jam friands

pumpkin lasagne

pineapple upsaide down cake

fish fin·gers

Fingers of fish.

Fish fingers are a childhood memory. The sort of thing you were allowed on a friday night if your parents were going out and you had to have dinner and be ready for bed before the babysitter came. They were best served with baked beans, maybe peas and perhaps some oven chips. The perfect rectangles of reconstituted, or apparently not, fish. Yum!

Well, fish fingers are still a treat in our house, but luckily now we know how to make them ourselves :

Trim some fillets of a a firm white fish - groper is particularly good - into fish finger shapes. Save the off cuts for fish cakes, this is a time when freezing the fish is just fine.
Mix some flour and polenta, about 1/4 cup of each should do it (although I think that sometimes less flour and more polenta would be better), and season with salt and pepper.
Rinse and dry the fish.
Coat the fingers of fish in the polenta mixture. You could double dip the fish fingers if you like by dipping the first dipped finger in beaten egg and then again in the polenta, this will give a thicker coating.
Spray a lined baking sheet with oil, lay out the fish fingers and spray again.
Bake for 15 to 20 minutes at 200°C or until they look really good.

hol·i·day

It is so good to go on holiday, and it really is so good to be home!

This was a holiday of family, friends - new and old - and also, plenty of gastronomic experiences! Not least being my first taste of lobster, chitterlings and tortoice shell jelly.

sau·sage

Lorne, banger or Lop Cheung

I shall leave you with a picture of a most delicious local choritzo as we travel the globe for a month.

Scotland, England, China . . . but none so good as the sausage of home! But I wont mind trying!

Blogging by Mail

What a haul!

Thank you so much Dolores it is just so great to get a surprise parcel! And what a parcel :

Coco Délice Chocolates
Caramel Sin
Peach Conserve
Diablo Magazine
Sunset Magazine

The chocolates lasted 2 days, the jam is still going, the magazines were great fun to browse. But the caramel sin . . . this I had to used up once half of it had disappeared spoon, by spoon, some how.

But here is how to make a banana cake simply divine : make your favourite banana cake recipe and just before baking drop in spoonfuls of a wickedly brilliant caramel. Oh so good, we all know how wonderfully caramel goes with banana ; this cake will not last long.

Thank you Dolores for the great parcel, and thank you Stephanie for organising. Apologies to you both for the tardiness of my posting - I will mention computer problems and our 19 year old cat going missing (happily back now).