Mostly cloudy and frigid

When your digital weather station reads: "mostly cloudy and frigid," you know it's a good day to make a pie. Fish pie that is. A fish pie needs to be piping hot, topped with mashed potato, and somehow provide real sympathy to the lack of times you'll step foot out of the house today.

Having lived in London for so long, I'm partial to a cottage pie (beef) or a shepherd's pie (lamb), but the one I've made dozens of times and always go back to, is fish. It must include the best fish you can get, and you can pick any kind you like. My chosen fish was always smoked haddock, but it's hard to find here in Midwest America. Cod, if properly sourced, is tasty. You can add several different kinds of fish including salmon, shrimp, whatever you like. Ultimately, it's the creamy, mustardy sauce and hard-boiled eggs that makes this pie irresistible.

This is certainly one of my top 5 Jamie Oliver recipes that I simply could not do without. As he suggests, I add a touch of class and serve it with tomato ketchup and heinz baked beans.

Fantastic Fish Pie

Adapted from The Return of the Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver

5 large potatoes, peeled and cut into large chunks for boiling and mashing

a few tbsp of olive oil for mashing the potato and frying the onion & carrot

2 free range eggs

2 large handfuls of spinach

1 onion, chopped

1 carrot, halved and chopped finely

1 1/4 cup heavy cream (or double cream)

2 handfuls of grated mature white cheddar cheese

juice of 1 lemon

1 heaped teaspoon of English mustard (Colman's)

handful of parsley, chopped

1 lb of fish- your choice: haddock, cod, salmon, or a mix- skinned, boned and cut into bit size chunks

salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 450F. Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil and add the potatoes. Bring the water back to the boil and cook for 10 minutes. Add the eggs once the water has boiled. Use a colander on top of the boiling potatoes to cook the spinach (using a pan lid on top of the colander to trap the steam.) At the end of the ten minutes, your potatoes and eggs will be cooked. Remove the spinach to drain and squeeze the excess water out of it.

Drain the potatoes. Set both the eggs and spinach aside to cool. When the eggs are cooled, peel and quarter them.

Mash the potatoes using a little olive oil and salt & pepper, put a lid on the pan and set aside. You can use butter and a little cream if you'd like, but the sauce underneath is creamy enough. The olive oil makes the mashed potato crisp up in the oven.

In a separate pan, add a little olive oil and slowly cook the chopped onion and carrot until cooked (about 8- 10 minutes). Add the cream and bring just to the boil, then remove it from the heat. Add the cheddar, lemon juice, English mustard and parsley. Salt and pepper to taste and get ready to start layering your pie.

Using a lightly oiled casserole dish of your choice (8x10 in size at least), start by placing the pieces on the bottom and strategically arranging the spinach and eggs around the fish. Make it so that each person will get a bit of everything.

Pour the sauce over the top of the of the fish, eggs and spinach and top everything with the mashed potato.

Cook for 25- 30 minutes until bubbly and the potatoes are golden brown on top.

Serve with a salad and/or heinz baked beans and don't forget the ketchup.

Happy Holidays from Hunger Habit

You can see that we've been roasting meats this holiday season. The two below are some of my favorite celebratory roasts and we'll definitely be needing a detox after filling up on such juicy and delicious dinners over the last few weeks.

This is the first year I've abandoned the traditional English turkey. Don't tell the in-laws, but turkey comes last on my list of roasted meats, so I was happy to see it behind us after Thanksgiving.

The first roast is the uber-famous Zuni Cafe Roast Chicken with Bread Salad. I'm not the first person to blog about this dish and I certainly won't be the last. I've professed my love for it after visiting Zuni Cafe in November. I was immediately taken under Judy Roger's spell, as all good food lovers who have pre-ordered her chicken should be.

The chicken is salted at least 24 hours in advance and you need to pat it dry during several occasions after it's sat in the refrigerator. It's a delicious roast chicken, but the bread salad is something very remarkable. The currants, scallions, toasted pine nuts and crispy bread are all bathed in a sharp vinaigrette and married together by sitting in your oven while your chicken rests. If you haven't been to Zuni, get there. If you want a new way to roast chicken, try this. Immediately.

The recipe on the link above is just as it is in her cookbook. I didn't adapt it at all. Some things should not be messed with.

The second triumph was my sister's (okay, Martha's) Christmas Roast Pork with Crackling. After abandoning the traditional roast beef, we settled on pork, but it needed to be BIG. She proceeded to order the pork leg from her local butcher and she and my Dad wrestled with this huge beast to ordain it with three heads of garlic. If you need pork to feed a crowd, this should be your choice. You certainly need some muscles to man handle this in and out of the oven. You've been warned.

You can see that the crackling turned a perfect golden brown and we crunched it greedily. The pork was juicy and spiked with the garlic pearls, thanks to my Dad's hard work. When paired with my black truffle dauphinoise and some simple green beans, the Christmas feast was memorable.

So here I am, staring 2011 in the face and a meatless weekend ahead. It's been worth it.

Happy New Year from Hunger Habit. Peace!

Pay the price

For my English Mother in-law, Lesley's, first Thanksgiving, we rolled out the pumpkin pie carpet. The turkey was roasted to perfection, but not without normal amounts of stress surrounding timing and oven schedules. Ultimately, the low point of the day came when I shook hot pan drippings with flour and exploded the burning liquid all over Lesley - her hair, her shirt, her glasses. It was a poor attempt at de-lumping the gravy and at least three of us in close proximity to the disaster paid the price.

After a quick trip to the bathroom for clean-up, the laundry room for stain remover, offers of a stiff drink and many apologies, we were back on track.

These little sprouts were proudly displayed on the menu as an attempt to add a British stamp to our Thanksgiving parade. Our normal green vegetable, green beans, were supposedly out of sight. Lesley is a top-notch peeler and quickly offered to peel and halve SIX bags of sprouts. All I did to thank her was nearly send her to the ER.

I had pre-tested the sprouts several weeks ago because we can't get enough of them at my house. I even like them thinly sliced, raw, served with some vinaigrette and a little parmesan. For this Thanksgiving dish, I roasted the sprouts rather than boiling them into submission, and they came out caramelized and crunchy. Pancetta was mostly responsible for their deliciousness, but I'll take a little credit.

You can enjoy these sprouts tossed with a little pasta for a quick mid-week meal. Add a little glass of red wine and it could even make it to the weekend.

Roasted Brussel Sprouts with Pancetta, Capers and Parmesan

Serves 2

1/2 lb brussel sprouts

6 oz pancetta, cubed

1 clove of garlic, minced

1 shallot, finely chopped

one sprig of thyme, leaves removed

3 tbsp capers

1/2 cup parmesan cheese, grated

olive oil

a little squeeze of lemon juice

salt and pepper

handful of chopped parsley

Preheat the oven to 400F. Prepare the sprouts by cutting off the bottom of each sprout and peel off any yellowed outer leaves. Halve them and then toss them in a little olive oil, salt and pepper. Pour them onto a baking tray in one layer and roast for about 15-20 minutes until they are starting to brown. Turn regularly.

In the meantime, get a pan hot on your stove and add the pancetta. Brown it until it's getting crispy, but not completely done. Add the thyme and shallots and stir until translucent. Add the garlic and stir around for a few seconds until fragrant. Finally add a squeeze of the lemon juice and scrape the pan to get all of the juices off the bottom.

Take off the heat and add the capers.

Take your sprouts out of the oven, toss them in your pan and put them back on the baking tray. Make sure to get all the yummy juices out of the pan and onto the sprouts. Roast for another 10 minutes until the sprouts are golden and crunchy on the edges.

Sprinkle with parsley and parmesan and serve as a side dish or toss with pasta for a main dish.

Check your seasoning at the end and add a little more lemon juice if needed.