Monday 25 May 2015

Quick Cod and Prawn Gratin

Preparation is key to many things in life, as is cooking. I've learned to make sure you have the necessary utensils, not just the ingredients. So before I did anything, I put a tablespoon on my shopping list before adding the ingredients. A teaspoon, however, is a third the size of a tablespoon, or so I found after I'd finished cooking. So as long as I can remember that...

When I shopped, though, I couldn't find a tablespoon in the whole of Tesco. Poor performance.

To begin, I poured the flour into the hot milk without mixing it with water first. I had to start that again. Then I turned the grill on and forgot to light it, resulting in me remembering late and nearly losing my eyebrows.

The recipe includes peas for the ingredients of the gratin itself, which is a bit like a pie. But at the last minute the instructions suggest you also throw in peas as a side dish. Oh.

I then forgot to preheat the plates so the food cooled quite quickly once served.

The topping, a mixture of cheese and breadcrumbs, ended up a little thin due to the size of the dish.

I got the timing for all of this wrong- I invited my parents around to share it with me but when they arrived I was still 20 minutes off. It was a good job I did invite them around as this isn't a dish that's safe to reheat, and it fed the three of us. We all liked it, though, and the fish- Vietnamese river cobbler and smoked haddock- was very flavoursome, one more so than the other. The recipe suggested cod, but on my shopping list I recorded only their generalisation of “white fish fillet”.

Timing etc. aside, the meal was a tasty success.


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