Jubilee Fish and Chips – Nick Coffer @nickcoffer by Seafish
Method
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 30 minutes
Serves: family of 4 people
Ingredients:
- 500g skinless haddock fillet (or any other similar white fish such as cod, coley or pollack)
- 2 large eggs or three medium size eggs, beaten in a bowl
- A small bowl of plain flour, seasoned with a little salt and pepper
- 6 slices of stale bread, or half a stale baguette
- 2 large (or 3 medium) sweet potatoes
- 200g frozen peas
- 2 tbsp butter
- A few sprigs of fresh mint, finely chopped
- Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
- Olive oil
100 Fresh New Recipes for the Whole Family.
Jubilee Fish and Chips – oven baked haddock fish fingers, sweet potato chips and easy mushy peas by Nick Coffer @nickcoffer, Author of the ‘My Daddy Cooks’ book of 100 Fresh New Recipes for the Whole Family.
What could be more quintessentially British to make than fish and chips in this Jubilee year?! My version brings the dish bang up-to-date. It requires no deep frying (never ideal when cooking with the help of children) and is loads of fun for everyone to assemble. The fish stays lovely and moist in the crumb coating and the sweet potato ‘chips’ are a failsafe hit in our house. Finally, an extremely simple and fresh version of mushy peas to complete my version of this classic dish which your family will love preparing – and eating! – together.
You will need two flat baking trays.
Preheat your oven to 200ºC/ 400ºF/ Gas Mark 6
- Peel the sweet potatoes. Cut them in half lengthways, then in half again lengthways. Cut each of these remaining pieces into 3 long wedges. Put the wedges into a bowl, pour a good glug of olive oil over them and mix the oil and the potatoes together.
- Lay the wedges on a baking tray and put it in the oven. You now have 10 minutes to prepare your fish fingers.
- Blitz the stale bread in a food mixer or blender to make your bread crumbs. It’s no big deal if some of the crumbs are not very fine. If you don’t have stale bread, toast your slices before blitzing them up.
- Cut the fish into “fish finger” size chunks.
- Put the flour bowl, the egg bowl and a bowl with the breadcrumbs in a line. Using one hand, coat each fish finger firstly in some flour, dip it in the egg, then roll it in the breadcrumbs.
- Once all the fish fingers have been coated, grease your other baking tray with some olive oil. Place the fish fingers on the tray and spray or drizzle olive oil over each one. Just a really light coating will do the trick.
- After the wedges have been in the oven for 10 minutes, put the fish in too. The wedges and the fish will be ready after a further 20 minutes cooking time.
- With five minutes to go, boil some water and cook the frozen peas for 3 minutes. Drain them, mash and crush them with a potato masher, stir in the butter and the mint and season to taste.
- Serve immediately.
