Fast fish pie

Happy to report another success - a quick and easy meal that's turned out delicious and, this time, healthy. BBC Good Food's Fast Fish Pie lived up to its name.

The recipe starts with celery and garlic, adds fresh cherry tomatoes, then stock (or wine) and tomato puree along with the fish, plus tarragon to finish. I used mixed fish (hake, smoked haddock, salmon) rather than the white fish plus prawns in the recipe, and dill rather than tarragon as I had none in the cupboard. My stock is baby-friendly (low salt) Heinz but with the smoked fish it was fine. A good grinding of fresh black pepper finished things off beautifully.

I made cheesy mash without spring onions (again, none in and not worth buying just for one recipe), and served it with the fish mixture rather than making a pie. It means forgoing the crispy top, but you get your dinner quicker and have one less dish to wash up, so that's a win in my book.

I have to say that the 10 mins prep was a bit optimistic for me. Chopping celery, garlic and tomatoes, making stock, and prepping potatoes were just about quick enough, but skinning the fish and checking for bones was time consuming for a non-expert.

Update: to make it even faster I used fish pie mix and a tin of tomatoes, and swapped the normal tomato puree for a sun dried one (Sacla). I also chuck in some frozen peas.

In general it's a pretty healthy and diet-friendly dish. I didn't use as much oil as suggested, but braised the celery with some of the stock, and I could easily have omitted the cheese from the mash - in fact I mashed in some leftover cheese sauce from another dish, giving it good anti-food-waste credentials too. On that note, as the tomatoes and celery are cooked, you can use up ones that might be a bit too past their best to eat raw, and other veg such as carrots or broccoli stems could go in too. To give it a trio of haloes, it's also pretty budget-friendly as you can eke out the fish with more veg, and/or choose cheaper fish or even offcuts.

Overall, an extremely tasty dish, and one that can easily be batch cooked into larger portions. Definitely a keeper in our menu rotation!

Gooseberry meringue pie

After the lovely local gooseberry fairy made a surprise doorstep delivery, I thought I should do something more interesting and summery than a crumble or pie. I found this:

Gooseberry meringue pie (Waitrose recipe)

Meringue
3 egg whites
175g caster sugar

Filling
900g cooking gooseberries, topped and tailed
150g caster sugar
3 tbsp cornflour
3 egg yolks

As ever, I made a few edits. I only had 550g gooseberries, so I cut the sugar for them down to 100g. I should have also reduced the eggs to 2, which would have had a knock-on adjustment of the sugar in the meringue to ~180g. As I failed to make this adjustment, there was a bit much filling for the case.

Oh yes, the case was another adjustment as it was too hot to faff about making pastry/I don't have a pie tin, so I bought an 8" sweet pastry shell from Waitrose. However, it wasn't really wide or tall enough for this recipe (thank goodness I didn't have the full 900g of gooseberries!) so it came out looking all meringue with some gooseberry overspill. Moral: make your own.

1. Put the gooseberries in a pan with 2 tbsp water and 150g caster sugar. Cover and gently heat, stirring, until tender. Some will stay whole; some will become mushy. Strain the mixture through a sieve, set the gooseberries aside and put the strained liquid back into the saucepan. Simmer this until it has reduced to about 200ml. Mix 5 tbsp of this reduced liquor with the cornflour, until smooth. Pour into the saucepan and add the drained gooseberries. Bring to the boil and stir to thicken. Add the egg yolks and stir well to combine. Remove from the heat immediately.
2. Pour the mixture into the pastry case and leave to cool. With an electric whisk, beat the egg whites in a large, clean bowl until you have medium peaks (when you hold up the beaters the mixture should be firm but the peaks just slightly droop over). Add 1 tbsp caster sugar and beat this in, then continue in the same way, whisking and adding the sugar until you have a stiff, glossy mixture. Spoon this over the tart, making sure that you cover the rim of the pastry and don’t leave any gaps. Bake at 190°C/gas 5 for 25 minutes.

No edits to the method - wow!