I’ve been very uninspired food wise over the past two years – obvious from the complete lack of blog entries – but last night my cooking mojo returned! Woohoo!

It’s been a strange two years food wise. The small people continue to treat my cooking as though it will give them the plague and COD has embarked on a journey of food avoidance behaviour that has taken a bit of getting used to. There is a long list of ingredients that are deemed evil by the many members of my immediate family. Even when there is agreement on ingredients, guaranteed it will need to be prepped in multiple ways to please the masses. LOD eats all the broccoli, EEROD only eats the ‘tree part’ and ACOD only eats the stalks. LOD only likes corn on the cob, ACOD likes corn off the cob and EEROD only likes baby corn. It goes on. This is exhausting.

That being said, last night I managed a dish that has nothing ‘evil’ in it and was utterly delish! My children did not eat this because, well, fish, but COD and I loved it.

Before I go into the recipe, it is strange looking back at my last blog post in which I waxed lyrical about a move to be more plastic free. I don’t think we’ve done much more in the past two years. We still get our veg from Living Larder, we still buy soap, we gave up on shampoo and conditioner bars, I still forget the reusable bags in the car and I found recyclable heads for our electric toothbrushes (still plastic though!). We have beeswax wraps, which I made, but while we started off enthusiastically, it’s easier just to use a container with a lid or the dreaded clingfilm – although I don’t think I’ve bought a new clingfilm in 2 years and there is still some on the roll so we don’t use much.

But, I digress……

Tray baked cod with mash

This is an adaptation of Sir Oliver’s fish tray bake from the 30 minute meals recipe book. 

Ingredients:

1 x cod loin (skinless and boneless) and chunked that up into 4 equal size portions
4 x streaky bacon / pancetta strips
1 x leek (finely chopped)
1 x courgette (chunky chop)
1 x red chilli (finely chopped)
1 x garlic clove (finely chopped
2 x tomatoes (chunky chop)
3 x potatoes (peeled and quartered)
1/2 x lemon (quartered)
coconut cream
margarine
salt, pepper

Method:

Pre heat the oven to 180 degrees (fan – I have no idea how other ovens operate really), fill and boil the kettle. Get out a small roasting tray.

In your roasting tray, add the leek, garlic, chilli, courgette and tomato. Give it a good mix up and then lay the fish fillets on the veg. Put a slice of streaky bacon / pancetta on each fish fillet and wedge the lemon pieces in the corners. Season to taste (I added a good whack of seasoning). Pop this in the oven for 20-30 minutes, depending on how chunky the fish fillets are.

While the fish is in the oven, boil the potatoes (I scandalously use boiling water for boiling potatoes and cannot see a blind jot of difference other than it saving a lot of time – yay!). Once the potatoes are done (10-12 mins), drain them, season well and add a good knob (can you say that when it’s not butter?) of margarine and mash. Add enough coconut cream to get the mash to your desired consistency. For me it was about 80mls.

Serve in a bowl with the gorgeous fish on a bed of mash and spoon over veg and the sauce from the tray. Enjoy! This looked like it was enough to have left overs but COD and I scoffed the lot! So, I’d say it feeds 2 hungry people!

Obviously you can also make mash the normal way with dairy but coconut cream mash was a revelation!

In other news:

• LOD has just turned 10! That’s double digits and we did in fact congratulate ourselves on keeping a human alive for 10 years! She is tall, gorgeous, has taken up flute and still loves ballet. An all round good kid that one. We’ve decided to keep her
• EEROD is 7.5 and we still get slightly panicked when she goes quiet. She still likes to practise her ‘art’ on things other than paper but her work is good and so we have accepted she is an ‘artiste’. She can mostly be found dressing up in my scarves and dancing in front of mirrors
• ACOD is no longer a baby or even close to one. That phase in our world is long gone (does small happy dance). At 4.5 she is definitely her own person and essentially rules the house. She is still in nursery and delighted herself this week by learning how to write ‘poo poo’ and ‘wee wee’ and so we have post-it notes stuck all over the house with some combo of those written on them!
• I gave up the world of Local Government last July and am now working for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, saving the world.
• House renovations have moved on in the past two years but we still have a looooooong way to go. This summer will see the official opening of the new patio and party-zone.
• The weather at the moment is hideous and not conducive to gardening but it’s getting to that time of year when I need to think about what vegetables I am going to grow……..