The recipe: p48, "Saffron Haddock with Crushed Potatoes and Asparagus"
Sam's mum is in town for the weekend, and while I wouldn't normally subject a guest to the Random Kitchen experience, both mother and son seem keen to take the plunge. Still, I'm secretly relieved when random.org selects something relatively sensible (in terms of both book and recipe).
I wondered whether last week's post about Swedish Cakes and Cookies would miraculously conjure up something from those pages this time round, but apparently it's the invocation of saffron that does the trick. It's not something I've used in cooking for the longest time, but I'm curious to see how it matches with a flavour sponge like white fish.
The prep: I need to buy pretty much everything for this dish, but it's all fairly standard stuff. My only concern, given the past issues I've had with sourcing things in Lewisham on a Sunday, is the saffron - but no, there it is in Sainsbury's, more expensive than gold (and frankly far more relevant to my life).
I've already resolved to significantly up the quantity of potatoes - it seems the more ambitious the cookbook, the more measly the portion sizes, largely since they seem to expect you to be serving up the dish in question as part of a three-course meal. We've bought a cheesecake for afters but that's as far as it goes, so a bit more bulk wouldn't go amiss.
The making: The fish for this week's selection is to be poached in saffron-infused milk. I might expect this to happen in a pan, but James Martin requires me to use a heavy-bottomed roasting tin on the hob top instead. Well, if you say so...
Whether pan or roaster, it turns out that the main challenge throughout this process is to stop the milk from bubbling up to the point where it gets an icky skin, while making sure it's still hot enough to actually do something.
In any case, "two good pinches" of saffron slowly start their work of turning the milk a warm yellow colour...
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| That's about half of it, my pinches aren't that puny |
...and once that goal is achieved, the haddock fillets are added and cooked "for 3-4 minutes" before being removed from the heat and left to sit in the saffron milk until being reheated shortly before serving. I opt to extend that "3-4 minutes" because it's quite evident that the fish has barely really started cooking at this point, and I have no great desire to poison the mother-in-law.
Next, "400g" (lol) of new potatoes are boiled, drained, and crushed together with some double cream and chopped chives and dill "without mashing them". James recommends that I do this using a fork, but I want to serve this up before Week 29, and the gentle deployment of a masher turns out to be absolutely fine for achieving the desired consistency.
Then (and I dispute this order of events - surely it should have been "meanwhile"?) another pot of salted water is brought to the boil and some asparagus spears are cooked "for 2 minutes or until tender". So for 4-5 minutes, then. James Martin seems intent on making me serve up underdone food today, but it's no use, mister - I can see right through your ruse.
The asparagus spears are drained, returned to the pan and nicely buttered up. At this point, I'm supposed to put them on the plate already then reheat the haddock, but again, that seems a bit illogical timing-wise unless your plates are pre-heated to the point of being molten. Anyway, I've done the reheating in the meantime, so the components are duly ready to be assembled simultaneously - and the whole thing ends up being a remarkably close approximation of the picture in the book and everything. Yay!
The eating: I've been a little sceptical about the saffron's presence throughout, and indeed I'm not convinced it adds a huge amount to the fish flavour-wise - it's quite a subtle taste anyway, I suppose, but I don't see how the poaching process is meant to infuse much of that in the haddock, and indeed it doesn't really. Still, the occasional blast from a clinging saffron strand does provide some welcome variety.
It would have made more sense if, instead of using double cream, the potatoes had been smashed together with the saffron-infused milk. Sure, the whole dish might have become overwhelmingly yellow as a result, but it seems a waste to have simply discarded all that saffrony goodness. Oh well - the potatoes are still excellent, the chives and dill giving them a perfectly summery flavour on the weekend when the British weather finally turned for the good.
And the asparagus is, well, asparagus.
It's literally only now, writing this, that I realise I was supposed to buy smoked haddock. D'oh! No wonder it looked a bit more yellow in the book. Although I suspect the smokiness would have minimised the saffron's contribution to the flavour experience even further.
Anyway, heck, we still enjoyed it. Random Kitchen has taken on board a willing
It's going to be back to something like "Vegetables For One" next week, isn't it?
One-word verdict: Summery.
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