A cold hunt

The urge for a hot drink is pressing.

While the potatoes were parboiling for sautéing this evening I thought I’d go & locate the cod for this evening’s meal.

We have a chest freezer. I knew I hadn’t seen the 360g packet of cod fillets for a while so it had probably swum down into the depths. I keep one side fish with veg on top, the other side is meat. On the shelf at the back are ready meals to the right, pastry & our own pre-cooked meals & sauces on the left.

I dived down to the bottom. No sign of such a large pack of cod. All the veg & fish parcels laid strewn around me on the floor. I thought maybe the cod had swum into the meat section. They occasionally seem to slide from one section to another. Soon I had another pile of various packets of meat, a couple with no names though clearly one was cooked chicken & the other a cooked meat of some sort.  Still no 360g packet of cod. I put everything away, leaving anything I knew I was going use up soon on top, including an alternative parcel of cod.

I can only assume we must have eaten the 360g parcel at some time & I had failed to cross it off my freezer contents list. We had chosen the recipe specifically with that piece in mind. I did contemplate doing something entirely different, but I already had the potatoes on the go. I’m using up the oldest stuff in the freezer at the moment or that’s the idea. The next items on my list go better with chips or mash &, anyhow, I had settled in my mind on cod for dinner, so that’s what we were having.

The recipe I’m doing is for a Portuguese cod & onion stew. We used to have this recipe quite often when we were newly married, living at Crag Foot, over 40 years ago. We haven’t had it again for ages, probably 30 years or so. The other day I was suddenly reminded of it & felt a hankering to have it again. It’s quite a simple stew with cod in the base of a dish, topped with sliced onions & tomatoes. Cider is poured over & it’s put in the oven for an hour to bake. Then a breadcrumb & cheese topping is scattered across & a quick flash under the grill to brown & give a bit of crunchy interest to the fish. We’ll be having some green beans as well. I hope we enjoy it as much as we did all those years ago.

Needless to say, with all that rummaging in the freezer my hands are frozen, hence the urgent need for a hot mug to put my hands around & warm me up again, inside & out.