Bâtonnets de Poisson, Frites et Purée de Pois

I ate this and survived, so I know it's possible.

Serves one, eaten on your knee in the dark while you stare in horror at the evening news.

Fish fingers x 4

Oven chips

A tin of mushy peas

1 lemon

Dried tarragon

Why is some perfectly good food looked down upon while simultaneously being considered worthy of a scandalous mark up? Specifically, why don't restaurants serve normal food as well as their “dishes”? Instead of the chef's skill elevating it to the status of haute cuisine, normal food is treated as anything but edible. But to order from the kids menu in the same places is to glimpse a parallel universe, where a couple of fish fingers, a few chips and a dollop of mushy peas costs more than a round of drinks. Did the chef spend all morning soaking and chipping potatoes, carefully selecting and cutting the locally-sourced, line-caught fish into identical geometric strips, soaking the peas, and roasting breadcrumbs? Don't be daft. He opened some packets and set the deep fat fryer to “ker-ching!”.

With a little thought and creativity, that chef could be selling the same food for an even greater mark up to even bigger idiots than children. He could be running Chez Hip, where the menu is written in semaphore, the food is served in evidence bags, and everyone drinks piss from jam jars. But no. Prejudice poisons art. You, on the other hand, are enlightened, wise and astonishingly beautiful, and will definitely share the hell out of this blog post because you understand fundamentally that, once eaten, all food is just shit waiting to happen. You are refreshingly free of concepts such as quality and taste.

Thus cleansed, begin by cranking that sorry excuse for an oven into life. Set it for 180 degrees. Take one of the metal racks out of the oven before it gets too hot to handle, and place some tin foil on it.

Open the oven chips. For the dish in the picture, I used McCain's Home Fries. They're fat, fatty and go brown just in time for the fish to cook, which is about 30 minutes. There are other oven chips, but these were on special offer. Other types of oven chips might be nicer, at least until I land a sweet sponsorship deal with McCain's.

There's no one looking, so just select the nice, long chips and throw the scrawny, pointy ones away. There's logic to this. If you cook the runts, they become as sharp as razors, they'll cut your gums to ribbons, and judging by the state of your oral hygiene during lockdown, you'll develop a mouth ulcer so painful you'll wish for death every time you try to swallow. As you select the chips, satisfy your lust for easy power by pretending to be a customs guard in a warm overcoat coat peering into the hold of a freighter on a stormy night, and the chips are terrified refugees blinking upwards into the light. Is this salvation or death? You decide, you monster!

I used Birdseye haddock fish fingers. They were probably closest to me, or cheapest or something when I realised I needed some to write this nonsense. Probably cheapest. There are many other brands around, including gourmet fish fingers, but if you get the cheap ones you can also get a cake for afters. Cake is good. Cake doesn't judge. Cake understands.

Prepare the fish fingers by first placing them on the tin foil. Cut a lemon in half and carefully allow a few drops of the juice to sink into each finger. Not that much, you fool! Just a few drops, otherwise the breadcrumbs will go soggy and stick to even the expensive non-stick tin foil you bought without noticing the price, and bizarrely now keep in the cupboard “for best”. Keep the rest of the lemon to dribble over the fingers before eating if you're kinky like that, or maybe to rub into your nipples or those of a close friend.

Next, crush between your fingers and sprinkle a small amount of dried tarragon onto the fish fingers. To be honest, I lack the skill and patience to simplify that last sentence, but I digress. The taste of tarragon is like a cheerleader for cheap fish. If you have no tarragon, you can try thyme, but use less of it because thyme just needs to learn to shut its filthy cakehole, actually. If you want a creamier flavour, try dill. Dill takes care of its own needs, goes with whatever it damned well pleases, and calls its own damned taxis, so just shut it OK, thyme.

If the oven has finally staggered its way to temperature, place the tray containing whatever mess you've made on the top slot and wait 25-30 minutes. Then take it out. It's done.

Open the tin of mushy peas. Spoon half of it onto the plate you intend to eat off. Put the plate in the microwave for about 60 seconds. Is it really hot? Good, the microwave is still working. Filthy, but working. The peas will have released a surprisingly large amount of water. You can soak it up with kitchen roll. Sorry, I mean you can soak it up with toilet paper, or the bottom edge of your t-shirt.

Photograph your work and post it to Instagram, like your whole world is just perfect right now. So blessed, babe. So blessed.

For the amateurish picture at the top of this post, I found an old bottle of something called “Balsamic Glaze” in the cupboard. It's disappointing on its own, but when squirted all over food it imparts tang without ever developing an ego, like a really good rhythm guitarist. Failing that, you can try to coax that old tomato sauce bottle into life.

Were your fish fingers slightly overdone? Mine too. Maybe check on them 5 minutes before the end next time.