Naked Scampi

I may have mentioned that my partner inherited a Tefal Actifry. It's a delightful, albeit overpriced, kitchen gadget, allowing us to cook proper chips without needing a deep fat fryer - it uses a couple of tablespoons of oil (we often use olive oil flavoured with basil or lemon) poured over the chipped potatoes, set the timer for 20-25 minutes and set it off. It has a paddle to move the potato pieces around the pan, blows hot air over the oil which increasingly covers the potato, and thereby frys the potato o rather nice chips.

Actually, I'm not too sure exactly how much oil it should use. The instructions once explained, but they are long lost, and the measuring cup that comes with the gadget was not inherited, so I've always guessed at the amount of oil to add.

Anyway, chips that we make are always lovely. Last week, I tried to cook some duck strips in it, which didn't work very well, so today I thought I would be safer with this evening's dinner - scampi.

Well, I say "scampi". The packet I retrieved from the freezer reads "WHITBY YORKSHIRE BREADED SCAMPI". In a smaller font below, it reads "scampi & premium fish". In the small print on the back of the packet, it reads "cod and hake, pressed into shapes"

Regardless, it's scampi-ish.

The cooking (heating) instructions say to oven bake the scampi for 30 minutes, or deep fry them for 4 minutes. As the Actifry is sort-of like a deep fat fryer but using less oil, we guessed that they might need 8 minutes dumped in with the cooking chips.

I did this, and returned after 9 minutes (one minute for luck - you can never tell with seafood, even if it's been processed and pressed into shapes), to find the scampi-ish had lost their breaded coats. There were breadcrumbs-ish being heated, there were lumps of pressed scampi-ish being heated and there were chips being heated.

As you will have probably noticed by now, if food isn't completely inedible, I will serve it and challenge my partner to eat it. She doesn't want to cook when it's not her turn to do so, so she will eat whatever I serve. I have rarely made her ill.

So, I served the naked scampi-ish, the chips and a pile of mostly-soggy breadcrumbs. We both cleaned our plates. Perhaps the food tasted very good, or perhaps neither of us had much lunch today.