This article was written for Annabel & Grace, which is now part of Rest Less.
I’m a strong advocator of ‘good interference’ in other’s lives. I have no particular preferences, no specific subject matter… it’s just that I like to share with anybody standing within chatting distance any good news, ideas or thoughts I’ve just had, or stored away, if I feel it would be beneficial to them.
However, my husband loathes this quality in me and would prefer that I keep my mouth firmly shut! This sharing trait might even be right at the top of his list on the Pro side of ‘Pros and Cons of being a Widower’.
You can imagine my delight when a wonderful lady approached us in Tesco with her unasked for advice and knowledge about fish pies.
We were mulling over the very mundane and dull-looking pies versus the delicious Charlie Bigham ones which were double the price and ‘hands down’ double the taste. A middle-aged woman passing us in the aisle stopped and said, “If you like, and with barely any effort, you can make a delicious fish pie with just a few ingredients that you can find right here.”
The husband was very keen on hearing this but that was nothing to my enthusiasm that here was extremely ‘good interference’ being doled out by a random stranger! This shows that offering ‘pearls of wisdom’ to any passerby that happens across one’s path isn’t just my thing… it’s now happening in our local Tesco store.
My Aunt Linda was my sole teacher in this art… but to be honest I’d not had a lot of unasked for knowledge pressed upon me in the intervening years. I just flew the flag solo, despite my husband’s warning glares.
The stranger pointed to the fish counter and said we should buy a variety of fish that was already cut and deboned for this very recipe.
Once we had this fish we should buy Tesco Finest cooked mashed potatoes. Then, she almost whispered, we must mix the raw fish with a jar of Hollandaise sauce before spreading the finest mashed potatoes over it. Waving her hand about with gusto, she suggested that a good scattering of Parmesan cheese would finish this dish off and promote it into something utterly heavenly.
I ran about collecting the few ingredients….now and again checking in to ask my temporary cookery teacher if I had the correct thing. Hollandaise sauce comes in various guises so I needed to make sure I had the right sort….the right sort was the most expensive – obviously.
I made this pie that night. It took no time to prepare and 30 minutes to cook. It was superb and tasted like I’d done a few years at Le Cordon Bleu.
It was my first fish pie that I’d ever cooked and I’m 64 years old.
What great interference that was. Thank you random lady in Tesco.
Other important facts to share:
Did you know that the man who created the Toblerone chocolate bar assumed that we knew to press the vertical triangular chocolate together to break them up?
Did you know that beavers have see-through eyelids so they can see underwater with their eyes closed?
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Of course we have a fab fish pie recipe on this site too! Check it out here