Friday Fish Pie

Ingredients
1tbsp oil
500g of fish
Dry white wine
1 tsp dill
100g peas or petit pois

25g butter
1 tbsp plain GF flour
1/2 pint semi-skimmed milk
75g cheese
1 tsp dill
Freshly ground black pepper

2 medium potatoes
1 medium sweet potato
Butter and freshly ground black pepper to taste

In terms of fish, I tend to get what's on offer; usually some form of white fish, or a fresh and smoked fish mix. I avoid shellfish as it has a strong flavour I dislike (YMMV) and prawns. For cheese, I use a mature cheddar, but anything that makes a good sauce will do.

Heat the oven to 200 degrees.

Peel and cut the potato and sweet potato (hereafter refered to as 'the potatoes') into large chunks.

Heat a pan of water to the boil and add the potatoes, bringing back to a lively simmer for 20-30 minutes, until tender (the chunks should break apart when pricked with a knife).

While the potatoes are cooking, heat the oil in a small frying pan; add the fish, sprinkle with dill and then almost cover with white wine. Bring to a slow simmer and saute the fish for about 5 minutes, depending on thickness (smoked fish needs substantially less time, of course), turning once.

Drain the potatoes and return to the pan. Add butter and pepper to taste and mash to a smooth consistency. stir to mix the regular and sweet potatoes together.

Drain and retain the wine stock from the fish. Flake the fish into the bottom of a lightly greased ceramic dish and add the peas.

Add the milk to the wine and mix gently.

Melt the butter and stir in the flour. Add the milk and wine mixture and stir until the sauce thickens. Add the dill, pepper and cheese and stir until the cheese is melted.

Pour most of the sauce over the fish and mix in. Top with the mashed potato by shaping slabs of potato and placing them on top of the filling, as attempting to 'spread' the potato will just shift the filling around.

Top with the remainder of the sauce or some grated cheese.

Bake for about half an hour, until the sauce on top is crispy and the uncovered potato golden.

And now, a food blog

That's right, I am starting yet another blog, this one as a record of my eating habits and recipes, both as a place for musing about food and in order to motivate myself to improve my habits.

Where I start from on this is as a man of thirty-some years of age, a shade over six feet tall and rather heavier than I would like. I am adopting a number of strategies to reduce my weight, having found direct calorie counting to be ineffective for me, and complicated by the fact that I am seeking to coordinate my diet with Hannah's (and Andrew's, although he's working in the other direction) across our two households.

Key strategies include:

• Portion control, as I know that I am guilty as anything over overfilling my plate.
• No snacks.
• Strategic scrounging; my place of work often has left over conference food, which I get to scavenge. It makes good economic sense, but I need to be smarter about it, in particular saving scavenged food for the next day if I have already eaten.
• Preparation for lunch; I need to have fruit, soups, sandwich fillings and good, wholemeal bread in at all times.
• THE PLAN, a long-term dietary plan.

A lot of this will be easier once I get my own place and am not wrestling with a crippling storage shortage (currently my bread tends to be stored on top of the spice sprawl), but I also need to be open and public about these steps in order to maintain my motivation.

But on top of this, I also want to celebrate food. I love food, and I love cooking. It's a key warning of depression when I find I don't want to cook. With that in mind, this is what I ate yesterday.

Warm Tuna Salad for 1

1 small tuna steak (you could use tinned tuna)

2 eggs

1/2 lettuce (I used a sweet gem, but anything would do; something with a bit of crunch though)

2 medium tomatoes (although I actually used a handful of cherry tomatoes)

1/2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1/2 tbsp olive oil

fresh ground black pepper

Hard boil the eggs.

Heat a small amount of olive oil in a small frying pan.

Grind pepper onto the tuna steak and place in the pan, peppered side down. Grind more pepper onto the top side and then flip over. You should only cook the tuna for about a minute on each side; you want the last bits of pink in the middle just turning, no more, otherwise the fish will be too dry.

Chop the lettuce, rinse and place in a bowl. Chop and add the tomatoes and drizzle over the dressing.

Shell and slice the eggs. Break the tuna into small pieces and add the warm ingredients to the salad bowl.