Monday 30 March 2009

Peppered Mackerel and potato bake

With the cupboard looking a little bare, I googled for a recipe idea for smoked mackerel and potatoes and came across this Peppered Mackerel and Potato Bake at BBC Good Food.

This was a quick and easy supper dish, and I made it dairy free by substituting rice milk and a beaten egg for the cream. Simplicity itself, par boiled potatoes are sliced and fried with some onion then layered around flaked mackerel before the cream is added and the whole is baked for getting on for an hour. It smells great when its baking!

The serving suggestion of a green salad didn't appeal to my family, so we went with an accompaniement of petis pois and courgettes fried in olive oil and deglazed with a little lime juice. It was declared "Quite splendid" and not a scrap remained on plates!

Monday 16 March 2009

Aubergine and Potato Bake

Tonight's culinary adventure needed to involve aubergines and potatos, and google was kind enough to provide a link to a recipe for Aubergine and Potato bake at cookitsimply.com.

This was basically a moussaka/lasagne type dish and made vegetarian by leaving out the garlic sausage also omitting the cheese would make it vegan easily enough. The cheese did add to the flavours but I think it would have been tasty without it. It was quite time consuming to prepare, taking me an hour to get all the potato and aubergine slices prepared and the tomato sauce made, but I could have done this quicker if I'd used two pans; I was just being economical as my dishwasher is broken at the moment! Once it was layered up I baked it for 15 minutes without the cheese, then added it and baked for the remaining 15 before finishing it under the grill to get it nice and brown.

It was a very tasty dish with some nice flavours, filling and comforting, and would have been accompanied well by a salad and some nice foccacia or similar. I would cut the potato into thinner slices if I made it again, they were about 1cm thick this time and that made them a bit chunky.