If you love cooking, or even just enjoy food for food's sake, you should visit Henrie's Hotch Potch, the Highlife regular recipe column for a truly amazing website: www.iafrica.com.

A food guru if ever there was, Henrie Geyser does not supply just any old kind of recipe, randomly pinched from the yellowing pages of Your Average Cookbook. Rather, the wondrous menus that grace the pages of Henrie's Hotch Potch each week have come to exist through endless experimenting and tasting, night after night of gleeful peeling, chopping, stirring, stuffing, straining, baking, grilling, frying and braaiing - wooden spoon in one hand, glass of wine in the other.

We are fortunate enough to have been given permission to reproduce a few of Henrie's recipes, just so that we can get a taste! To visit Henrie at the iAfrica web site where he updates his column every Friday with a full menu of Starter, Main Course and Dessert - click here

Ingredients

2 haddock fillets per person
the juice of one lemon
2 litres of water
1 tablespoon wine vinegar
1 onion, peeled and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh parsley
a pinch of thyme (dry is fine)
2 bay leaves
1 carrot, scraped and sliced into little wheels
salt and black pepper

For the mustard sauce:
2 tablespoons of flour
100ml dry white wine
2 tablespoons of prepared hot English mustard (the bottled version is OK)
40g of butter
500ml fish stock
salt and black pepper
50ml fresh cream
a few sprigs of fresh parsley
2 lemons, one sliced into wedges, the other into rings

For the Jansson's Temptation:
6 medium potatoes, peeled and sliced into thin "chip" strips
2 onions, peeled and finely chopped
50 g of butter (plus another 50g of melted butter)
1 tin of anchovy fillets, each fish sliced into three pieces
150 ml fresh cream pepper

To prepare the sauce:

• Melt the butter and stir in the flour

• Gradually stir in the fish stock

• Stir, add salt and pepper and simmer for about 15 minutes. Add the wine and let it boil for two minutes

• Remove from the heat and stir in the mustard first, then the cream

• Use the parsley and lemon pieces to decorate the fish plate

• Serve the sauce separately

To prepare the fish:

• Pour water into saucepan and add carrots, vinegar, onion, parsley, thyme, a dash of salt and pepper and the bay leaves. Cover and boil for 30 minutes, the last 3 minutes with the lid removed

• Reduce to low heat and poach fish for about 10 minutes (Don't overcook or allow the fish to fall apart)

To prepare the Jansson's Temptation:

• Fry the onion until golden brown in 50g of butter Place the potatoes, anchovy and fried onion in rough layers in an oven-proof dish, finishing with a layer of potato only

• Melt the other 50g of butter and spoon it over the potatoes

• Pour half the cream and the anchovy oil from the tin over the potato and bake in a moderate oven for about 45 minutes or until the potatoes cooked. After 30 minutes in the oven, pour over the remaining cream

The tangy potatoes and the haddock go together superbly.

Serves 4

Henrie

To visit Henrie at the iAfrica web site where he updates his column every Friday with a full menu of Starter, Main Course and Dessert - click here