Fish cakes

 

Today we’re having a fishy, and quite British recipe (no dad, not fish and chips): fish cakes. I had attempted this once before, with a recipe from a celebrity chef who shall remain nameless, but that was several years ago and that in itself should tell you that I wasn’t right impressed. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good fish cake, but the only time I’d tried making them at home the recipe was asking for tinned salmon, which I had never bought before, and with good reason I found out. It would appear that in tinned salmon, every bit of the fish ends up in the tin. I could identify not only flesh, but also bones (annoying) and skin (ewwww). The mere thought of what I’d put in it ruined the dish for me, and I never attempted it again until today. You might say to me, what’s to say that restaurant fish cakes are not made from tinned salmon? Well, maybe you’d have a point, but I’d rather carry on living blissfully in my ignorance.

Now you might ask, what prompted me to try making fish cakes again? Well, now and again I like to buy the BBC Good Food magasine, and this month the recipe to make with your kids is fish cakes. Having checked that the ingredients list was 100% tin-free, I decided to give it a try and at the time my son seemed suitably enthusiastic.  (Once confronted to the grim reality of hand-mashed potatoes, he gave up fairly quickly, but never mind). It turned out to be a little bit long to make, so maybe not ideal for a quick mid-week dinner, but the result definitely reconciled me with home-made fish cakes.

Ingredients for 8 hefty fish cakes or 10 more normal sized ones: 800g floury potatoes – 3 eggs – 100g dried breadcrumbs – zest of 1 lemon – 3 smoked mackerel fillets (approx 140g) – 2 skinless salmon fillets (approx 250g) – sunflower oil

Peel the potatoes and boil them for 10 minutes. Add the salmon fillets cut into chunks and simmer until the fish is cooked through. Remove the salmon with a slotted spoon and finish cooking the potatoes until tender.

While the potatoes cook, peel away the skin from the mackerel fillets and flake them into a large bowl.

Once the potatoes and salmon are both cooked, tip them into the bowl with the mackerel flakes, add the lemon zest and mash well. You might need to mix with a spoon too, to make sure both salmon and mackerel are evenly distributed. Leave to cool.

Whilst the fishy mash is cooling down, crack the eggs into a bowl or a dish and whisk them with a fork. Tip the breadcrumbs in another dish or onto a plate.

Divide the mash into 8 or 10, and shape it a individual fish cakes.

Roll each fish cake into the whisked eggs, then coat in breadcrumbs. Repeat if you want a thick crust on your fish cakes.

Heat the oil in a frying pan and cook the fish cakes in batches, turning them regularly to keep them golden.

The verdict: My husband found the fish cakes too lemony, the zest of 1/2 lemon would probably be just enough for anyone who’s not keen on lemon. I decided to double-coat my fish cakes as I like them well crusted, and I ended up having to use 1 more egg and 25g more breadcrumbs than what the recipe originally asked for. I would also recommended using French toast, which replace dried breadcrumbs advantageously: put the required weight of French toast in a strong, sealable plastic bag and go over it with a rolling pin until reduced to small crumbs. Easy-peasy. The rest of the pack can be eaten with Nutella for breakfast. Finally,  it was the first time I had a reason to use the zester my friend Shannon kindly gave me a few months ago. How did I ever live without one??

Strawberry jam

 

Lately with the warm weather I haven’t been greatly inspired to cook, hence the lack of posts, however with all these fruits about in the supermarket I have felt the urge to make jam, and here we are. Last year I had a go at plum jam, and if I do say so myself it was the best tasting plum jam ever! This year I’ve decided to try a classic, and made strawberry jam. After baking, jam is probably the most satisfying form of cooking I can think of. The kitchen smells beautiful, and it’s always a great pleasure in the middle of winter to pop open a jar of home-made jam. I used to be quite intimidated by jam making, thinking it was really hard, and that you needed a copper pan, a sugar thermometer and all sorts of complicated kitchen paraphernalia, but in the end you really don’t. Give it a try!

Ingredients for about 3kg of jam: 1.8kg whole strawberries – juice of 3 lemons – 1.84kg jam sugar (JAM sugar, not preserving sugar) – knob of butter

Wash, drain and hull the fruit in put a large non-metallic bowl. Sprinkle over the lemon juice and sugar, and gently mix. If you’d like to keep the strawberries whole in your jam, cover the bowl with a clean tea-towel and leave overnight. If not, proceed with the next step straight away.

Put a saucer in the freezer (this will advantageously replace a sugar thermometer if you haven’t got one). Tip the fruit and juice and sugar into a 4.5L heavy-based pan. Heat gently to dissolve the sugar, whilst stirring all the time. DO NOT boil until all the sugar has dissolved. Note that at that stage loads of scum may appear, if it does get too much and threatens to go over the top of the pan remove it with a slotted spoon.

Turn up the heat, then boil hard for exactly 4 minutes (use a timer). Take off the heat to test for setting: take the saucer out of the freezer and spoon a little jam onto it. Wait a couple of minutes, and push your finger through the jam on the saucer. If the surface wrinkles it is ready, if not return to the boil for 2 minutes, then test again. Repeat until the jam wrinkles on the saucer.

Once the jam is deemed set, take it off the heat and swirl in the butter. If the scum doesn’t dissolve, skim with a slotted spoon. Cool for 10-15 minutes (otherwise the fruits will all rise to the top once in the jars).

Stir to distribute the fruits, then pour into warm sterilised jars and seal straight away.

The verdict: either I’m a messy cook, or jam-making is a messy experience anyway, but I went through all the tea-towels in my house and my entire kitchen was sticky with jam. Apart from that, I went for the overnight rest but once I had cooked the jam the fruits were all whole, which I didn’t like. I set about mashing them with my potatoe-mashing device, which might explain why it then took me ages and ages and ages to get the jam to set (I had to repeat the boil and test process may ten times). And I still think it might be a tad too runny, but boy does it taste nice!

Just another little tip: I do not own a jar steriliser, and I have read about sterilising jars in a warm oven, which I always found a bit dubious. But I had a brainwave: I used my old baby bottles steriliser. Pillory me all you like, but if it’s good enough for baby bottles surely it’s good enough for jam jars… If you decide to do that, obviously throw away the rubber band and use new ones, apart from that it works a treat.

 

Salad and smoked paprika potatoes

 

In this unbelievably hot weather, we’re not usually in the mood for warm food, and we’ve been eating plenty of salads. Which has two advantages, first I don’t have to spend ages in the kitchen after work, and second it’s good for our waistlines. The only downside is that I had to start getting creative with the salads, because there is only so many times a week my son will eat Greek salad before getting fed up with it.

The thing I have found though, is that we still need some sort of carbs base or we end up starving before bedtime, and there is nothing worse than going to bed on an empty stomach (I can’t stand it:  the noise resonates in the mattress and keeps me awake). So on the days where the carbs are not in the salad themselves, I try to come up with an interesting side.  One of my all-time favourites is my grandma’s fricassee de pommes de terre, in other words shallow-fried potatoes. The pleasure is even greater when you’ve been and dug out the potatoes yourselves, 5 meters, sorry, yards, away from your kitchen door, washed, grated and cooked them all by yourself. From earth to plate in an hour, yummy! However the idea of the fricassee is that you fry the potatoes in oil: not very light at all. My grandma has tried several versions where you par-boil the potatoes before frying to reduce the frying time and the amount of oil needed, but I’m sorry to say it’s not a patch on the original. The challenge was therefore to come up with something just as tasty, but a bit more healthy, and I came across the smoked paprika potatoes recipe, from BBC GoodFood I believe. Dead simple, it does just the trick.

Ingredients for 1 person: 2 medium potatoes – 1/2tsp to 1tsp smoked paprika – olive oil – salt

Pre-heat the oven to 180degC, and put in the oven a small roasting pan with a little bit of olive oil in the bottom.

Peel, wash and dice the potatoes in cubes (approx. 15mm / ½”). Put them in a large bowl and pour a generous amount of olive oil on top.

Sprinkle the smoked paprika and salt over the top, then toss everything thoroughly until the potatoes are coated with oil and paprika all over.

Take the roasting pan out of the oven, rotate it a little so that the oil is spread all over the bottom. Pour the potatoes in the roasting pan, making sure they are all on a single layer.

Bake in the oven for approximately 30 minutes, tossing the potatoes halfway through to ensure they roast evenly.

This week I have served the paprika potatoes with what I call Caesar salad, but probably bears little resemblance with the original: lettuce, cherry tomatoes, pancetta (fried in its own juices, and sorry for sounding posh but standard diced bacon somehow just doesn’t do it for me), roasted pine nuts and Parmesan (grated or in shavings). Et voila!

 

 

Chocolate brownies

For the second post in a row I have no picture to show for my work, the standards are clearly falling… Nevertheless I think this recipe deserved a mention in the blog… Now let me start from the beginning, which is the origin of the recipe: it was entrusted to my dad a long time ago by an American English teacher living in France, and even though we have made a little tweak or two it is still very faithful to the original and has never failed to produce the best brownies ever. As it happens this particular batch was crafted for a very special occasion: you see yesterday whilst most of the country was out sitting in beer gardens or taking their kids to the seaside, basically making the most of the glorious summer weather, myself and a few colleagues from work were walking the Yorkshire 3 Peaks. Yes, I know, crazy… But after having done most of our practice walks in torrential rain, yesterday’s dry weather was a relief I can assure you. But anyhow. Since this is an all-day event, we needed plenty of sustenance and to that effect in addition of my sandwiches I’d decided to bring my very own batch of chocolate brownies. Well, why not?? They’ve got nuts and sugar for a quick energy boost, and chocolate to pick you up from this moment of despair when you think “Why oh why did I agree to do this?” (not that it happened to me). And this is how on Friday night, at a time where I should have been in bed, I was in my kitchen making chocolate brownies.

Ingredients for a 20cm square dish: 75g unsalted butter – 125 good quality dark chocolate – 125g sugar – 100g flour – 75g walnuts or Pecan nuts, roughly ground – 2 eggs – 1tsp vanilla paste – and my own added ingredient, a generous splash of Jack Daniel’s

Pre-heat the oven to 160deg .

Melt together the butter and chocolate in a bowl above a pan of hot water. Once melted take the chocolate off the heat and leave to cool down a little.

Add the eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla, Jack Daniel’s and nuts, mixing well after each addition.

Pour in a buttered dish and bake for about 15 minutes, or until the cake slightly comes away from the sides of the dish.

The verdict: I’m not one to pat myself on the back :-), and maybe it would be better to ask my fellow walkers for a more objective opinion, but I thought this batch was especially tasty. The trick with chocolate brownies is not to overcook them, they need to be still slightly goo-ey in the center, and these were done just right. Or maybe it was the circumstances in which they were eaten, right at the top of Whernside enjoying a superb view in good company… they nearly brought tears to my eyes.

Variants: since we’ve had this recipe for a while, both my dad and myself have been experimenting with it, and some interesting versions we’ve stumbled upon are: replacing the JD by pear schnapps (I still have a home-made one from 1996 which has seen me through many crisis and has unsuspected stomach-settling properties… but more to the point, it goes wonderfully with the dark chocolate of the brownies), or replacing the ground nuts by whole pine nuts and pistachio. Or maybe both.

Tandoori salmon

The other day I cooked a tandoori salmon side that turned out so nice that I thought I really ought to share it with you. It all started rather as a coincidence: whilst doing my weekly menu list before going shopping I’d decided I quite fancied salmon, but I wasn’t too sure how. “Something with a bit of a kick” was the usual helpful suggestion from my husband, so I settled for tandoori with a recipe straight from the spice mix box. Once at the supermarket, I took advantage of the offer on and brought back a nice big side of salmon, something I’d never cooked before (I know, appalling, right?). One I got home I stuck the salmon in the freezer until I was ready to cook it, tandoori-style. What’s that got to do with the price of fish (haha), might you say, but you shall see the point shortly.

Now that particular day I was walking to work, and therefore having woken up early I had the house all to myself. I decided to be a wonderfully efficient domestic goddess and prepare the salmon so that it would have time to marinate all day before cooking. The ingredients list is extremely short, and the recipe could be followed by a 4-year-old (he would have done if he hadn’t still been in bed): 125 ml olive oil, 3 tbsp lemon juice, 2 tbsp tandoori spice mix and runny honey. So here I go, whisking together the olive oil, lemon juice and tandoori spice. I then get the salmon out of the freezer, pop it on a plate (skin down) and pour honey over it. Then armed with my pastry brush I start brushing the honey all over the salmon… You can guess what happened, right? Yep, honey over frozen salmon does go solid… Not my finest hour I have to say. That’ll teach me trying to do cooking at 6:00 in the morning. Thankfully that was easily solved  by defrosting the salmon lightly in the microwave, just enough for the honey to melt a bit and become of brushable consistency again. Once the salmon was properly covered with honey, I poured the oil and spice mix on top of it and put the plate back in the fridge and went to work.

For the final stage (the cooking), I put the salmon in an oven-proof dish and reserved the oil left in the plate. I then cooked the fish in a warm oven (around 180deg) until it flaked easily; and to make sure it didn’t get too dry, halfway through cooking I poured over it the oil and spice mix that was left in the plate. Finally, I served it with stir-fry vegetables but I guess it would also go nicely with boiled rice.

My only comment on this would be that the mixture of oil and spices would probably benefit from a bit less oil and a bit more spices. Bon appetit!

Stuffed courgettes

 

Is it just me, or have I been blogging a awful lot of desserts lately? Nothing wrong with that you might say, however it’s not doing ny silhouette any good. Therefore today in the interest of re-addressing the balance within the food spectrum, and preserving my ever-expanding waistline, I shall be sharing a savoury recipe. Now this is called stuffed courgettes, because personally I love courgettes and now is the season for them, but you could very well stuff peppers, buffalo tomatoes, butternut squash… The idea is that it’s a complete dish, meaty and vegetably. The meat helps the vegetables go down easier with kids and vegetablophobes, and it’s carb-free if you’re looking at that kind of things.

Please note that since I make this up as I go along, there are no real proportions as such.

For 3 courgettes / 6 halves I have used: 250g mince beef or Quorn – 1 tin of chopped tomatoes – 1 cup water – vegetable Oxo – basil – 1 onion, diced – olive oil

This is easy peasy: wash the courgettes throughly, chop the ends of and cut them in halves lengthways. Take the centre out with a teaspoon (you should have approximately 5mm or 1/4″ of flesh left all round). Lay the courgettes in a oven dish.

In a frying pan, cook the onion on moderate heat until soft. Add the mince beef or Quorn and fry until cooked through. Add the tinned tomatoes, water, Oxo and basil, and season to taste. Leave to cook on low heat for around 15 minutes so that the meat absorbs the other flavours.

Fill each courgette half with the mince preparation, drizzle a bit of olive oil on top of each courgette half and put in a warm oven (around 180deg) until the courgettes are cooked and the meat is slightly crispy on the top.

Note: instead of basil you might find it interesting to use ground mixed spice for a more exotic taste. I would suggest to drop or at least reduce the amount of Oxo though, or it can overpower the spices. Bon appetit!

Negre en chemise

 

Now, I haven’t mentioned this yet, but while we were on holidays sunning ourselves my birthday happened. Since I wasn’t home at the time, unable to cook in my own kitchen with equipment that I know I have and know where to find (apart from when my husband has put things away after washing up, in which case there are usually a few expletives because he never puts things back where they normally live), I didn’t make myself a cake until we got back. Also, I don’t know about you but I find it a bit tricky shopping for food in a foreign country. Yes you could say I do it every week, ha ha ha… Anyhow, once we got back I made myself a cake, or I should probably call it a dessert. And today, lucky you, I shall share with you one of my dearest childhood memory, the Negre en Chemise. In our house, when it was your birthday you were allowed to choose your birthday dinner. And since I have always loved chocolate (I have some early photos to prove it!) my birthday dessert had to contain chocolate, and I used to request a Negre en Chemise, every year, which my dad used to make, every year. Now before going any further, I would like to put a disclaimer out there: if you decide to look up the translation, I did not make the name up, neither did my parents. Yes, it’s un-pc, but it’s also very nice to eat and somehow The Very Best Birthday Chocolate Dessert doesn’t sound quite as exotic.

Now this dessert is probably quite a grown up dessert (unless your kids are total chocoholics already) as it contains tons of dark chocolate and very little sugar. I should also point out that calorie-wise it’ll probably use up your entire daily allowance in one serving. But who cares, it’s my birthday! Right, you’re all warned now, so on with the recipe.

Ingredients for 6 rather large servings: 185g unsalted butter, cut in small pieces – 185g dark chocolate of the best quality – 3 eggs – 20g sugar – 250g whipping cream – 90g icing sugar

Melt the chocolate and the butter in a bowl over a pan of boiling water (au bain-marie). Stir well (but no whisking!), take off the heat and leave to cool until just warm.

Crack the eggs, separating the whites from the yolks. Keep the whites to one side for later. Add the yolks to the cooled down chocolate and butter and stir well, then add the sugar and stir well again.

Whisk the egg whites until stiff peaks form and add them very delicately to the chocolate mix (the idea is to keep the fluffiness of the egg whites in the final mixture).

Butter a dish (I used a salad bowl but that wasn’t the cleverest thing I’d ever done – too wide. I think a pudding bowl would do nicely). Pour the mixture into the dish and refrigerate overnight.

The next day, remove from the dish (it probably won’t come out by itself, in which case stand the dish in warm water to melt the surface of the hardened dessert slightly), turn over on a serving plate and return to the fridge until ready to serve.

When you’re ready to serve, make the covering by whisking together the cream with the icing sugar. Note that I am lazy and use squirted cream, to very good results if I do say so myself. Cover the chocolate with cream (be quite generous!) and serve immediately.

The verdict: Yummy!!! Just as I remembered. The bottom picture  is what the Negre en Chemise looked like just before serving, the top picture is after slicing. You may notice that there is significantly more squirted cream on the sliced version. Apparently I hadn’t put enough on and some decided to add more cream once served… If you use squirted cream though, beware that it “deflates” very quickly and therefore you need to serve immediately after squirting it on the dessert. Also, since my not very successful attempt at making it in a salad bowl (it ended up too wide and not high enough), I wondered if it might not be better doing individual portions, like in mini Christmas pudding bowls. I’ll bear that in mind for next year 🙂

 

Chocolate mousse

 

And today I shall be taking on this great dessert classic: chocolate mousse. AKA Mousse au Chocolat (it does sound so much nicer in French, don’t you think?). I am a sucker for a chocolate dessert, but it has to be right: I cannot stand industrial chocolate desserts, in fact I can smell them before I even taste them. Chocolate mousse is, on the face of it, very simple, and yet finding a decent one could prove difficult. So here’s my own attempt.

I’ll let you in the confidence: the key to a successful chocolate mousse is the chocolate. You can’t just get any old stuff from the shelf, as I found out first-hand. As cooking chocolates go I like Menier, but I guess the choice is yours provided it’s branded! Another thing: white chocolate isn’t chocolate, and milk chocolate is not designed for cooking with (yes, I do sound a bit uppity but this a subject close to my heart 🙂 ). Right, now that we all agree, let’s get going.

Ingredients for 6 people: 6 egg whites – 200g dark chocolate – 30g sugar (amazingly simple, isn’t it?)

Whip the egg whites until stiff, add the sugar little by little. Melt the chocolate with a tiny bit of water (2-3tbsp max) in a big bowl over a pan of boiling water. You should get a thick paste, which you can then incorporate in the egg whites while stirring gently.

Divide between 6 serving bowls and refrigerate for at least 3 hours.

As you’ll notice, you’ll have plenty of egg yolks left, now is the perfect time to make some buttery biscuits to eat with your lovely chocolate mousse!

Smoked cod and sweetcorn chowder

 

Hello everyone! Long time no speak… I know I have neglected this blog a bit lately, but there is a very good explanation: I was on holiday. Not away on holiday, unless you think Manchester and Liverpool are acceptable holiday destinations for UK people, but somehow I think not 🙂 Anyhow… The good thing is, during these few days off I have cooked, hence a couple of recipes you’ll find on here in the next few  days, and I have eaten out. A lot. Far too much for my waistband actually, but that’s another topic entirely. In fact, one would not write a food blog if one was overly bothered about one’s waistband. So on the topic of eating out, I might well get round to starting a new category in this blog, the “Reviews”. We shall see. First things first, let’s get cooking!

So, while I was off my parents came over. And when my parents come over we try to eat British stuff otherwise what’s the point? One of the things I made is smoked cod and sweetcorn chowder (yes, well done, the clue’s in the title). What’s British about that, I hear you say? Well the interesting fact is that it’s impossible to find smoked fish in France, apart from smoked salmon that is. Maybe smoked, pre-cooked mackerel as well, but it’s rare. Uncooked smoked cod, haddock and the like… impossible. As you can imagine this was a rather exotic dish for my parents.

This recipe is once again fairly quick, easy (if you’ve been reading me for a while, I don’t tend to go for big fancy recipes, especially during the week), and so far everyone seems to like it.

Ingredients for 6 people: 130g pancetta – 50g butter – 3 leeks, trimmed and sliced – 25g plain flour – 600ml semi-skimmed milk – 700g undyed smoked cod (or haddock), skinned and cut into bite-size chunks – 326g can sweetcorn in water, drained – 450g new potatoes, sliced – 1/4tsp paprika – salt, rgound black pepper – 2tbsp fresh, chopped flat-leaf parsley to garnish

Fry the pancetta in a large pan over medium heat until the fat runs out. Add the butter, leave to melt, then add the leeks and cook until softened.

Stir in the flour and cook for a few seconds, then pour in the milk and 300ml cold water. Add the new potatoes, sweetcorn and fish. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10-15min until the potatoes are cooked. The milk will froth a lot, you can keep removing the foam with a spoon while the chowder is cooking.

Stir in the salt and pepper to taste, then the paprika. Laddle into warm bowls and sprinkle chopped parsley on top to garnish. Serve straight away!

 

Tartiflette

 

At the moment at work we have a French student who’s come over to do a placement with us (I know… the poor lad wanted to come to England and he’s landed in beautiful Bradford, isn’t he lucky?). The other day he was looking for ideas of French food he could cook for his flatmate, and a brainwave came to me – now now, I can hear you, but yes it does happen – how about Tartiflette? This is typically French, the main ingredient is a cheese called Reblochon which, for some very bizarre reason can be found very easily at Sainsbury’s, and it’s very, very yummy. And as soon as the word came out of my mouth I thought “Mmmm, tartiflette, I feel like tartiflette”. The second thought was, here’s a good one for the blog. So here we are, Jeremy you can get the credit for that post.

A tiny bit of background on Tartiflette: it is a traditional dish from the French Alps, more specifically from the Haute-Savoie area (near Chamonix and all that). I would view it as a wintery dish, but after all here in the UK we never know from one day to the next whether it’s winter or summer. Think a long day out skiing, then coming back to simple comfort food and a glass of white wine (or a beer). It would also seem that Tartiflette was promoted in the 1980’s to increase the sales of Reblochon. A ruddy good marketing idea if you ask me.

Now if you’ve looked at the picture and ran away a mile, I can’t really blame you: it doesn’t look much. I also have to tell you now, if you’re on a diet, you might as well skip right to the next blog post, in fact if you’re on a diet I would think there isn’t much point you reading my blog at all since the recipes are rarely diet-friendly. But this one my friends, this one should really come with a health warning: it is oozing with cheese, cream and other light ingredients like that. MAJOR CALORIES ALERT! Beware if you carry on reading, and heaven forbids you try this recipe, I will not be held accountable for the state of your arteries. But enough said, back to the business at hand.

Ingredients for 6 to 8 people: 2kg potatoes – 150ml single cream – 2 Reblochon (Sainsbury’s size, they’re smaller than the French ones) – 200g smoked diced bacon or pancetta – 2 onions, diced – 200ml dry white wine.

Boil the potatoes until fully cooked. Leave to cool, then peel and cut into bite-size cubes. Lay out into a ovenproof dish.

Fry the diced bacon/pancetta in a frying pan without any oil. Once the bacon is lightly cooked, add the onions and cook on medium heat until soft. Stir regularly to allow even cooking.

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Add the wine to the bacon and onions and turn up the heat to evaporate the wine. Stir continuously so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Turn down the heat, add the single cream, season to taste and stir well. Leave to cook for a few minutes until warned throughout (don’t bring to the boil or the cream will split).

Pour the sauce over the potatoes and stir until the potatoes are properly coated.

Slice the cheeses in halves (ie, you should find yourself with each cheese cut in 2 round halves, each half the thickness of the full cheese – I don’t know if I’m being very clear here but hopefully the picture can also give you an idea). Place the cheeses on top of the potatoes, rind facing up (It’s important!), so as to maximise the surface area covered by the cheese.

Bake in the oven for 30 minutes.

Jeremy, if I’m doing it all wrong I will happily stand corrected but I’ll want proof :-). And to any non-French reader, please, please do not try to substitute the cheese for any other, it will simply not be Tartiflette anymore. Now are Sainsbury’s going to see their sales of Reblochon rocket through the ceiling I wonder?