Fish pie and my new cook books

Hello there. This is my fish pie from last night, and very nice it was too.

I make this fish pie from time to time. First I make a basic white sauce on the hob, then I add a packet of mixed raw fish, in my case from Ocado, and a few herbs, dried or fresh, whatever I’ve got to hand, and cook it on the hob for a couple of minutes. Then I put the fish-in-sauce mixture into a Pyrex or other ovenproof dish and smother loads of mashed potato over the top. (This time I had some mash I’d made previously in the freezer so I defrosted this the day before). Then I grate a bit of cheddar cheese over the mash and cook in a fairly hot oven, approx 190 degrees C fan oven for about 40 minutes. It’s nice when it goes brown and crispy on the top. We had this with petits pois. If you can’t be bothered to make the mashed potato, you can always use something ready made like Waitrose essential frozen mashed potato. You can take that straight from the freezer and layer it on top of any sort of pie… cottage, fish etc and cook directly from there. You can also make this with tinned fish, tuna or salmon are good with a few sliced mushrooms added in the sauce. So easy! The tuna one is really good cold too.

On Saturday my friend Pat came round for a socially distanced chat. She, like the rest of us, has been having a clear out at home during lockdown. She had unearthed a number of cookbooks she is unlikely to use again and offered them to me before she took them to a car boot sale or charity shop. Here are the ones I picked from her pile, thanks Pat! x

David made me put the books into quarantine in the garage for a few days so I haven’t had a chance to look through them properly yet, but I’m looking forward to doing so. I now have a Gary Rhodes book, I’ve never tried his recipes before. My parents once went to his restaurant in London which was a prize they’d won in a raffle. They had a great time.

I have learnt a lot of my cooking skills from Delia’s Complete Cookery course, so now I have a couple more Delia books. I like her recipes as they always work. But you have to be a bit careful with her ingredients…. she’s really not shy with the butter or double cream. She says to go for it with puddings but if you’re worried about the richness and calories to just have one once a week… I kind of like her style. A lot of the puddings I like to make and eat contain fruit, which David doesn’t like, so if I make something like a crumble I make a big family sized one and eat it to myself every night for a week. Oh well, someone’s got to, and fruit’s good for you, right?! In the beginning of lockdown when I didn’t want to use milk or bread supplies for breakfast (that’s my excuse anyway) I really enjoyed a big portion of cold rhubarb crumble with a one day out of date yoghurt on top of it whilst sitting in the garden. So decadent! I know how to live.

The curry books will be interesting. Although I’ve made many curries in my time, I’ve never had any specific curry recipe books. David is a curryaholic. He will be extremely impressed if I manage to master Bombay aloo, his favourite spicy potato dish. The supermarket version of this is just never the same as in an Indian restaurant where the potatoes must be slow cooked for ages as they have really soft, big pieces of potato. Personally I just love poppadoms and a cold lager or two. I could probably make a meal just out of that. I’m also quite keen on onion bhajees.

For tonight it’s haggis with new potatoes from the garden, carrots and gravy. We like tinned haggis, which is cheaper than a lot of the others, and you can microwave it in 4 minutes.

Happy cooking and eating everyone. Bon appetit. Here are some random pictures of cows (bulls) in Windsor Great Park. They were the most unscary young bulls you’ve seen. They got spooked when they saw me with my iPhone camera… obviously not wanting to be stars of The Waffle, but here they are anyway. Most of them were dark brown all over, I love the richness of their coats. A couple of them had white faces as below. We had a bit of a staring competition.