Sunday challenge

It started out as a bit of an experiment, or maybe it was a challenge — a New Year’s weekend family lunch menu that moved away from the traditional roast chicken or beef that we might usually have chosen.
The bright idea (still convinced it was meant as a challenge) came from my wife who had seen a James Martin cook programme on afternoon TV a few weeks ago.
The central dish  — salmon coulibiac, essentially filets of a whole salmon encased in puff pastry, and stuffed with spinach and shiitake mushrooms.
The challenge? Although I am happy to spend hours in the kitchen experimenting with food, this on the face of it sounded much more complex. But I was heartened by BBC Food’s description of it as the “cheats salmon coulibiac.”
Enough said, with a helping hand from my daughter  this magnificent dish was created with perfection, and judging from the reaction of the rest of the family was an absolute success.
OK, perhaps the complete filets of a whole salmon was being a trifle over generous, and there’s still sufficient of this very appetising salmon pie to keep me going for the rest of the week.
But challenging? In fact when we got down to it, the entire thing was pretty straightforward to assemble and cook.

The challenging part perhaps was finding the ingredients over the New Year weekend when it seemed many supermarket shelves were verging on empty.