Master chef

Since M. had been so good to me the past couple of weeks I've been here I thought it was time to pay him back with a good home-cooked dinner. I was quite confident about doing this, as once upon a time I'd been capable of cooking quite a bit and had even tried my hand at baking. However, I soon found out that my confidence had been misplaced. Afterall it had been over two years since I'd done any real cooking (Hong Kong is not a place to cook, you just eat out all the time).

In the beginning, it all looked so easy. I downloaded the recipes for fish pie and chicken and chorizo bake and then went to Whole Foods to buy the ingredients. The pink hake and white sole fillets looked fresh, the pork chorizo sausage suitably spicy. I boiled the potatoes to make the mash topping for the fish pie then started mashing them. As I did so, the following revelations struck me:
- I had no masher. This made the mashing part quite difficult to do.
- I had no butter or milk to bind the potatoes together. This would not make for a good mash.
- Did I even have an oven-proof dish to bake the fish pie in?

Eventually the potatoes got suitably crushed, but it looked nothing like potato mash. Then the phone rang.
"I'm on the bus home now," M. said.
"Now? OK, I'd better hurry then," I said. There was no time at all to think about anything. I hastily made the creme fraiche leek and fish mixture for the fish pie, then pushed it into a large bowl - note, not pie dish - and topped it with the crushed potatoes. Just as I had turned on the heat in the oven, M. walked in.
"Hi, what are you making?" he said.
"Er, nothing. Well, fish pie. And something else. But you'd better stay out of the kitchen," I warned him. So he dutifully went off to watch sports on the television. I then started cutting up the chorizo, but it was only at the point of frying the sausage pieces when I had my second set of revelations:
- The recipe called for the chicken to be baked.
- I had nothing oven-proof to bake anything in.
- M. was home and ravenous, as he always was when he got home, and was already having to wait for the 'fish pie' so it would not be a good idea to bake anything anyway.
So I ended up stirfrying the chicken and put it together with the chorizo in a tomato sauce.

When it was ready, I took out the salad I'd made beforehand and started setting the table. M. was at the table like a shot.
"It smells good," he called out cheerfully as I opened the oven - to reveal the most pale and liquid fish pie I'd ever seen. What was wrong with it? Had the oven not been working? It was seriously not baked. But at least the chicken and chorizo 'thing' would be all right.

M. took a bite of the chicken and said, "It's all right, but it's really lacking in any spices. It's like a weak tomato soup."
He tried some of the fish pie ("Is that a pie?") but then decided to stick to the chicken and chorizo. Naturally, I was crestfallen.
"I'm sorry nothing's turned out right. I'll stick to things I know how to make in the future," I said.
"It's all right, you have to try new things so you can make them, otherwise how can you make them?" M. said, putting Tabasco sauce onto the chicken and chorizo 'thing'.
"I'm really sorry you have to bear with this," I said.
"I'm not bearing with it, I'm eating it, and it's OK," M. said.

In the end, the chicken and chorizo 'thing' became a pasta sauce for a Saturday lunch.