A complicated recipe. Oh boy, is this a complicated one. Not because the steps involved are complex in their own right, but because of the sheer number of things that you have to do at the same time. Although I suspect this can be simplified in practice: maybe we were just in a complicated mood.
The recipe uses two sauces, bechamel and hollandaise, mixed together. First, you have to find the sauces in the book: use the numbers above because the ones in the recipe don't work. And try to do things in order: the bechamel needs 30 minutes to steep, so do that then start poaching the fish, then make up the hollandaise. Yesterday, I messed up - we were cooking this as a two-hander, Hwsgo was around the hob, and my confidence as a saucier just went. I turned the heat up too high, didn't stop early enough, and the egg part of the hollandaise started to go scrambled. A trip downstairs to buy more butter and ten minutes later I'd produced an okay sauce, but it really wasn't a good moment for me. I guess, like transplanting seedlings, it takes a degree of concentration and sympathy for the thing being handled.
There's a lot of seasoning in this recipe (in each sauce and in the omelette mix too), so you need to be careful with the salt: it's easy to overdo it. There's also a lot of stuff going on at once, although having cooked this recipe, I see no reason why the sauces couldn't be made well in advance, leaving just the fish and egg mix to be concentrated on.
The omelettes are tasty and we enjoyed eating them, but we both agreed in the end that given the amount of work (and number of pans) involved, there are many other Simons that we'd rather have eaten for dinner. This recipe is definitely filed under "things that we're happy to buy in restaurants rather than making ourselves".
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