, as after baking it has filled the kitchen with a lovely gingery cakey smell, and it has cooled and it looks ever so inviting, you have to pack it up to mature! No eating allowed. Until that is, you unwrap it two days later, cover the top in butter icing flavoured with lime zest and juice.

It's nice. No scrap that, it's delicious and several people have verified this. I recommend this it's sticky, the treacle gives it a dark toffee flavour and the lime icing, despite it being a buttercream, stops it from being all too cloying, and, please forgive me for sounding like a second-rate food critic, gives it another dimension. This is one for the list of favourites.

A tale of a tea loaf

And so back to the more chatty style of post. This week I have returned to that which I am most comfortable with: baking.

New recipe number one was supper on a miserable Thursday evening and cooked as comfort food for the other half as he found himself bogged down with work. We whittled red meat out of the things we fancied and settled on some kind of pie--I had just been paid so this pie, complete with a near full jar of Waitrose's grilled artichokes, was slapped on the evening's menu.

I could not find wild mushrooms in Leeds city centre, and had to settle on closed cup and chestnuts. Also, I did as the recipe suggested and was lazy enough not to make my own short crust pastry. I came to regret this, as I have now reached the proud point of being able to make better-than-shop-bought pastry (gentle readers who have been with me throughout this journey will remember I used to be Sally Carrie Cackhands with pastry: it scared me, and that which I made was not nice to eat). Anyway, Mr Waitrose's slightly tough pastry aside, it was very good. The mushrooms gave it a really autumnal taste and because it was filled with veggies, sharing a rather large pie between us for supper did not leave us feeling as sordid as we might have. Before I move onto the next recipe, the pie is not blind baked, and you can avoid the problem of a 'soggy bottom'--which seems to have plagued those commenting on the BBC's webpage with the recipe--by cooking it on a chip tray with holes in it.

I have also successfully made my Grandma's tea loaf (or rather loaves: the recipe makes a brace). All families seem to have foods which are traditional to them; whether it be your mum's Sunday roast, or your dad's bar-be-que sauce, most families have recipes which are tweaked to become their own or things which are the taste and smell of home. Although this year has mostly been about branching off into new things, I have also realised that there are some things closer to home which I wanted to learn to make. This seems to be a recipe which my great-grandfather brought home from his travels and, presumably, gave to my great grandmother; it is a much treasured heirloom.

It is also a recipe which I thought might go wrong: all the measurements were imperial; I had to guess at the cooking times, as I knew my thermonuclear oven would char on the time and temperature stated (it was cooked in 30 minutes under the time, so my caution paid off); and I had never made a cake that doesn't contain fat before. What it does contain is sugar and dried fruit which have been soaked overnight in tea, and a flour and some egg which are stirred in in the morning. There is no creaming, no folding, no whisking--it is so simple. It is also the best use for dried fruit I am yet to come across and I have eaten slice after slice slathered in butter this afternoon.

Here I will leave you. I need to work out how to skin some pollock fillets, but that's another story for next week.

The world in ten words

Ok, so, a bit of a break, I was off enjoying a staycation and intimidating myself by reading Julie and Julia, although it didn't really intimidate me as she seemed to spend a lot of time whining and didn't really say that much on the food--more about her tantrums. So I am not going to waffle about my personal problems--you can have a round up of the recipes in 10 words or less--per recipe. (I made another recipe for focaccia, as I realised, having watched The Great British Bake Off that nice as the rosemary one which I made earlier this year it did did not actually produce focaccia, I shan't bore you with details of an uneven crumb structure which should happen.)

Simon Hopkinson's Olive Oil Mash:


Grown up babyfood. Mash shouldn't be puréed. Tasted nice.









Paul Hollywood's Focaccia

Messy--dough everywhere! Eaten before I could photograph. Nom, nom.

Tiramisu Cake (author's own)


A's birthday: sponge, brandy, chocolate ganache. Peculiar candles.