Healthy lunch: Tuna pittas

The Legatus has a positive team of medical advisors attempting to keep him alive for a few more years and at a recent review one of these doctors was urging me, again, to eat more oily fish.  Now, I can't bear fish - it's either rank and disgustingly smelly or completely tasteless which, as a food, makes it pointless for anything other than nutritional purposes.  The point of food is not nutrition but sensual enjoyment, of course.  Fish is the least sensual food there is.  Back in the stone age there were two sorts of humans (no, not Neanderthals and Cro Magnons); those who lived on the coast and primarily fished and eventually evolved (if that is the right term in their case) into the people who now inhabit Iceland, Norway, Portugal Japan and other fishy loving places and those who hunted mammoth and woolly rhinos and got all the best cavegirls as a result.  Yes, fish is girls' food (like fruit - well girls and monkeys for that).  So you can imagine my horror when Dr really-rather-gorgeous at the surgery urged me to eat more fish, especially oily fish.

Regular readers (all six of them) will know that I occasionally make smoked mackerel pate but my mini blender has packed up so I decided to do something with tuna today as it has recently been on offer in the supermarket.  Now from a health point of view the amount of Omega 3 in tinned tuna is considerably less than in fresh mackerel (isn't it awful that I even know this) but its better than nothing.  So I mixed some tinned tuna (which looks and smells like catfood -although not as much as Gentlemen's Relish) with some super low fat mayonnaise and plenty of black pepper to help take the taste of the tuna away somewhat.  Put it in some toasted brown pittas with some cucumber and I feel very virtuous!

Smoked Mackerel Pate

I just did one of those online tests to see if I was getting Alzheimer's disease which, according to the test I am not (yet).  One of the things that was recommended, after having got my results, was that I should be eating more oily fish.   Now I dislike fish intensely.  I think it is, at best, effete, bland and lacking in texture (white fish, salmon).  At worst it is noxious, putrid tasting and smelly (mackerel, herring, sardines)  How can it be both?  Well it depends on the fish, of course.  However, suffice to say, I would never choose to eat fish if meat was available. The number of times my heart has sunk when abroad and someone tells me that they are taking me to a "nice seafood restaurant" (talk about contradictory terms).  Oddly, I do enjoy crustacea but not molluscs.  I particularly dislike oysters, which, as Sophie once said, is odd given they "taste like your favourite part of a woman's body"  "They taste like bottom?" I replied, receiving a kick as a result. No doubt this is something to do with their reputation as an aphrodisiac. Or is it that girls taste like oysters?  Given I tasted girl well before I tasted oysters, for me, it is the former.

Anyway, given my team of doctors are now banging on about oily fish too, I thought I would dig out what is, oddly, given the above, a favourite recipe.  This is smoked mackerel pate; a recipe as given to me by my Uncle Keith, who was in the Airborne at Arnhem but spent his twilight days living in East Sussex, trout fishing, making game pies, collecting pickelhauben (which sounds, in this context, like some sort of Scandinavian herring dish) and smoking his own fish.  He was the one who left me many, many bottles of classed growth claret in his will. 

This is a tremendously simple but tasty recipe and only has three ingredients: Peppered smoked mackerel fillets, fat free fromage frais and lemon juice.  The peppered fillets give it a bit more bite than the normal ones and avoid fishy blandness.  I use fromage frais because most recipes and ready made mackerel pate are usually high in fat, being made with cream cheese or crème fraîche.  No point in eating oily fish for your health if you bung a load of cheese into it!  

I just put a pack's worth of mackerel fillets in a bowl, broken up with a fork, with about three or four tablespoons of fromage frais and a couple of squeezes of lemon juice and then use my hand held blender on it until it turns into a smooth paste. Then decant it into small pots.  I find that one pack of mackerel gives you enough pate for three pots.  If you put cling film over the top it keeps in the fridge for about two days.  I have mine with wholemeal pitta and/or cucumber and pepper batons.