“Beautifully simple recipe: cod & prawns with fennel & white wine. (Prepare 5 minutes, Cook 25 minutes.)” I was enchanted by this tempting supper on a Waitrose shelf.
All the ingredients, except parsley and white wine, were by the giveaway recipe so I succumbed to Waitrose’s marketing ploy. This was lazy and wasteful as the fennel and leeks came in packs of two. I could have bought them individually in the veg section. The preparation and cooking times are wildly optimistic. It took me at least 15 minutes to chop up the greens and fish and total preparation and cooking time was almost an hour. It was worth the effort as it turned out like a Boston chowder and I will make it again perhaps with some small new potatoes, celery and pak choi instead of fennel and leeks. Incidentally pak choi, that nobody had heard of 25 years ago, is now grown in Cambridgeshire. So that will be something to eat when the shelves are bare when we leave the EU, and we will be swimming in a gin lake from all the micro distilleries that have sprung up – nil desperandum.
There are lots more recipes on the Waitrose website but a common theme seems to be ingredients that are unlikely to be at the back of the cupboard – a cunning ploy to increase one’s spend and clutter up the kitchen.
I was similarly tempted by this recipe when it featured in a Waitrose commercial. So, I looked at their website, printed out the menu and then went to Sainsbury’s to buy the ingredients. Very good it was, too.
Not sure that’s what Waitrose would have wanted, but there you go.