Words and pictures. And fish.

  Lucky you, in case you're feeling too tired to read, I've loads of pictures for you. Without further ado I'll get straight to the first one and if you saw yesterday's post you'll know about my miserable welding. Though the picture below isn't great, my welding is. Actually, it may not be great but it's better than yesterday and for this project, that's good enough.

An improvement

  After a few hours of metal work I got home shattered and was greeted by a hungry wife. Seeing how battered I looked and as it was getting late, she suggested a takeaway. No chance. A quick shower washed off the grime and gave me the inspiration and pep I needed to create something delicious. 

  This story incorporates a little recipe fiddling as well as hopefully offering a little inspiration. Sound interesting? Ready? Good, now pay attention. First you need to think of fish pie as a set of principles instead of a recipe. The elements you need to create are a white sauce filled with ingredients and a topping. See how these principles give you loads of room for creativity? Good, you're getting it.

Fresh from the grill

  Instead of making a white sauce like a béchamel by melting butter, adding flour and then milk, you're going to sweat some veg in the fat before adding the flour, and as I don't drink cow juice, I used a combination of veg stock and coconut milk. Oh, and a splash of white wine from a bottle that I happened to have open. 

  I have a habit of making my fish pie a real medley of ingredients so the veg I sweated were onion, mushroom, carrot and cauliflower and here's where you can really go mad. Once they had softened a bit, in went the flour, then the liquids and voila!, I had a white sauce with loads of ingredi... Yes! I know this is a fish pie and there's no mention of fish. I'm getting to it.

You don't have to be at nursery to eat nursery food.

  As I want my fish just cooked and in nice chunks instead of totally overcooked and flaked into a zillion pieces, I add it to the white sauce right at the end and let the heat of the sauce cook it. Once the fish was stirred in, (smoked haddock and some tiger prawns as I know you're curious), the whole mix was put into a oven proof dish and given a topping.

  For the topping I went for butternut squash. I sliced it into half moons and steamed it while the veg was steaming, so by now it was nice and soft but firm enough to handle without disintegrating. For fun I made a nice pretty pattern then covered the whole thing with a heap of parmesan cheese and stuck it under the grill.

​​​​​​​  Time taken from inspiration to tucking in was a shade over 45. That's me and I'm obviously able to do this sort of thing in my sleep, but once you've done it a few times, and if you do it with other people, it won't take you that long. Part of the fun is to vary the ingredients and flavours and if you taste it as you go along you'll not get any nasty surprises. There's a lot more I could waffle on about but that's quite enough for now as you've done far too much reading. As usual, if you've got any questions, get in touch.

Kirk out

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