Fish and Chips

One discussion we had on the way to the airport was “what meal is it that we really want to have because we can’t get it in Cairo?” Previously winners of this title have been roast dinner, cheese, biscuits and port, steak and ale pie and then of course sausages. This time though the meal of choice was fish and chips.

We settled on this because food at the BCA is actually meeting a lot of our ex-pat needs as they have a really good range of sausages now and they do good pies. Also, with it being summer we aren’t as much in need of a roast dinner compared to how we feel in colder times.

So it’s Friday night and we head down to the chippy in Tollington Road with an order of two haddock, four cod and five chips (R&J fancy haddock and apparently the chip portions are huge so we don’t need six servings). Scott gets into the queue (it’s Friday night so I guess we expected a queue for fish and chips!) and I head over to Tesco to pick up some peas that we’ll cook up when we’re home. When I get back to him he’s at the front of the queue, but not looking too happy about it. It seems that they were running low on haddock and so put some more onto cook. Whilst this was cooking they got on with filling other orders where they could. Haddock now ready and they have run out of cod though! So on goes the cod and we wait another 15 minutes. Just as the cod is nearly ready it looks like chip supplies are in the danger zone and we’re ready to start ranting. Luckily though there are just enough and we get our order. Phew!

So, fish, chips, mushy peas and some beer make a nice dinner eventually. (We still can’t get used to it being so light until well past 9pm!) Conversation turns to mushy peas and the discovery is that even though when you make mushy peas from scratch you need to rehydrate dried marrowfat peas – you can’t make them directly from fresh marrowfats.