I had in my fridge 400g of fresh hoki brought from Pac'n'Save for just over $4. A bargain for sure. But what to do with it? If I had 750g then I had a thai receipe that would of worked, but 400g was a bit too little hoki to stretch for 1 adult and 4 kiddo's. I had in mind to do a fish pie with, served with veges as well but my mind went blank (happens occasionally, ...well actually a lot, with four kiddos around) and I only had half an hour before going out, and half an hour cooking time when I got back. What's a girl to do?
Thank goodness for online friends. I posted on the Simple Savings website asking for help and within minutes I had the help I needed. The fish pie was absolutely delish and I'll be making it again. It also worked out pretty cheap to make too.
Fish Pie
400g hoki
1 packet of instant cheese sauce
1 cup of frozen mixed veges
1 sheet of ready rolled flakey pastry
Halfway cook the fish and veges, make up the cheese sauce and add in. Stir it all up. Put flaky pastry over the top. Bake on med-high heat for 20 minutes.
I'm thinking just about any fish would work with this, even canned fish. And of course I could of made the cheese sauce and pastry myself from scratch, but using instant sped it up time wise considerably. Not that I make pastry by hand a whole lot even when I have time you understand. lol.
In the middle of the Fish pie saga I had gone out to our library to watch a documentary on how the Cuban's dealt with the oil crises. You might remember in my last post I wrote about reading a book about an Australian couple who move from the city to a self-substaining farm due to the Peak Oil crisis. That book has kinda risen my interest in the whole topic so to much amusement of my extended family I took my nearly 18yods along with me to watch this doco.
It was very interesting to watch how the Cubans had to change things to cope. The biggest thing was as they had no oil for agricultural machinery they had to have smaller farms and with a greater variety of crops because the food had to be sold locally due to having no transport. The rural areas had solar power and the cities had electrical blackouts daily which meant there was no fridges, no air con, etc. They had to shop one meal at a time or pick it straight out of their gardens. They rode bicycles a lot, or waited up to three hours for buses. The average weight loss was 20lbs I think, and children were malnourished and pregnant women were anemic. In other words, it was pretty darn tough.
The scary thing is, I think this is our future. There is a limited supply of oil, we're over the half way mark of using it up (which is what Peak Oil means), and it's only going to get more expensive to get the rest of the oil out of the gound. One day we'll be wishing for the good old days when oil was $100US a barrel. One day sooner than we think...
