Cooking, Recipes, Wine............ and Ethical Foie Gras - At Last!

Comfort food par excellence - and very easy to prepare.  You just need to know when you're going to eat it so you can de-salt the fish in advance but the great thing is that you can make a large quantity and freeze it in its semi cooked state and then it's really light and crisp with only a short trip to the oven before it's ready.

Ingredients:

Salt cod

Potatoes

Parsley

Garlic

Salt, pepper

Olive oil

Take roughly equal quantities of salt cod and potato.  De-salt the fish in a big bowl of water - as much water as possible and change the water at least 4 times over 24 hours. There's no need to buy expensive thick pieces of salt cod for this dish - get thin tail pieces with not many bones.

Dice the potato and boil in salted water until only just cooked then place in a baking dish and start to mash the potato with the back of a fork.

Using a fork, scrape the fish meat off the skin, taking care to leave the bones behind. Mash the fish meat and the potato together and keep adding olive oil, a spoonful at a time. The mix will absorb a lot of olive oil and that's good - it won't turn out oily even if you add 200ml of oil to 1kg of fish / potato mix. Finely crush a clove of garlic into the mixture. Keep some of the bigger flakes of fish to add right at the end so that the dish will have some good texture - add these together with the last of the olive oil and the parsley. Season to taste. Even though it's salt cod, you may need to add salt - although the fish isn't "cooked" you can taste it at this stage anyway.

At this point seperate what you want to put in the freezer. Transfer what you're going to cook now to a preheated oven 190C. Cook for 20-30 mins until the top is starting to brown and then finish under the grill until the top is browned and crisp.

Serve with a simple green salad.