If Ground Beef Is On Sale..

In all aspects of life, I am always happy to find a good sale/offer. In the States (not everywhere), the grocery stores will send out weekly ads in the mail. They’ll highlight offers and coupons etc. If you love to cook or have to cook for a large household, you’ll absolutely love these. I love having a cup of coffee and reading these. I flip through and see what’s available, what’s fresh and come up with meal ideas for the week.

So recently ground beef has been on sale. It’s usually the fattier type (80/20), but let’s be realistic. We can’t all eat everything we want. Food can get really expensive! Sometimes the fattier ground/mince beef is tastier too. So when I see these deals, I stock up if I can. Same goes for chicken which freezes really well. For the beef, I prefer to cook it and then freeze it. Or freeze patties so you can throw them straight onto the grill/grill pan for a burger.

Here are two recipes you can make that would freeze really well. They can be eaten for dinner or lunch and in a variety of ways. There are many shortcuts you can take, but if you have the time on maybe a Sunday you can just cook these. You could do it while the husband is watching Sunday football maybe!

• Beef Meatballs with Homemade Marinara
• Universal Bolognese or Cottage Pie Base

There are so many recipes out there for these dishes. If you have time you can use fresh tomatoes for Marinara (the riper, the better). Lately I like to blanch my tomatoes and remove the skin. Don’t hesitate to use lots of tomato paste too.

For Bolognese, some recipes use milk and/or pork as well (Epicurious) or white wine instead of red (Food Network). Some of you may be surprised to see Cottage Pie or wonder what it is. You’ve probably heard of Shepard’s Pie, but traditionally Shepard’s Pie is made with ground lamb. The beef version is called Cottage Pie. This MyRecipes.com version adds mushrooms. This Epicurious recipe uses dried marjoram. Ultimately, there are many versions. Play around with them and choose the one you like! I personally love it super thick and gravy-like.

As for meatballs, I don’t really measure when I make them. I use whatever ground beef I have, add some breadcrumbs or panko soaked with milk, an egg or two, finely chopped or grated onion and garlic, Italian seasonings and a handful of parmesan or romano. A couple of good recipes are Ina Garten’s or this Epicurious recipe that uses ground fennel. Either way, bake them and then pop ’em into a bubbling Marinara. These freeze so fantastically. Reheat with a bit of olive oil and splash of water.

Beef Meatballs & Homemade Marinara

Universal Base for Bolognese or Cottage/Shepard’s Pie

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Anniversary Dinner

Last Monday my darling husband and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary. For dinner, we went back to the restaurant he took me to on my very first trip to the UK in 2007 – Rules. Rules is located in Covent Garden and is London’s oldest restaurant (established in 1798) and has served a wide range from Charles Dickens to the Prince of Wales. With silver service, guests are treated to traditional English food of the highest quality. The restaurant owns an estate in Northern England where it sources game and beef of the finest quality.

As the restaurant is a favorite of the Royal family, it was fitting I had a starter cocktail called the Kate Middleton “29” with Sipsmith, Pinky Vodka, Lillet and Crystellised Violet & Rose Petals.

For starters Chris had the pressed wild rabbit terrine with black pudding, cider jelly and mustard with grilled sourdough. I had traditional potted shrimp for the first time. Both were incredibly fresh and full of flavor.

As we did nearly five years ago, we ordered the roast beef for two with all the trimmings. And from looking around the room it was pretty clear that this was the menu favorite. This has to be THE best roast meal I’ve ever had and it was just as good as we remembered it to be. The meat was perfectly cooked rare and seasoned just right. The Yorkshire pudding was massive, and the creamy horseradish was homemade. But the potatoes.. Oh my.. I am not normally a potato lover. I eat them but I’m never dying for them. But these must have been The most incredible potatoes I’ve ever had. They were so crispy and golden that you really had to push your fork into them. Apparently they are roasted first in goose fat and then deep fried in the same fat! Yum yum yum… This dish is a classic example of how food does not always have to be complex to be good. Great, fresh ingredients treated with care can be absolute perfection!

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Onion Soup That’s NOT French?!

Seeing as it’s still a bit chilly here in the UK, soups are still a lunch time staple. A week or so ago I noticed that the soup of the day in the cafe at work was Onion Soup. Being that traditional French Onion Soup was a childhood favorite of mine, I was completely shocked to see that the soup at work was white and creamy!

So last weekend (as I wrote about yesterday) I made a huge batch of chicken stock. I was craving soup for a light weekend lunch (as dinner was going to be heavy). But I didn’t really have many fresh vegetable options. Plus you can have only so much curried carrot soup before you get sick of it. So I thought of this mysterious cream of onion soup. And really there’s hardly much to it and yet full of flavor! And don’t worry – there’s no smelly breath from this soup. The onions are quite sweet so go easy on the sugar! There are a couple recipes out there but here’s a straight forward one for my Creamy Onion Soup.

Recipe for 4

INGREDIENTS

3 medium or 2 large yellow onions
~3-4 tbsp butter
Fresh thyme if you have it
Sea salt
Pinch sugar
~heaping tbsp flour
~1-2 cups milk
~2 cups Fresh chicken stock

DIRECTIONS

Peel and slice onions. Heat half the butter in a pot on moderate heat. Add the onions, leaves from a couple sprigs of thyme and a pinch of salt and sugar. Cook until the onions are soft for about 5 minutes. Tip into bowl and set aside.

Heat the rest of the butter on low/medium heat until foaming. Sprinkle the flour in and combine well. It should be equal parts butter and flour. Cook for about a minute, stirring constantly. Slowly pour in the milk a little at a time. Combine until smooth before adding more each time. Add enough milk so it’s like a thick gravy. Add enough stock until it’s a soup consistency you’re happy with. Add the onion mixture and let cook for a couple minutes. Then blend with a hand blender. Taste and adjust seasoning as desired. Serve hot with some bread and enjoy!

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My First Professional Experience

Hi Everyone! Hope you’ve been enjoying the first couple weeks of the new year. As I mentioned previously, I’ve taken up a new role back in finance. So with commuting and working, it’s been tough to find time to sit down and blog. So nearly a month later, I finally found a Saturday afternoon to share a few pictures of my very first professional experience.

Just one town over in Amersham, the Seasons Catering team were gracious enough to give me the opportunity to cook with them one evening at a private party. It’s a bit of a story how it came about, but needless to say I’m a big fan of the Seasons group which includes Seasons Cafe in old Amersham, another at the Rowan Garden Centre and their traditional Sweets shop also in old Amersham. Chris and I are frequent customers of the Cafe in old Amersham where we have brunch on the weekends. We love sitting up at the counter, reading the paper and having our huevos rancheros or super fluffy scrambled eggs on corn toast. It’s a really cosy place with a deli too – selling all sorts of treats, bread, pies, sandwiches and more.

Chef/Co-Owner Claire and I

So for my catering experience, I arrived a private home in Amersham to meet Claire and the team. It was so impressive how much equipment they brought with them! For about 60 guests, the team provided a pop-up bar and staff who served up a few different canapes and ‘small-bowl’ food. You are probably asking what I did – what is small bowl food?? It is apparently a new trend in the catering world. Rather than having a buffet, catered events are now offering small bowls of food served by wait-staff. As you’ll see in the pictures below, they are literally small bowls. The portion size is a few bites and is similar in size to Spanish tapas or Chinese dim sum. The staff serve them on trays and then pick up the empty bowls afterwards.. Got the concept? It’s brilliant isn’t it?! All the guests were well fed and were able to socialize and mingle about.

Right, the most important party – the food! The first canape we did was Coconut Crusted Prawns with sweet chilli dip. As you’ll see below, Claire is amazing at presentation. She had a collection of gorgeous platters and add a fresh touch of orchids, lemon grass and chillis.

Coconut Crusted Fried Shrimp

While these look simple, they were incredible. The coconut added such a great, unique flavor with the shrimp. I’ve only ever seen a coconut crust once before with chicken at a Caribbean place in L.A. If you ever order from Seasons, I highly recommend these! There were a few other canapes served that evening including Fresh Scallops Wrapped in Bacon and Lobster Bisque with Paprika Crositini. But I was too busy prepping to take more photos. But here are some of the small bowl foods we prepared that night..

Small Bowls of Bangers & Mash with Caramelised Onion Gravy

Small Bowls of Thai Green Chicken Curry with rice

Small Bowls of Tandoori Lamb, Pilau Rice, Mint Raita and fresh Poppadoms

There was one more dish that night that I didn’t get a chance to take a photo of.. And what a shame because I think it was my favorite! It was Duck a l’orange with Dauphinoise Potatoes. So all in all, you can see why I was so blown away by my first catering experience. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to help out with all the prep. Claire took care of all that and brought a lot of the food prepared. I just helped out with prepping and serving the dishes. But it was such a great experience. The team worked so well together! There was so much going on – from getting the timings right to ensuring all the dishes were being served hot and being cleared for more. The team even bring all glass, crockery and cutlery and even take it with them to wash up. So the customer’s experience is completely stress free!

To the Catering Team at Seasons, thank you so much for the experience and I hope to work for you again some time soon! In the mean time, I’ll see you around in the Cafe 🙂

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My Husband The Budding Chef!

So despite my love of food and cooking, there are times when I am delighted to sit back and let my hubby do all the hard work. Although I don’t let him into the kitchen often, when he does cook he does a darn good job! He’s a master at rack of lamb and toad in the hole, but not long ago he was so sweet and made his American wife a British Thanksgiving dinner. It was all last minute and he managed to find a turkey crown from a local butcher that morning. Now I must say my apologies to my Dad, my Mom and my aunts because I have to admit that Chris’s turkey was THE best turkey I have ever had! It was the most flavorful and moist turkey and that was without a brine.

Roast Turkey Crown

After very thorough research he tried a new (and very successful) method of cooking the turkey. He rubbed it all with a seasoned butter (just salt and pepper) and then painted olive oil on top to seal the butter in. He also used little pigs in a blanket (British versions are cocktail sausages wrapped in bacon) and tucked them into the edges with toothpicks/cocktail sticks. Simple and straightforward but with great results. After cooking it at 160C for awhile, he checked the temperature and it was about 140F (it should be 165F). So he removed the cocktail sausages and raised the temperature to 200C/400F for another 20 minutes or so until it reached 165F. While it rested under a foil tent, he got on with all the trimmings : duck fat roast potatoes, sauteed green beans, sage and onion stuffing, carrot and parsnip puree and super crispy Yorkshire pudding! I do have to note that the carrot and parsnip puree was sooooo yummy. He used one part carrot, two parts parsnip and just added a splash of milk and butter.

It was all so good and helped me miss home a little less. The only thing missing was a Honey Baked Ham which is a tradition with my family. And I haven’t seen any ham in the UK come close to the succulent juicy ham from the Honey Baked Ham store with a crispy sweet crust… Mmm.. But I can’t complain really as for the first time my Thanksgiving dinner was made all by my hubby 🙂

Thanksgiving - British Style!

So you might be thinking – okay – roast meat and trimmings.. Sure that’s nice.. But he really impressed me this past weekend when he made us Thai Fish Cakes! Not only did he make it all by himself but he used a couple different recipes to make his own version! Here are two recipes that he referenced – one from the BBC and another from Good Food.

Thai fish cakes is one of my favorite Thai dishes and something that always felt very daunting. We had some leftover frozen fish that we wanted to use and this turned out to be a great use for it! You just add the fish, egg, lemongrass, garlic, spring onion, chilli, coriander/cilantro, ginger (if you have it), some oil, fish sauce and lime zest into a food processor and blitz. Add it to a bowl and mix in some chopped green beans. The mixture was a little wet, so he added a couple tsp of plain flour to help bind it.

Heat about half an inch of plain oil (vegetable or sunflower) in a large frying pan. Don’t put it on your highest heat but just below it. Make a small patty at first to test the seasoning and oil temperature.

While Chris made the patties, I was flipping and frying them. My method here was to use a large round metal spatula with holes in it and a fork. The oil temperature was hot but not so much so that the oil was splashing out. Basically it was safe and I could stand close to it. After forming the patty, place it onto the spatula and slide it gently into the oil. If it won’t slide, flip it into the oil but use the fork to catch it with your other hand. Let it fry until you can see it browning up on the sides. Then turn it over. You will need to cook these until just before they look burnt. They’ll be a nice dark brown. Keep flipping them if you need to even the coloring. Let cool on kitchen towel before eating with sweet chilli sauce and some salad greens. Enjoy!!

Thai Fish Cakes

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“As Easy As Pie” or “A Piece of Cake”?

I heard these expressions the other day and it got me thinking.. They’re meant to imply something is very easy, but neither pie nor cake are all That easy to make. As you know, I’m not exactly a baker. Actually I try to avoid it. One of the reasons I love cooking is the ability to create whatever you want or feel like. There’s not really a ‘set’ outcome and I almost never measure.. Always going by taste instead. But baking is a completely different matter. You absolutely must measure and measure properly. That’s probably one of the reasons I avoid it! Not to mention the fact that anything baked is usually loaded with calories. I also don’t have a massive sweet tooth..

BUT – if there’s one thing I’ve learned to love about British food, it’s their love of pies. And not apple pies – savory pies full of meat, potatoes and more. While chicken pot pies are well known and fairly popular in the States, it’s always thought of as really heavy and creamy. But I’ve learned that chicken pot pies (or any savory pie) don’t always have to be cooked “Paula Deen” style (a Southern chef who LOVES butter and cream). Brits love their steak and kidney pie, pork pies, steak and ale, fish pies, cottage pie and so on. And they don’t always have a pastry lid (like with cottage pie or fish pie), although it’s my preferred way to eat a pie. So it occurred to me that while we had one day of Basic Cuisine at LCB on pastries, I’ve never attempted it at home. I usually cheat and buy ready made puff pastry at the store. But after watching several TV chefs make shortcrust pastry like it was nothing, I thought I really should give it a go.

My Mini Pies!

Recently I talked about slow roasting and using the oven and the satisfaction of putting something in the oven and waiting for it to be ready. It’s the waiting and anticipation that make it exciting for me. Will it cook properly? Will it taste good? So you can only imagine my delight when these bad boys came out golden and flaky. Of course, as with doing anything for the first time, I learned a few things..

• Roll out the dough pretty thin (if it’s too thick, it’s too starchy and dry)
• I did a lard/butter combo the second time around.. Makes it flakier
• Be careful what vegetables you put in.. For example broccoli has too much water content!
• Season your filling very well.
• Mashed potatoes versus chopped/boiled potatoes make the filling creamy and more moist.

There are several recipes out there, but I just grabbed a recipe I saw in the Daily Mail paper last Saturday. Here it is:

• 350g (12oz) plain flour – and extra to dust your surface
• 175g (6oz) unsalted butter, cold and diced
• 4-5 tbsp cold water

In a food processor, add the flour and butter. Blitz until it’s like sand. Then while it’s going, pour in a tablespoon at a time of cold water until the dough comes together. Take out, shape roughly and wrap in plastic wrap (cling film). Refrigerate for about 30 minutes. When ready, dust a clean surface with flour and roll out to a couple millimeters thickness. I used both a muffin tin and a Yorkshire pudding tin, and both came out very well. Cut out a circle larger than the radius of each hole. Be careful to not poke any holes when lining the pans. I found that as you line it you’ll have a bit of excess as it folds. Simply pinch these pieces out and gently push the dough together to seal (against the edges of the tray). Be sure to have some sticking up, so that after you fill them it’ll be easy to seal the lid on. If there are any holes, your filling might bubble out!

No one ever said baking was a clean process..

For my first go at the pies, I used up some leftovers. So Pie No.1 included: Leftover roast beef, broccoli and a Gorgonzola white sauce. After making a test pie of this, I realized quickly that the broccoli has too much water content and made the pastry soggy very quickly! So I added a bit of mashed potato afterwards. Pie No.2 consisted of: Leftover slow-roasted pulled pork, mashed potatoes and chunks of English mature cheddar. I had some leftover vegetables too, but only enough for one pie. So Pie No.3 had Roasted sweet potato, roasted red onion and goat cheese.This one turned out to be my favorite I think! It was really creamy because of the goat cheese, and the sweet potato and onion had great flavor because they were roasted with balsamic, olive oil and salt and pepper.

First tester pies!

Veggie Pie : Roasted sweet potato and red onion with goat cheese

Because this was so easy, I thought it’d be a great idea as a half-term activity with my 4-year old nephew and nearly 3-year old niece. We had a baking day with savory mini pies and an apple cake that their mum (my sister-in-law Tae) helped them with. The kids were great and they really love to cook. It definitely gets messy, but it was exciting for them!

Baking with the Kids!

We made two different types of pies : (1) bakes beans, sausages and cheddar and (2) beef meatballs in marinara with cheddar. The finished pie in this photo was made in the Yorkshire pudding tin which I think is actually easier to assemble and to eat! I’m so embarrassed to admit, but I know my brother and sister-in-law will tease me endlessly if I don’t fess up to it… But I was horrified when I was taking the mini pies out of the oven and the oven gloves slipped and I dropped them! Eek! Thank goodness there was the Yorkshire pudding tray which is much easier to handle 🙂 After pies, they got to making a delicious apple cake (very in season). This was one of Tae’s friends’ recipes, so I don’t have it. But here’s a BBC Good Food Recipe that’s very similar. It’s a great autumn cake too – with flavors like cinnamon and nutmeg.

Delicious and moist apple cake

Enjoying my cake with a cup of tea! California girl being very English!

So as you can see.. baking really can be as easy as pie OR cake! If my toddler niece and nephew can do it, you can too!

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My Ongoing Love Affair with Meat – Pork Edition

As anyone can see from my blog, I am an avid meat eater (click here for the first edition of my Love Affair with Meat). It’s fitting as my husband calls himself a “meat-a-tarian”. It also makes sense if you are familiar with Vietnamese cuisine (seeing I grew up eating it). You don’t exactly come across many vegetarian Vietnamese restaurants.. And if there’s one type of meat Vietnamese people love, it’s pork. Whether it’s roasting an entire pig, grilling it, braising it or drying it, we love pork. So despite being Vietnamese, my parents exposed my siblings and I to many different types of cuisine. We’ve had pork several ways, and I thought I knew a lot about pork.. But for some reason, I don’t have a single memory of eating pork the way the Brits do. And if you’ve ever been to a British food festival, horse race, air(plane) show, German holiday market, concert or any other outdoor event with food trucks in the UK, it’s highly likely you’ve had roasted pork with crackling in a bun with apple sauce and/or stuffing. My American readers might now be saying, “What on earth is crackling?!” Well my friends, let me show you…

Classic Roasted Pork with Crackling

Pork crackling is the result of roasting pork belly or pork loin with skin on at high heat. The skin bubbles up and, if done properly, crisps up to the most sinful and comforting crunch. The Guardian did a fantastic article on the Ultimate Search for Pork Crackling, check it out. The author addresses several different methods and her results are rather interesting. Needless to say, there are several ways to do it. But so much is dependent on how hot your oven gets and how much time you have to prep your pork. While I did a bit of research into different methods, the recipe I was using as inspiration was Andy Bates’s Slow Roasted Pulled Pork.

 

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Chicken for Non-Chicken Lovers

Just over a week ago, I got back into one of my favorite routines – watching Saturday Kitchen with James Martin. And as usual I thoroughly enjoyed the programme. James Martin really is a fantastic chef and tv chef. For one thing, he’s cooking entire meals live (not like ‘cooking segments’ on US news channels). He also gives good, relevant cooking tips and advice. Just now while looking up his website to link to, I discovered that he has a new venture called Life, Fork & Spoon which is a food delivery service with either fresh or frozen meals that can be delivered to you next day. I had a quick browse and for the prices and quality of food the service looks really good. This would be ideal for hosting a dinner party, especially around the holidays.

Anywho – on to the chicken. One of the dishes James cooked on the September 24th programme was his Pot-roast Chicken with Potato Ragu. Although James makes every dish seem easy to make, I promise this dish really was easy. And it’s perfect for the changing autumn weather. It’s cosy and because of the rich stout you almost forget it’s chicken. So because it’s a BBC show, they couldn’t officially mention which type of stout he was using but it was clear he was using Guinness. Any stout would work but he highly recommended the ‘un-named’ Guinness brand.

I only made a couple changes to the recipe. Because I had some, I added a couple cloves of garlic and half a carrot to the onion for the roasting. I didn’t have any homemade stock available, so I used beef stock cubes. I also doubled the concentration, so I used two cubes for the same amount of water. Also, for the ragu, I forgot to buy cabbage but had leeks so just used those. Also forgot the parsley which would’ve been a nice fresh touch but I didn’t think it was the end of the world. And I used regular onions instead of shallots.

BUT despite those changes, I was very happy with this dish. I also used a technique which my Dad does with every poultry he cooks – I let it soak in a brine. I just looked online and dissolved 1/4 cup salt and 1/8 cup sugar in 1 litre of cold tap water. Then I just made enough of the brine to cover the chicken in a large bowl. I let mine soak for a couple of hours but overnight would be best. What this does is make the chicken super moist. Just dry it when you’re ready to get cooking.

I hope you’ll try this dish! It’s great for two because you can eat the legs/thighs for dinner and save the breast for lunch or a pasta dish the next day. Enjoy!

Pot Roast Chicken with Guinness

Potato Ragu

A great way to mix things up with your Sunday Roast!

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Being a food tourist (UK Edition)

For the last couple of weeks, Chris and I have been showing my parents, aunt and uncle around the UK. As you’ll know from my blog, my family loves food. So it was only fitting that food was a central part of being a tourist with me!

We started in Birmingham for our 2nd wedding celebration with friends and family. We were blown away by our amazing caterers – Celebration Caterers– who fed us so well with the creamiest homemade pâté, incredible roast pork with the best crackling I’ve ever had, delicious vegetarian lasagna and much much more.

Homemade pâté with a clarified butter top

Served with rustic bread, mixed green salad and red onion chutney

Our next stop was to the Lake District to the family caravan. I couldn’t believe how lucky we got with weather! Loads of sunshine the first day and barely any drizzle the next. I promised the family that they were in for some of the best fish and chips and Cumberland sausages and they were not disappointed. You can’t really go too wrong with these classics!

Next stop – London!

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Making the most of my ‘thyme’

Baby Matthew!

This past weekend Chris and I became uncle and auntie again! Baby Matthew joined us last Friday and the family all got together at Chris’ parents house for a Sunday roast. Chris made a delicious roast chicken with thyme butter and fresh orange juice with sage and onion stuffing. I think Americans don’t do this often enough. It’s not like it’s overly complex. Just keep an eye on it, occasionally baste it with its juices and fat and make sure you don’t over cook it. Before it was done, he even added cocktail sausages around the baking tray. It was served up with gravy, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, carrots, roast parsnips, broccoli and cheesy leeks. Absolutely delicious! And it’s actually a pretty healthy meal too!

There was quite a bit of leftover chicken, so naturally I thought of making a chicken pie. It’s been a bit of a cold June here, and savory pies are always comforting – not to mention incredibly easy to make. If you have leftover roast chicken and have a decently stocked kitchen with butter, flour, milk and thyme, then all you really need is ready-made puff pastry. In this case, I had some leftover puff pastry from making my first fish pie last week. Also, I always have dried thyme and butter and flour and milk. But for our weekly grocery shop, I got lucky and found in the marked down section – leeks, thyme and lardons. To make the dish a bit heartier I thought I’d add in some white button mushrooms as they’re not pricey anyways. Click here for my Chicken and Leek Pie.

Chicken, leek, mushroom and bacon pie filling

However, as I decided I didn’t have the right amount of pastry for the baking dishes I have, I improvised and use the filling to make a pasta dish instead. I happened to have some radiatori pasta shapes which look like ‘radiators’. Apparently they’re great for thicker sauces, so a great combination with my chicken pie filling. I saved a bit of the pasta water to thin out the filling so it was more of a sauce. All in all a success! And Chris has happily taken it to work for leftovers lunch too 🙂

Chicken pie pasta!

Now what I didn’t mention in my recipe is that the butter I used to cook the leeks in was some leftover tarragon butter. I actually had a really long block of tarragon butter I had frozen ages ago, and I finally used it when I made the fish pie. Tarragon is an incredibly fragrant and flavorful herb. It goes bad really quickly, so I took some advice from one of my chef instructors last year @ LCB and made tarragon butter.

Tarragon

All I did was roughly chop it and combine it with room temperature butter. Spread some plastic wrap onto your counter and spoon the butter on in a row. Start folding the plastic over it and then twist the ends. Basically you want a log shape. If you hold both twisted ends at the same time, roll the log back and forth and it’ll tighten up. Then pop it in the freezer to firm up and use as desired! I’m actually going to do the same with the extra thyme that I bought for the chicken pie this week!

In case anyone is interested, below are pictures for the fish pie I made. It was the first time I’ve ever even eaten fish pie! As an American, the concept of fish pie was a bit strange to me. I had this thought that the seafood would turn out rubbery and the sauce bland. But since we had a ton of fish that needed to be used. I thought I’d take a stab at it. I haven’t written the recipe but it’s basically the same concept of the chicken pie. The ingredients can vary but I used: plain white fish, bit of smoked haddock, cooked crayfish and baby shrimp, leeks, asparagus and tarragon butter. A couple of differences in cooking method include:

• Poach your fish in the milk and set the milk aside for the sauce.
• You don’t need to mix the seafood with the sauce. Once poached, add the bite-sized fish pieces, crayfish and shrimp into the baking tray. Then just pour the sauce over.
• I blanched the asparagus before adding it to the sauce. I only used asparagus as it was marked down at the market. But a more common vegetable would be peas. Just toss frozen peas straight into the sauce.

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