My Favourite Sandwich

It wasn’t exactly a secret since I’ve posted about it before but I suppose it’s one of those things that doesn’t come up in conversation very often and I don’t really mention it either. The truth is though that I love fishfingers. They remind me of being small but I’m not sure why as we I don’t think we ate them very often and I don’t remember having a particular fondness for them back then either. I do remember the time my dad cooked them for me though (very traditional household: mum cooked, dad mowed the lawn so this was An Event), he used the same frying pan that he’d previously cooked hamburgers for my brother in and I declared them the best fishfingers ever (much to my mum’s subsequent dismay).

I re-discovered fishfingers when I was a student and ate a fair amount of them during my three years at University but as much as I love them, I don’t tend to eat them very often now. I guess it’s because there’s so many other things to eat and it’s rare for us to eat the same things twice these days.

Stephen’s been working really late the last couple of weeks and cooking for both of us has been tricky, not a lot of the food we eat works well when re-heated and I’m usually too hungry to wait until 9pm when he comes home so we’ve struggled. It was at some point last week when I sat down to yet another plate of toast that it occurred to me that fishfingers were the answer. I could grill some quickly for myself and make Stephen a proper (and grown-up!) dinner for when he comes home. And that’s what I did today.

I’m quite particular about how I like my fishfingers: grilled until they’re really brown, a small incision made in each one so that I can adminster the salt and vinegar without making the fishfinger soggy, sandwiched between two slices of buttered toast (I prefer white sliced bread but I didn’t have any) and cut into four squares, not triangles which is how I eat all other types of sandwich.

It was delicious and one of the best things about fishfingers is that they still taste the same as they did when I was small. They may have shrunk a bit (but so have Double Deckers and Wagon Wheels) and they may use all natural flavourings now but every time I eat them I remember how much I love them I’m transported back to being eight years old again. There’s seven left in the box, I wonder how long they’ll last now that I’ve got the taste for them again?