Not the most successful dinner

It was time for Nigel Slater's Real Food.  In fact, we had had a recipe from the book a couple of weeks ago, when Helen had cooked us a meal the night we sneaked out to the cinema.  The dish was chicken pieces sautéed with chiles and garlic.  The dish I did had eerily similar ingredients.

Things started well.  The recipe was entitled "Crispy Fish with Garlic, Chilli, and Basil":

The title is very enticing, right?  Really, any recipe with the word 'crispy' in it gets me going.  It recommends hake or haddock as the fish.  I found hake at our trusty fish store, and it looked very good.  And I had bought a bottle of Viognier, which Katherine likes very much, to go with the meal.  I very thoughtfully decided it was important to have a few trial glasses while cooking:

Anyway, the recipe calls for dredging the fish in cornflour, which I duly did:

Perhaps you can see the problem.  The cornflour did not stick to the side with the skin on.  Still, I soldiered on.  I put the pot of oil on, to deep fry the fish:

I then put the fish pieces in to fry (in two batches):

I had the usual problem of not knowing what temperature the oil was.  I want a thermometer like the one Alton Brown has which is an L-shape (so you can take the temperature of oil properly even when it isn't very deep).  As a result, the oil was, I suspect, a little too cool, and the fish fell apart as it fried.  This was the final result:

It looks OK, but not great.  And what you can't see is that the pieces are really quite oily.

Then I made the sauce: that was easy, just a matter of flash frying garlic, chiles, scallions, and then adding soy sauce, Thai fish sauce, a little water, and cilantro and basil.

And I made Chinese noodles.  But then came the killer.  Evelyn refused to go to sleep.  So eventually we had to bring her down to the kitchen at about 10.00 p.m. so that we could eat.  (Thankfully, she sat in her bouncy chair and didn't cause a fuss while we were eating.)  The food had been ready for 30 minutes, and so the fish was cold and soggy, and the noodles cold and gelatinous.  The sauce turned out to be very spicy (there were three chopped chiles in it after all) - too spicy for Katherine.  All in all, not a very successful meal.  I blame Nigel Slater more than I blame Evelyn.  Perhaps I didn't fry the fish properly, but I don't think cornflour alone makes a good coating.  We've done several recipes from this book, and it seems as though they are rather hit-or-miss.  I am inclined to think the book is just not very good.

Next up, a serious challenge.  The recipes in this book are uniformly elaborate and demand skill, patience, and time.  I'm already nervous...