My dad has a penchant for op-shopping. Perhaps too much so. He’s often picking up recipe books for me (almost always cake ones) that I can barely fit in my kitchen. What results is that, more often then not, I flick through them when he gives them to me, like the look of a few things and never remember to come back to it.

So, I’m setting myself a challenge. Once a week, from here until goodness knows when, I will cook a recipe from every cook book I have until I have made it through my entire collection. I will endeavour to cook something I have never cooked before, or something I thought was too hard to try, or one of those recipes that I fell in love with but then forgot. I will then blog my result, good, bad or ugly.

This week, I thought I’d start off with one of the largest cook books I have:

The Practical Encyclopedia of Potato and Rice, by Alex Barker, Sally Mansfield and Christine Ingham.

This is one of my favourite cook books ever. It is divided into two halves: potato and rice, obviously. However, each half is preceded by almost a hundred pages of encyclopaedic information regarding these two staples, covering everything from cooking techniques to different types of potatoes and rice around the world. It is a wealth of knowledge, particularly for a self-taught cook like myself.

The hardest part? Choosing a recipe. With 512 pages of potato-ey and rice-ey goodness, there are so many amazing looking recipes amongst the bunch. But as I flicked through, I remembered one that had caught my eye when my dad gave me this book years ago:

Salmon in Puff Pastry. I just loved the presentation idea. Besides, we seldom have fish in my household, so time to get an omega 3 fix! (HELLO, puff pastry! Any excuse will do!)

Of course, I just had to turn it into small, individual serves. I swear, it’s an obsession.

Aesthetically, I think it worked better as a large ‘pie’. However, last night everyone was home for dinner at a different time, so this was also a practical measure.

But, for someone who has grown up without an appreciation of fish, this was great. The rice element made it something completely new to me, and the hint of lemon made it perfect.

Just looking at that picture makes me want to crunch into some puff pastry. It’s so tempting to whip some out now and bake away, despite it being past midnight. Puff pastry = love. Yeah, the tails were my favourite bit.

Of course, if you want to make some, here’s how:

Do you have a kitchen full of unloved cookbooks? I encourage you to join this conquest with me! It’s amazing the gems you will find in forgotten former loves.