Holy Mackerel! Its Fancy Tunafish!

(Sorry for the radio silence…back to your regularly scheduled blog entry….)

February, 27, 2011, Oscar Night…6 Days Left

To send good vibes to our favorite for Best Picture, The King's Speech, I decided to make Beef & Onion Pie (pg.177), a traditional English dish that I'm sure Colin Firth eats. But, before I started working on dinner, we needed to deal with lunch. Actually, it was going to be a very big cooking day. I guess you could say it was my Oscars of cooking days. Since it was my last whole weekend of cooking I really needed to crank out at least three recipes today. So, for lunch I made the family Jamie's Sweet and Sour Pork on page 65. It cooks really fast and you need to be completely ready before starting to cook. While I started my marathon of cooking, Husband started his marathon day of dish-washing. He already seemed to be dragging a bit from keeping up with me yesterday and I felt kind of bad that it was starting again already. I also hadn't broken the news to him at how many recipes I was going to do that day.

After lunch was cooked, eaten and cleaned up, I got going on the beef & onion pie. The pie filling was a cinch to make and I felt like I could almost guess what Jamie was going to say next, it followed similar techniques as some of his other recipes. The one thing that threw me was that I didn't do a good job reading through the recipe beforehand to gauge how much time I would need. I just saw "40 minutes" under the "To make your pie" section and totally missed the hour that the beef filling had to cook in the "To make your beef filling" section. Once I realized it, I sent Husband, Kid and the Baby out to eat. They have been good soldiers and there was no reason for them to starve on my account. Also, after eating our crazy menu for the week, I think they were quite excited to get out of there!

After I got the pie filling bubbling away on the stove, and the family was out of the house, it was time to prepare the recipe I was least excited about. Now the other bumps in my food revolution have all been about not being brave enough to prepare the recipe, but in all of these cases I knew once I could get the courage to do the cooking, the food would get eaten. For Recipe #161 I wasn't sure anyone, including me, would eat it. Yes, we're talking about Smoked Mackerel Pate on page 282. So, I decided making half of the recipe was the way to go. To get me through this I kept thinking of all of those Oscar Starlets that would be dining on some sort of fancy pate that night at all of their big Oscar parties. I turned to page 282 and read through Jamie's recipe.

Jamie writes, "This is such a lovely thing to eat. There's loads of goodness in the skin of the mackerel, so try to leave it on when you make this -- you won't really notice it once the fish is all chopped up."

I next skimmed over the ingredients: 10 ounces smoked mackerel, 4 scallions, 2 lemons, one 8 ounce bar of Philadelphia cream cheese, 2 tablespoons of horseradish, salt and pepper, ciabatta bread, 2 large handfuls of sprouts (for garnish). Then I read over the method and like a big, large brick, it hit me over the head. Its just fancy tunafish salad! Instead of tuna you are using the mackerel, cream cheese instead of mayo, etc. etc. Well, then, that doesn't seem so bad! I made it in no time and you know, once again, Jamie was right. It was pretty good. Husband got home with the kids and I was completely shocked when he tried some and liked it too. You know, at the end of a long cooking day, it was almost as good as winning an Oscar.

Recipes cooked: 162
Recipes left: 11
Days left: 6