Impromptu

The day before yesterday, that is to say Wednesday and a Sainsbury's day, BH did baked cod for our main meal and there were some potatoes and a piece of cod left over.

Then yesterday morning, I thought to convert these left overs into impromptu fish cakes, to make what for us is a very occasional cooked breakfast at home.

Chop the small amount of onion. Blend the onion, potato and fish with a fork. Blend in an egg.

Turn into hot oil in the (Aga) sauté pan, shaping the mix into a patty about half an inch thick. Fry for about 10 minutes, mostly with the lid on, turning once. Cutting the patty in half for the purpose.

Not good for the photograph, but the patty was going to be cut in half anyway to serve. I suppose I should have divided the mixture into two patties at the start, although that would have been slightly more fiddly.

But photograph aside, the fish cakes were very good, with an excellent texture and a pleasant, fairly bland if fishy flavour. Even though I say it myself.

Maybe a little chopped parsley or pounded pepper next time? Fresh, naturally.

And while we are on food, a convenient place to record that, after Grape Tree withdrew, BH has just found brick dates, long absent, at Sainsbury's. Some of which dates went into her recent apple, walnut and date cake.

Grape Tree got their brick dates from Western Commodities, at reference 1 below and snapped above. They appear to still do dates, but they did not respond to my email asking what had happened to their brick dates. Oddly, no list of products on their website, so perhaps their business is feeding a relatively small number of food processing operations. No need for retail-flavoured material on their website.

Also that the Canadians have got around to updating their toonie for our new king. Dei Gratia Rex and all - perhaps the Catholics in Quebec go for this Pope given title. Appeals to their sense of humour. Just as the brand managers at Duchy Originals have updated their packaging. The people, that is, responsible for the tainted lentils from Waitrose, recently noticed.

The only catch was that his charity number was printed so small on the packet of lentils that I had to resort to the power of Samsung to read it and so find my way to the snap above. Presumably his commission on our lentils score as 'other trading activities'. One can only hope that he gives the modest amount of money involved to worthy causes. I have not looked into reference 2.

PS 1: Western Commodities look to be housed just off the M5 at Cullompton. A stretch of the M5 on which I once worked for a short while. A couple of stretches in fact, chucked off both, on the second occasion for poor sampling of blacktop. A process called quartering as I recall, carried out on hot blacktop on a large metal tray.

PS 2: oddly, the brick dates are not to be found at reference 3, nor can the power of Google do anything with their bar code - '000234050869'. While Bing thinks that I am interested in dating antique bricks. We will see if the customer service people at Whitworths bother to reply to my query,

References

Reference 1: https://www.westerncommodities.com/.

Reference 2: https://www.kccf.org.uk/.

Reference 3: https://whitworths.co.uk/.