Monday 25 May 2009

anyone else noticed

price of Sainsbury's basics going up suddenly and sneakily?
A few months ago they did HUGE advertising campaigns about the Basics, and I was converted, and one of the big things was the Basics 10 fish fingers for 49p, using sustainable not minced fish, and sustainable palm oil. Suddenly its gone up to 69p!
That's a LOT to increase in one go, on a so called "hero" product, and that's the only one I noticed, wish I had more old receipts around to compare now...

I don't have anything to prove!

(and no this isn't about bread making!)

But yes, I used a Pataks biryani paste for the quick biryani, and it was yum, and it's all decent ingredients. I tend to always have a jar on hand, as I find the one pan pilaf is such a quick and easy meal. I don't always use the Biryani, I've also used the Korma, tikka masala and Rogan Josh, I think. Don't get the tandoori if you're like minded, as it does contain one of the to be avoided colours, which I was highly disappointed to find out.

I added frozen leaf spinach and peas to the "biryani", as well as the liver, obviously. Would you be surprised to know Littl'un adored the liver? She's had liver a few times before, and always asks for more. Of course it's "chicken" to her. Classically, all meats are "chicken" even the beautifully fresh haddock we had as a treat the other day! LOL! I don't give liver too often as it's v high in iron and vit A, both of which not good in too high doses in little people.

On the other hand, I may have used a bought curry paste for that meal, but I made chapatis myself today! And the "subji" was really simple today, just made with cumin (whole and powdered) salt, tomatoes (half a tin) and a little sprinkling of turmeric and garam masala to fry the veg in. I microwaved the chopped unpeeled potatoes before adding to the pan to speed up the cooking. Shimples!

Just like the chicken yesterday, wow, pop it all in slow cooker before Mass, come home to be tempted by the divine smells of the poaching chook. Early supper with the kids, juicy tender bitey meat. Didn't so much carve it as stop it from falling apart as it was taken out of the pot.

I have poorly just returned from abroad parents, so used some of the poaching liquor and veg and a lil of the leftover meat (there wasn't much left!) to make a soup for the sickly ones. Added some ginger and garlic and more stock and sent it in a flask. Hope there weren't any passengers who'd been to Mexico on their plane...

bacon sour recipe

people have been asking me what is a bacon sour. It's something I invented at uni, and used to serve with rice, or pasta or Ebly, or left over chips, or pitta bread or jacket squds or whatever.

Basically chop up and fry about half a pack to a pack of bacon, however flush/greedy you are feeling... Cook it til its as you like bacon, but it won't stay crispy if that's all you eat, so beware!!

Add some chopped onion if you feel like it.

Pour in some tinned chopped tomatoes, half a tin to a tin.

Add a capful of whatever vinegar or lemon juice you have to hand. Vinegar works better, I've used plain malt and red wine, and some weird posh tarragon one which was lying around, it's all good.

Add some sweetcorn, tinned or frozen, and mix up well. Grind black pepper in. Simmer until thick. Serve.

week plan 23rd May - 29th May

Saturday - lambs' liver quick biryani + veg

Sunday - slowcooked whole chicken, sauteed potato cubes, greens

Monday - (Bank Holiday, Daddy's B'day) cauliflower, courgette and potato curry with chapatis and rice, followed by double choc brownies as b'day cake, candle and all!

Tuesday - slow cooked beans and bacon on toast (away to Warwick Castle for the day)

Wednesday - beetroot keftedes in pitta bread (recipe from review of the Modern Vegetable in Good Food mag)

Thursday - final episode ever of ER, grilled ham and cheese sandwiches!!!! Probably a salad...

Friday - Fishfingers, mash, some veg from box

Monday 18 May 2009

crispy prawns are only crispy briefly

those prawns on Friday were yummy, but Godpapa complained that the ones we left for him to try were not really crispy anymore. It's such an easy recipe I could easily make it in seconds again, it's originally a Nigella Express recipe with calamari! Just mix 4 tbs semolina with 2 tbs cornflour and 1tsp salt and 1 tsp paprika, in a plastic food bag, and put prawns/calamari/chicken chunks etc in and shake to coat.
I fried them in batches in a karahi, uses less oil than a pan or even a wok, or fryer raw prawns will take a minute, cooked prawns very few seconds, just enough to crisp up.

Meantime I boiled noodles and rinsed with cold water then added them to a wok full of the stir fry pack I cheatedly got in the Big Bad T---- shop. Added rice wine vinegar, soya sauce and a drizzle of sesame oil. Served the prawns separately to keep them crisp.

Saturday afternoon I was really chuffed to be able to use my beloved electric hand mixer to whizz together a banana bread and put it in the oven in the 10 minutes it took Godpapa to get Littl'un ready for her nap. It made the house smell heavenly and she had a good chunk for her post-nap snack. Later we did go to the Crepe Cafe, http://www.thecrepecafe.co.uk/index.html?_ret_=return, it was fab, filling and yum. Staff were excellent and the kids loved watching it all being made fresh in front of us! Daddy and Big'un met us there after their cultural weekend, and it was nice to be all together again.

Sunday morning I was really rather show-off super mummy. I put the lamb and stuff in the slowcooker, had some time over, so whipped up some mini banana muffins (the muffins were mini, not the bananas) to take to share at the Confirmation class after Mass. I forgot the brand new mini muffins can be quite hard to give up their paper cases, and the ones done in the silicon cases were much nicer, I'm thinking I'll get a couple more boxes of the silicon ones and use them to line the muffin tin instead of paper ones. More washing up I guess, but worth it not to waste half the muffin!

I had a bad headache so Godfather No1 made the cous cous and I intercommed him at the wrong moment, so there weren't enough raisins in the couscous, but the finely chopped courgettes were accepted and the pine nuts added a lovely crunchy texture which Littl'un especially adored.

Today I made the left-over baguette bake. Basically I saved the dry hard baguette ends from a couple of lunches, and tried to smash them to small bits and spread them in a baking dish. Then I made a very basic tomato sauce with some finely chopped hidden veg (courgette & carrots in this case) tin of tomatoes, some of a bottle of passata, couple of capsful of red wine vinegar, then poured over the bread and left to soak.
Finally slice and scatter a ball of basics mozzarella, and some nice bouncy spring onions.
Bake til hot, sizzly and bubbly. I served up a grated kohlrabi remolade, basically mixed together a tablespoon of mayo with a couple of teaspoons of mustard and a capful of redwine vinegar, salt and pepper. Mix the grated kohl rabi in well, and enjoy. I love Kohlrabi. This is a nice salad with a change for coleslaw lovers...

Only downside was it was a tad protein low, and early evening, so I got hungry before writing this blog, and Mum-in-law had sent a loaf of seeded homemade breadmaker brownish rye-ish bread home with Big'un, and so I had to have a slice of that just now... Its another vote in the direction of breadmaker buying, if I hadn't just had to spend housekeeping money on new clothes for sudden growth spurt Big'un! *Sigh* start saving up again...

Thursday 14 May 2009

what's on the menu next week?

It is a bit of a complicated menu plan this week, but hold on to your hat and we'll get there..

Daddy and Big'un are going off to Grandma's house on Friday afternoon, Grandma and Grandad are taking Big'un to http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/music/productions/london-philharmonic-orchestra-38584 here on Saturday, so Godpapa and Littl'un and I are going to spend the day together, and we thought we'd head to a tiny place we discovered this week - http://www.thecrepecafe.co.uk/ for an early evening meal for the 3 of us, and if Daddy and Big'un get back in time they can join us too.

If it ends up not possible we'll find food for Littl'un and I'll cook my wonderful quick baked gnocchi standby dish, using a Sainsbury's basics pasta sauce, vacu-pak gnocchi and some blitzed veg and a basics mozzarella ball. No need to boil the gnocchi, just pour sauce into a dish with the gnocchi and bake for about 20-30 mins. I have it booked in later in the week if I don't make it on Saturday. With me so far? Good.

If I've already made it on Saturday, I'll make a Nigella minestrone in minutes (using fresh Nigella, actually nigella is a seed one can cook with, so that's even funnier than I first thought!) Or I'd fry up a bunch of chopped up leftover meat and mix with noodles. Eating with chopsticks is always so much more filling... So here goes:

Saturday: crepe from Crepe Cafe, or gnocchi bake.
Sunday: slow cooked lamb with olives and whatever veg box veg I can hide in there* Served with cous cous
Monday: left over stale baguette ends soaked in tinned tomatoes and baked with cheese and maybe a tin of beans.
kids free-from meal is lamb mince and rice pilaff with veg. Pudding of pink wafer bix and fruit.
Tuesday: pan baked chicken thighs/drums with Frank's Red Hot sauce, potato wedges and roast cherry tomatoes, and whatever green veg replaces chard (shudder) in my box.
Wednesday: Bacon sour, possibly my signature dish, with Ebly (yay!)
Thursday: this is the night for the gnocchi if I didn't make it or minestrone if I did or leftover noodly thingy.
Friday: Thai red salmon curry and rice, maybe brown rice if I can summon up the courage to try again!

Somewhere in there I'm also going to bake at least a banana bread as I bought a reduced bag of basics bananas and 2 were a bit bruised which just screams out banana bread. I also want to fiddle around with the naan recipe to make some sweet fruit flatbreads (yeasted) as I was thinking the naan dough is so nutritious with all the yoghurt and milk etc. I'll probably also whip up a batch of cookies or similar too if I can. Let's see how it goes....

Oh and let's have some more comments here, I wanna hear what you think and what you are all eating!

*veg box this week has the double whammy of aubergines and courgettes which are great for bulking meals but hated by Godpapa. I have to hide them unless he's working the late shift. The kids eat them fine...

the defiant meatball and other suppers

I had a bogof pack of decent sausages in the freezer, so I slit and discarded the skins and rolled each sausage into 3 meatballs, all were beautifully round and it was quite therapeutic to do. However, when I fried them they all sprang back to slightly oval/oblongy clearly a divided third of a sausage! Oh well. Took them out once fried and made a nice quick tomatoey sauce in the pan - fried some chopped onion (from the packet in the freezer) then poured in a tetra of chopped tomatoes with olives from Sainsburys. Added the usuals, splash of already opened wine, green tabasco, etc. Served up with the rest of a packet of linguine, very yum, if more rugby ball than round meatball, oh the defiance of the wretched sausage!

Today I used Vicky Bhogal's wonderful and largely unsung book "Cooking Like Mummyji" to make dry chickpea curry, and I used an amalgam of various different recipes to make naan bread. From scratch! Wonderful. Big'un was off school today, and we did an lil maths lesson weighing out the ingredients, and it was science to explain how the yeast made the bread rise. And utterly divine to eat, and I had some fun on my own experimenting with methods of cooking it. I tried oven on a high heat with a preheated baking tray, and both tawa and grill and tawa and held upside down over flame (I have a special thingy to do this, it's designed for chapatis). I think tawa and grill worked best, but my oven doesn't have a grill inside it, which would have made a difference. I'm sorely tempted by one of these:
http://www.spicesofindia.co.uk/acatalog/Tandoori-Pot.html
but don't think naan would work in it.

Just made my next grocery order and managedto get it £40.25 plus delivery! Very pleased with myself.

Oh and toying with the idea of getting a breadmaker, doing tons of research towards it...

Tuesday 12 May 2009

so the week so far

Well, it's been a revelation! My beautiful nephew's birthday was on Saturday, and we wanted to go spend the day with him in Warwick. In the past we would have got home too close to the kids' bedtimes, they'd be hungry, not want to eat any of the quick things to hand, or we'd have to stop to feed them on the motorway, then get home and put them to bed and then order takeout, and end up eating really late and real rubbish, and spending LOTS of money. THIS time, I put a gammon joint, decent quality, in the slow cooker in the morning, while everyone was getting ready, plonked on top of some carrots, celery, potatoes and onions. Poured a little cider over the veg before adding the gammon and rubbed wholegrain mustard on the top of the gammon and drizzled a little honey over.
By the time we came home it was tender and juicy and could be flaked up with 2 forks, with no effort, utterly delicious. The girls even had big portions, we all stuffed ourselves, and there was still about half the joint left. Had some in sandwiches today, and it was GOOD. Perhaps could have done with soaking the gammon overnight to remove some of the salt tho.

On Sunday I had some reduced price nice mince I'd bought up and frozen, which I made into freefrom Shepherd's Pie for the girls for Monday, as well as a big one for us for that evening, tho I did adulterate the mash for ours once I'd made the little ones... It was great, and left a portion which I can have for lunch tomorrow.

Monday, the girls had the aforementioned pies, I've been informed they are called "Binky Pie" in a certain household as a certain girlie loves Shepherd's Pie so much. Or was is Cottage Pie, I'm never sure... I did a coconutty free-from Apple Crumble for the kids too, note to self, Binky doesn't like apples, especially cooked... But they all loved the crumble, so not a disaster.
However, our supper, the brown rice, was really not at all how I wanted it to go!! I wanted to pressure cook, and I've done brown rice pilaf in the pressure cooker before, and I followed the instructions that were in the book that came with the cooker, and it came out like a sludgey stewey thing, though very tasty! Far too much water, and far too much food in fact! I packed 2 big food tubs to give away to people I knew would enjoy it, and still had more left. No idea what happened, especially since it worked fine the last time... You'd be surprised how hard it is to find instructions on cooking brown rice in a pressure cooker, you'd think it'd be the ideal method, so much quicker...?

Today's risotto, much much more of a success. Got the recipe from the Credit Crunch Cookbook, worked really well. The chicken had frozen and defrosted pleasingly, I'm wary of chicken. I used the other half of the cauliflower I used in the brown rice yesterday, as well as some mixed veg from the freezer, and some cooked peas that were in the fridge too. It was a bit use-up and a bit add new ingredients, and it worked brilliantly and was really quite quick. The girls kept busy while I attended to the risotto with a fab Disney Princess cupcake decorating set, with no nasty colours or sweeteners or preservatives, yet met the standard for girly pinkness required for this kind of activity. They loved it, tho Littl'un initially only ate icing off 2 cakes, but did eventually eat cake once her Dad fed it to her, while she was looking at her fave book of the day - a photo album of her family! Big'un had no difficulty polishing off a cup cake and picked - yes, you got it - Princess Jasmine. They come with a tube of icing to squiggle with, some confetti icing hearts and some rice paper printed placards. Plenty fun, creativity and mess, rang all their bells. And Daddy supervised, and that was MY fave part of it! LOL.

Has anyone else discovered Sainsbury's clotted cream scones? We accidentally bought some (not even "whoopsed"!) and used half each as a base for some rhubarb and strawberry icecream, and Daddy came up with the idea of drizzling double cream on top so it goes hard and "crackable", very very very delicious and very very sinful. Where's that priest gone....?

Oh, I must post about the day out in Warwick, but will do so as a comment later, as it's not strictly budgety, but VERY foodie, and I know some of you are waiting to hear all about it...

busy busy busy sorry!

Hello! Gotta do a quick catch up, and give the info on this week's menu and shopping costs!

So Friday we had our version of a ready meal, because I had myself an evening of fundraising indulgence booked, and food needed to be quick and easy, and perhaps even not made by me, in order to preserve the "mum's having a break" feeling...
We had pre-flavoured salmon fillets (coriander and lime) from the Morrison's fish counter, ready to bake, cooked in my silicon "papillote" dish, and served with new potatoes and purple sprouting brocolli. Very yum. And cooked by Godfather 1. Heh heh. AND I didn't clear up either! The pampering evening was cool, if rather painful in places. Threading of eyebrows? NEVER AGAIN! I'd rather go through childbirth again...

OK, so the menu plan. Shopping was online again, and was around £40 before the delivery charge. We're now getting the Abel and Cole mixed veg box on a Friday, no fruits, so I picked up fruits in Sainsbury's which added about another £7, but I'm just not that keen on the fruit picked by the in-store shoppers, and I prefer Sainsbury's quality, and I'd had to get Tesco grocery delivery due to the time-slot I'd needed for the delivery.

Saturday - Slow cooker gammon with veg
Sunday - Shepherd's Pie
Monday - Brown Rice veg and lentil stew
Tuesday - risotto made with left over chicken frozen from last week.
Wednesday - sausage meatballs with spaghetti and tomato sauce
Thursday -channa (chickpea) curry and naan
Friday - crispy prawn noodle stir-fry

Thursday 7 May 2009

chicken casserole and pizza fun

I sorta slow cooked the chicken in the end cos my naughty priest buddy came over for a cuppa so I quickly fried the seasoned chicken and veg in the pan then sloshed in some Marigold stock and some cider that was lying about and shoved the pan in the oven. Oh I love that pan, from Ikea, non-stick with a glass lid that doubles as an extra dish if I need it to. When I use the oven to slow cook, I seal the meat and then rest it in the lid while I fry the veggies, so all that juice drips straight back into the pan while it cooks. Great!

I put in the Jerusalem artichokes from the box and they went down fine apart from fussy J, tho he did try one. Both girls liked them, and Mr Fussy didn't even notice them!

I did then have to run off into central London to shop for my gorgeous nephew's birthday, so I didn't sit and savour this meal, but it was yum.

Pizza was excellent. I grabbed the recipe from this month's Good Food mag, it was a recipe meant to go with the free veg seeds on the cover, but of course, being me, I adapted it for our tastes and time constraints.

Big'un had lots of fun with making the dough, and arranging the pepperoni, tho she found it actually a bit too spicy for her liking when she came to eat it. On the way home from school she'd asked me what she was having for dinner, so I said "Oh how kind of you to offer to cook dinner" and the game went on from there. At least it wasn't Littl'un's famous dish of "shuga pasta"... Anyway, we did maths with the weighing, and the measuring, and then with dividing the dough, she "helped" me work out how to make 4 pieces easily, and BOY did she get stuck into the kneading and rolling out. These were thin and crispy, and were garlic bread style, rather than with a tomato base. Basically, garlic butter spread onto the base once it's rolled out and then the cheese and meat went onto that. I could have just opened a tin or tetra of tomatoes, I even have one with olives already in it, but I wanted to try it the way the recipe did it, and Big'un is a garlic bread fan, and not so much with the tomato sauce anyway.

I baked 2 at once then the 3rd with the 4th piece turned into dough balls. Fun. And delish. Easy and so hands on, and Big'un ate it even tho she wasn't that into it. Next time I'll prep up some other toppings and let the kids top the pizzas themselves before baking.

Littl'un still not really into her food right now, tho still good with the fruit, so not really worried, think the next canine tooth is shoving its way through and that can't be easy.

Anyway, it was the best bread dough recipe I've done, silky smooth dough and no proving, will be doing it again. Here is the basic dough recipe:

500g strong white flour
7g instant yeast packet
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil
Tip these into a bowl.
Add 300ml warm water and stir firmly with a spoon til it comes together.
Knead on a floured surface 2-3 times til it is in a bowl and divide. The recipe suggested dividing into 8, tho I did 4 as I didn't want tiny ones.
Roll out til as thin as you can get, for 8 pieces they suggested each being around 15cm across.

Spread garlic butter on as you like (they made it by adding crushed fresh garlic to soft butter, I used the end of a packet of Lurpak garlic butter.)
Shred some mozzarella and spread over, bake for 12-15 mins and then pile chopped seasoned tomato and basil on top. Or do what I did and have a small person arrange cold meat on top and grate some cheddar or whatever cheese you have lying about on the top and then bake.

We were eye-glintingly naughty and split and buttered our dough balls, tho you could just use them to mop up your lovely fat-free salad dressing...
Either way, enjoy!

Tuesday 5 May 2009

quick beans and speedy mushroom sauce

I knew it had to happen as I'm not always the world's most organised person, and I can be really forgetful too, but my plan to slow cook some beans, ended up going from the ridiculous to the sublime, and I pressure cooked them! So I went from beans that were going to take all day plus overnight (soaking) to cook, to beans that took 25 mins + 1 hr soaking to cook, from dried in both cases so still frugal!



Well the beans were yummy, tho I might use slightly less sugar next time, but the kids loved them too, altho Littl'un seemed to prefer sitting on her Godpapa's lap and eating his beans off his toast with her spoon, rather than eating her own beans with or without her toast!! Ah well, it's better for his waistline I guess...

Big'un vanished her plateful with great enthusiasm, so a hit there too. We had it with a very simple salad, and all felt pretty full and satisfied. Until I mentioned I was intending to use up the 2 stale croissants sitting in their tray in the kitchen by making Nigella Lawson's gorgeous but sinful recipe in Nigella Express. Suddenly everyone had room for pudding. Or found their "pudding tummy" as Big'un refers to it...

The beans recipe is really easy, its from my Prestige pressure cooker book, so can't be reproduced here, but it's a chuck it all in the pot and cook thing, and then I just thickened it by open boiling for a fwe minutes when reheating.

Today we had jacket potatoes with garlicky mushroom sauce and cheese. Godfather No 2 doesn't eat cooked mushrooms, but often used to refer to a mushroom sauce he used to enjoy with jacket spuds (or squds as his sis once texted me, and I love, so I'm keeping) and I'd never had any experience of mushroom sauce so I googled it, and then made one up from the rough idea. He loved it, hubby loved it, (also another mushroom phobic) so I made it again today. It was only after I made it the first time and asked if it was anything like the sauce he'd used to have, that he told me that he wasn't sure cos that one was from a packet!!!

Anyway, here's how I did it:

Roughly break up half a punnet of chestnut mushrooms into a small food processor bowl, pop in a couple of peeled garlic cloves and blitz to a paste, shaking down regularly to make all the bigger bits get whizzed up.

Heat a small saucepan with an ounce of butter and scrape mushroom/garlic mix in and start to fry. Add some freeze dried tarragon and black pepper. Stir and fry and when it smells cooked, no longer that punchy raw garlic smell, take off heat and rapidly stir in a tablespoon of flour.

Slowly add milk, probably about half a pint, a little at a time, beating well between addings, and then return to heat. Add salt and maybe more pepper, and my fave ingredient, green tabasco if liked. Stir well til it thickens. Add a dollop of cream at the end if you fancy.

OK, so it's a white sauce with a pureed mushroom base, but it's good!! And its pretty cheap, an quick and easy, and great with your jacket squd!

Sunday 3 May 2009

lamb carved with a spoon

I didn't chart yesterday's food partly because it's my Mum's complicated recipe for black urad daal with kidney beans, and those recipes are available on the net if people wanna search, and also because I didn't cook it! Godfather No 1 pressure cooked it pretty quickly while I went out shopping with my 7yr old daughter. We all met up at a playground after shopping, and then went home and everyone enjoyed daal, rice and naan breads, even 2yr old littl'un who enjoyed dipping bread in "gravy" or "soup" til we taught her "daal", and she also loved picking out and chomping the kidney beans. Oh and plain white rice with butter. Tons of it.

So today I sprang out of bed and zipped downstairs before getting ready for church. I browned my half shoulder of lamb, which cost under £4, and then plomped it into the slow cooker. Then I added some ground and whole cumin seeds, about a teaspoon of each, about half a teaspoon of garlic granules along with a few peeled but whole garlic cloves, a tin of basics chopped tomatoes, some salt and cracked black pepper, about a third of a tinful of redwine and most of a small tin of pitted black olives. (The rest of the olives got halved and popped in a small tub for a snack for littl'un at church!) Then I covered it, switched it on, and got on with the rest of my day.

10 minutes before serving, oh about 6 or 7 hours later, with a heady lamby savoury aroma in the house, I heated up the fat that had rendered off the shoulder earlier, and added a little more from the slow cooker. Fried up a handful of chopped onion (I used the end of a bag of frozen that I keep there for emergencies) and another teaspoon each of cumin seeds and ground cumin. Then a little shake of dried mint, tho I could have used some shredded fresh mint at the end if I could have been bothered! Next a handful of raisins, and a handful of pine nuts went in, then in with some couscous, 9oz suited us fine, stir it around til all coated, sprinkle of my ubiquitous Marigold powder and pour on 9fl oz water. Switch off and cover. Leave for 5 minutes and fluff up. Served it with the lamb, the juices were gorgeous and delicious, and the meat was so tender I "carved" it with a spoon! Little'un tried the meat, but not mad for it, but I knew she was getting a lot of the goodness of the meat in the gravy and she ate tons of that with her couscous, and she really enjoyed the olives, pine nuts and raisins. The whole table was having to donate raisins from our own plates, and her Godfather was happy to donate most of his olives as he's not a huge fan of that fruit. Big'un loved the meat, gravy, all of it, and she's not the biggest meat eater usually. Clean plates, and contented tummies, so definitely a success and something to make again.

I won't mention the pudding as it was a bought reduced item, and it was scrummy, and I figured out I may well have still been able to make it cheaper, but it was a nice break that way and it was SCRUMMY... But a very frugal, thrifty, delicious dinner it was for us all.

Friday 1 May 2009

salmon cauliflower gratin

Now, I know I'm not alone in not particularly being keen on cooked cauliflower. So getting one in my box usually means eating it raw with dips, or cauliflower cheese.
Today being Friday, we usually eat fish (how very catholic) mainly to help me plan the week's meals. Similarly we eat vegetarian on Mondays, echoing my Hindu father, and this common Hindu practice. Anyway.
I'm not going to explain how to make a white sauce, there are plenty of sites around that will tell and show much better than I could. So I made a white sauce, and as usual I used bits of different types of milk, so that I didn't use any one type up for the morning. Including soya milk. It works very well in cooking, in my opinion.
I pulled apart the cauliflower, and microwaved the florets in a little water. I asked a kind friend to open and sort through a can of pink salmon, the tall size can, not the little one, and he took away the skin and some of the bigger bones. Dog was pretty happy with this, as they went in his bowl.

Right, to assemble. Spread the cauli into a pyrex baking dish. Sprinkle and spread evenly the samlon onto and around the cauli. Shake some tarragon generously onto the top, and since I had it in the fridge to use up, drop dollops of creme fraiche onto these. Season with black pepper if there isn't already plenty in the sauce, but don't use salt as the sauce should have enough, and adding more will make the sauce separate and become watery.

Finally, in whichever order you prefer, top with grated cheese and breadcrumbs.

Place in hot oven (200 deg) til the topping is brown, about half an hour.

I served this with a BIG portion of purple sprouting brocolli, again microwave steamed.
One went back for more, one was full and found it very rich.