Thou shalt not partake of meat on fridays...

We rarely eat fish. Fish seems to be a fairly high maintenance protein source – this coming from someone who quite happily has eggs and tofu for dinner a couple of times a week because they will live in the fridge in appropriate portion sizes just waiting for me to use them. Fish is the opposite of this. When I buy fish I need to buy it from somewhere other than a supermarket and it has to be used that night. I’ve never had bad tofu (and I’m sure there are those of you out there who will strongly disagree with this!) but I’ve definitely had bad fish.

Friday was fish night. There were a number of recipes here that could be knocked of easily and I’m all for low hanging fruit. I went and made my fish related purchases – Gurnard fillets – very cheap - and hapuka steaks – not very cheap. I also had some sealord freeflow frozen hoki in the freezer and I saw no reason why it should escape.

Fish in milk. The title alone is almost enough to turn my stomach! Basically the fish – I used the frozen hoki for this – is cooked in a dish of milk at a low heat in the oven. When the fish is cooked you thicken the milk with a little flour and serve as a sauce. It was ok, I survived it at least. I’m not sure I’d cook my fish in milk again…

Savoury fish steaks – aka how to ruin perfectly good hapuka. Put your fish steak in a bakesafe dish, cover with sliced skinned tomato, cover with breadcrumbs, bake. I struggle to understand why you would want to do this to an innocent piece of fish. Fair to say it didn’t inspire me.

Grilled fish. My good sense stops me from listing a method here - suffice to say that it’s fish – Gurnard in this case – and you grill it. I like a nice bit of grilled fish – not milk or breadcrumbs or tomatoes. Just fish. It was good.

Now when I say it was just fish I mean it was just fish and the five sauces I made to go with the fish. Yes five. The more cooking I do on a Friday night, the less cooking I have to do on a Saturday and Sunday.

Admittedly four of the five were white sauce with additions and the fifth was white sauce by another name. I had suspicions that these weren’t going to be great.

Parsley sauce, caper sauce and onion sauce were all just while sauce with the named ingredient added. I’d love to say that the combinations had blown my mind and I’d found the culinary promised land. That didn’t happen.

Whoever called the awful abomination in the 66 Edmonds “hollandaise sauce” should be shot. Possibly shooting is to good. Perhaps they should be smeared in pate and thrown into a coral of Chihuahuas. Either way no one should ever take white sauce, add in some egg yolks and a bit of lemon juice and call it hollandaise. Very bad, very very bad.

Melted butter sauce was basically white sauce with a slightly higher proportion of melted butter. It actually was my favourite of the lot – not so much because of the extra butter, although that is always good, but because it had a little nutmeg in it. Nutmeg and fish, who would have known? It was actually surprisingly good and with all this “brain food” it is going to be significantly harder to surprise me from now on.