Jottage from Lancaster - Smoky Cheaty Brandade

On Saturday - on an impulse - I bought River Cottage Year which was prominently for sale, hugely discounted, in The Works. I didn't quite mean to buy it, but there was a recipe in it to make your own ricotta. OK, I don't use ricotta that much, but the thought of making it myself was a bit tempting. And another River Cottage book would just about fit on my cookery shelves - but only if I was ruthless and threw away some of the old cookery books that are cluttering it up. 


So I set about and cleared both shelves and chucked away some old books that really I would never use again. It's surprising how much cookery has its fashions. And surprising that some of those books took me back to times when the children were younger. Very much in evidence was my 'Italian' phase when I made something with pasta every week (more often than not hand-made). I seem to remember these as very happy times cooking for 4 with all of us together. Then the American cookbooks began to creep in. There weren't many of these, but enough for an idle onlooker to guess that we had started our long love affair with the USA (a love affair in more ways than one as both Heather and Deborah married US citizens). Sadly, most of these cookbooks have lain unused for too long and will pass to charity shops in the next day or so. I have copied out the odd recipe that I can see myself turning to again - but probably I won't make them.


River Cottage Year has a nice fish recipe in it. Now I am a little sensitive about fishy issues at the moment - but there's no way I'm going to relive my nasty episode with cold callers on the doorstep yesterday. Luckily I had bought some lovely oak-smoked fish from Booths to make Smoky Cheaty Brandade for when Heather and Tristan come tonight. It looked like a simple recipe and one which Tristan might enjoy. The smoked fish might be a little salty for him so I left out adding any other salt in the hope that all the added mashed potato would bring it down to a low level. It seemed to need something else adding - maybe an egg, or some nutmeg. But I kept to the recipe faithfully and it's all made up, ready to cook tonight. I wanted some nice veggies to go with and spent a pleasant 10 minutes leafing  through River Cottage Everyday before I homed in on green beans and tomatoes.


The brandade turned out to be good - but a bit uninteresting. Tristan seemed to like it anyway, and I enjoyed it too. But it really needed the green beans/tomatoes to give it some interest. It's not something I would make again I don't think.