Step 1. You will need to catch your herrings; I caught mine in Tesco, of course. Well, the sea was a little stormy this week, and I don’t have a boat.
Step 2. Off with their heads, which will get used to make fish stock when I next need some. In the meantime, they live in the big freezer, along with the mackerel heads from an earlier episode of this journal.
I‘ve given up numbering the steps, as it was far too much faffing about. As I was gutting the herrings, I was pleased to find they were nicely full of roes, which I saved in the freezer, to be used in somthing tasty when I think what it will be. Perhaps I will smoke them lightly and put them in a taramasalata. That’s the only word with six As in it that I know, by the way.
Cutting along one side of the spine, almost all the way to the top of the fish, enabled me to open them out into the normal kipper shape. I’m going to have to remove the bones from any I try to serve to Mrs Walrus, of course, but these are not shop-style filleted kippers. I was going to leave the tails on, but it made them harder to fit on the racks. In big smoke houses, they use the tails to hang the herrings up for kippering, I believe. Having had fish fall down onto the smoking wood in a previous adventure, I did these beauties on racks. The racks are suspended on hooks made from 2mm galvanized wire, quickly bent with a pair of pliers. At some point, I will make something that doesn’t have to hang over the edge of the smoking bin, as that lets quite a lot of smoke out.
I‘m not sure if you can see it very well in this shot, but smoke is escaping. This time, the wood was a blend of cherry, beech, and alder. I thought maybe the oak I used last time might be a bit too strong. Twenty minutes seemed like a suitable length of time to smoke for, and indeed, the wood ran out of smoke at about that point anyway.
Here we have kippers! They don’t look raw, and are waiting in the fridge for a suitable breakfast at which to serve them. I’ve been trying to remember how we used to heat them up for serving when I was young. I’m fairly sure a frying pan was involved, but then again, the microwave does a good job of warming smoked mackerel, so I might just use that.
We had a roast-in-the-bag duck crown in the freezer, but I wanted to feed the three of us, so I bought a couple of extra duck breasts. These Gressingham duck items seem to be in most UK supermarkets, and they are rather good. I also didn’t want to have all the faff of cutting the duck off the bones after it was 
cooked, so I decided to remove all the bones before starting, and combine all the meat into a single roast. On the left, you can see what is inside the roasting bag. The legs, and the tail end have gone to other customers. I often use the leg joints for confit duck.
Anyway, I sharpened my boning knife, and set to… here I have cut away the wings, and started to separate the breast from the rib cage, taking care not to cut the skin.
By this point, the rib cage, spine, and shoulder bones have gone into the stock pot, along with the wings, and are being boiled up for a lovely stock. The whole thing is a bit untidy, as this was the first attempt at this task, so I cut off the untidy edges, and rendered the fat from them, to add to my collection of duck fat. 
When I have enough, I will be able to do confit duck legs again.
The picture shows the second try, because the first time I did it, the two separate duck breasts slid out as I tightened the knots. It probably wasn’t as funny as I thought…
Here it is, in the handy aluminium tray that was supplied with the duck crown. I inserted a thermometer probe into the duck, as I didn’t want to ruin it by overcooking it. Anything over 50ºC would do that, according to the online sources I looked at. That’s 122ºF, if you are cooking in old money, as I believe some
countries do. I roasted it at 180ºC until the thermometer started beeping, and took it out of the oven to rest while I cooked the vegetables. The heat in the outer parts of the duck were conducted to the centre, and I was quite worried as it achieved a core temperature of 55ºC during that time, with no additional heat.
time I try this. Overall, though, I was very pleased with this meal. The sauce was a chicken gravy from the store cupboard (Bisto, since you ask) flavoured with some hoi-sin sauce. New potatoes, sweetcorn, and soya beans were good, too.
Here are some of the things I used to make a recent lasagne. It’s fairly hard to see, but there’s a bowl of home grown garlic at the back, on the right. Just push garlic cloves that are too small to bother peeling into the ground. A few months later, they will have multiplied enormously, and somehow pulled themselves down until they are six inches underground. I have no idea how they manage to do that, but they do. I must remember to ask my favourite botanist, if he ever visits us.
This is the humble, yet powerful, Oxo cube that I used, to flavour the rather insipid looking beef mince. Some people tear the foil off, and crumble the cube with their fingers. Try this… Pull the little flaps out as shown, and hit the cube a couple of times 
with your palm, until it is flattened. Now you can just rip it and tip the powdered Oxo straight into the pan. Isn’t that clever? I would credit the source of the tip, if I could remember it.
That meat will need to be browned properly, of course, before you carry on making the sauce, but you know that, don’t you? I wasn’t following a recipe, just doing what seemed likely to be the way I have made lasagne before.
Now some recipes have you put layers of sauce in with the layers of meat and pasta. I don’t do that, mainly because it increases hugely the amount of sauce you will need, and tends to make the final dish sloppy. I have been known to put in layers of grated cheese, and that can work quite well, but this lasagne didn’t have any.
ends up knowing how to do without measuring things. A lump of butter of a certain size. A big, but not too big, spoonful of flour. Do not forget Colman’s mustard powder, about half a teaspoonful. It’s not enough to make the sauce taste mustardy, but it will seem dull if you forget to put it in. 
The butter and flour have to be cooked until there is what one recipe book describes as a “biscuity smell”.
cheese. Please use a decent Cheddar, not soapy cheap stuff.
picture, along with a salad that miraculously appeared while the lasagne was cooking.
This was a dish I had been wanting to make for a while, although I was told I had done it before. Well, I’m allowed to forget things sometimes. As you can see, I’m using a Nigella recipe. It’s all over the internet, along with the scene from “A Series of Unfortunate Events” in which the children serve it. The recipe is everywhere, too, and is very simple.
