Dining With The Doctor: The Unauthorized Whovian Cookbook (23 page)

Once the batter is as smooth as it’s likely to get, pour it into your greased pan. See, I told you cornbread was easy. Bake it for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Now comes the hard part. Once you take it out of the oven, you have to wait for it to cool. If you don’t, it’ll turn into a crumbly mess that won't hold a shape. If you want some unexpectedly tasty fake fish fingers, now is the time to practice your patience.

Let’s pretend you didn’t turn into screaming rage monster after cutting away one corner and discovering it crumbled into gold dust in your hand. No, in this alternate reality, you walked away for a few hours, maybe watched the last couple Christmas specials, and when you came back your beautiful loaf of cornbread was cool and waiting.

To avenge the anger of your alternate universe self, the time has come to take a knife to your loaf. Use a sharp blade to cut it into fish finger sized rectangles. Now stop and admire them. Honestly, if you were lazy, you could just pile those on a plate and call it a day. Luckily, unlike your alternate universe double, you’re ambitious.

Toss a couple tablespoons of butter into a medium-hot skillet. Now carefully fry up each side of the cornbread until it’s a nice, toasty golden brown. It’s amazing how much the toasting transforms your cornbread from yellow food sticks to passable breaded fish fingers.

While those are frying, put your room temperature butter in a large bowl. Add the honey and attack it with a hand mixer. You want to get a lot of air into the butter so it’ll have a nice whipped texture, which makes it a lot more custard-like. If you want it even more liquidy, go ahead and add a quarter cup of plain yogurt. You can add a couple drops of yellow and orange food coloring as well to give it that final custardy kick.

Feel free to supercharge your honey butter’s flavor by adding a teaspoon of orange zest OR a teaspoon of lemon zest OR a teaspoon each of cinnamon and vanilla. If you go for the cinnamon and vanilla, you’ll need more food coloring to compensate.

These do have a tendency to fall apart faster than the other fake fish fingers, so don’t use them as an impromptu baton when conducting an imaginary orchestra.

Fish Custard Tacos

prepared fish fingers of your choice
tortillas
coleslaw
honey-mustard dressing (optional)
Mango Salsa:
2 chopped, peeled mangoes
1/2 cucumber, seeded and chopped
2 tbsp/30 g red onion, diced
1/3 cup/100 ml pineapple juice
2 tbsp/30 g honey
juice of 1 lime
½ tsp/2.5 g cayenne pepper (optional)
½ tsp/2.5 g salt
2 tbsp/30 g corn starch

This incredibly forgiving recipe lets you enjoy the look of fish fingers and custard while providing an actual edible entree.

Fish tacos are incredibly popular in Texas, California, and the American border states in between. The rest of the world finds the whole concept a bit iffy - until that first bite.

To make these, mix your pineapple juice, lime juice, honey, pepper, and salt in a bowl. Carefully sprinkle in your corn starch. Spread the corn starch out as much as you can to avoid lumps. Once the corn starch is sprinkled over the liquids, whisk it in until everything is completely blended and free from lumps. Now all you have to do is add in your diced mangoes, cucumbers, and onions. Give it all a good stir so the solids are all coated in your sauce then set it all aside to thicken slightly.

While the salsa thickens, make the fish fingers of your choice. You can use any of the gazillion recipes online or you can just buy a box of breaded fishy goodness at the grocery store. I’m not here to judge. Just make sure you have some kind of warm and crunchy sea based protein on the table.

When you’re ready to eat, simply spread a little honey mustard dressing on the tortilla (some fish taco lovers will call you a heathen while others say you're doing it just right), add your fish fingers, and spoon some mango salsa and coleslaw. You can make the coleslaw from scratch using the Baked Hath recipe or just buy some from the grocery store. You’re now holding your first fish taco.

I love serving fish tacos at Whovian gatherings. You get all the fun of actual fish fingers and real custard on the table, but when it comes time to eat, you can dip cookie or cake into the custard while assembling your fish fingers into a nice main course fish taco. Everybody wins.

Savory Fish Fingers and Custard Mock Cake

prepared fish fingers
toasted Panko breadcrumbs
1 8 oz/225 g package cream cheese
1/2 cup/125 g mayonnaise
4 tbsp/60 g Dijon mustard
4 tsp/20 g curry powder
1 tsp/5 g turmeric
1 tsp/5 g honey
1 tsp/5 g salt

You can go two ways with this. The obvious one is to decorate some cake like a stack of fish fingers and ice it with a thick, dark yellow custard substitute.

Let’s do it the hard way instead.

To make this as cake-like as possible, you need to make the “icing” nice and thick. What you’re really making here is a honey mustard dipping sauce with a curry kick. The cream cheese is both a bulk filler and a fluffing agent.

Put your cream cheese, mayonnaise, mustard, curry powder, honey, and salt into a blender or food processor and whip it into a frenzy of faux filling goodness. However long you think is enough, just keep going. You want to get as much air in there as possible in order to build up bulk and keep it from being too drippy. If your fake custard isn’t yellow enough, add another 1/2 teaspoon of turmeric and keep whipping it.

While your “custard” is whipping, bake your choice of fish sticks. It’s entirely up to you whether these come from a box or are homemade, but considering what you’re about to do with them, I suggest you go cheap and buy a box from the grocery store.

Once your fish fingers are nice and crunchy, spritz a cookie sheet with nonstick spray and spread a thin layer of panko bread crumbs across it. Toast these at 400F/205C for 3-4 minutes to get them extra crunchy.

Now all you have to do is assemble your cake. Make a nice cake sized square of fish fingers. Top it with a layer of your honey mustard filling. Add another layer of fish fingers, preferably oriented in the opposite direction, followed by another layer of fake custard. Keep this up until you run out of fish fingers. Save enough of the filling to lightly coat the top and sides. Once you have a gold brown square of protein, carefully take your toasted panko bread crumbs and use them to coat the top and sides so it looks like you made a tasty cake with a graham cracker crust.

As you can probably guess, this gets soggy fast. You want to serve it as quickly as possible. If it sits on the table all night long, you’re going to have bemusingly atmospheric fish mush. While it’s still warm, cut it into nice, cake-like squares and serve to your surprised guests. If they’re in on the joke, just let people pull fish sticks off the pile at their leisure.

Fish Fingers and Custard Cocktail

1 shot/45 ml cupcake flavored vodka
1 shot/45 ml vanilla vodka
1 shot/45 ml heavy cream
2 drops yellow food coloring
1 drop orange food coloring
graham cracker crumbs

If you don’t have any spare graham cracker crumbs hiding in a cupboard, throw a couple graham crackers into a plastic sandwich bag and smash them into crumbs using your bottle of cupcake vodka. Once you have a nice crumbly mess, empty it into a saucer. Tip a bit of heavy cream into an adjacent saucer. In this age of fat free recipes, you probably only bought the cream for this drink. You can afford to waste a little.

Dip the rim of your martini glass in the saucer of milk then grind it into the saucer full of graham cracker crumbs. See, rimming really is more fun than you expected.

You can’t leave a lovely glass like that empty. Pour your cupcake vodka, vanilla vodka, heavy cream into a cocktail shaker full of ice. If you really want that full artificial custard color, add in a couple drops of yellow and one drop of orange food coloring. Shake like your Tardis is tumbling through a time vortex. When you have your feet back under you, carefully strain the contents into your nicely rimmed martini glass.

 Garnish it with the sweet faux fish finger of your choice and offer it to the nearest archaeologist with a reminder that your heart, among other things, is bigger on the inside.

Savory Mock Custards

A lot of people make sweet fake fish fingers which they can dip into the tasty goodness of actual custard. Sometimes, though, you don’t want to sugar your guests up like two year olds at Halloween. if you’re in the mood for something savory, these five easy sauces should give you the glossy yellow look of custard with a savory flavor that goes well with your fish fingers. They’re not all silky smooth, but the fake fish fingers from the sweet dishes aren’t necessarily fooling anyone, either.

The best thing about these recipes is that they’re fast. You can whip up any of them in less time than it takes to empty a box of frozen fish fingers on a tray and pop them in the oven. They make for a quick, cheap, instantly recognizable Whovian meal. What more could a busy host want?

Curry Mayonnaise Mock Custard
1 cup/450 grams mayonnaise
4 tbsp/60 g plain Greek yogurt
4 tbsp/60 g mango chutney
2 tsp/10 g yellow curry powder
1 tsp/5 g turmeric
1 tsp/5 g honey
¼ tsp/healthy pinch ginger powder
juice of 1 lime

Mix the turmeric, curry powder, and mayonnaise until you have a consistent color. If it’s not yellow enough to pass for custard, add one drop of orange and two drops of yellow food coloring, then give it another good stir. Once you’re happy with the color, mix in everything else. For a smoother, more custardy texture, put everything into a blender or food processor. This is equally good on chicken strips or as a sandwich spread.

Tartar Sauce Mock Custard
1 cup/450 g mayonnaise
2 tbsp/30 g sweet pickle relish
2 tsp/10 g prepared yellow mustard
2 tsp/10 g fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 tsp/5 g turmeric powder

Mix the turmeric and mayonnaise until they’re well blended. The end result should be about the color of custard. If not, add a pinch more turmeric and give it another good hearty stir. Now simply mix in everything else until you have a nice, uniform custardy consistency. The pickle relish will make this a little lumpy. You can put it in a blender to smooth it out, but I prefer to suffer through a less than perfect look for the sake of the pleasant texture from the pickles.

Lemon Dill Herbed Mock Custard
1 cup/450 g mayonnaise
1 tbsp/15 g dried dill
2 tsp/10 g garlic powder
2 tsp/10 g onion powder
2 lemons, zested and juiced
2 drops yellow food coloring
1 drops orange food coloring