Jo Pratt’s The Flexible Pescatarian

Fish-allergic editor Keith Kendrick tries flexitarian pasties

If my wife has eaten fish, just a kiss causes my lips to tingle and my throat to swell

Despite my job editing Britain’s biggest food magazine, I can never fully experience the delights that the chefs in our food hub create each month. For me, fish is off the menu – I’m allergic to it. So allergic that, if my wife has eaten fish, just a kiss causes my lips to tingle and my throat to swell.

‘Which is why I would like to eat it every day,’ my wife jokes (at least I think she’s joking).

The only time she gets to indulge her pleasure is when I’m out for the night, enabling her to gorge on cod, salmon, crab or molluscs. All other mealtimes are fish-free zones. But I think Jo Pratt has the answer. Her cookbook The Flexible Pescatarian is for both seafood lovers and the meat-averse as each fish or shellfish recipe comes with ideas for vegetarian substitutions, and there are plenty of stand-alone veggie recipes.

Jo explains: ‘There are a huge number of people who want to eat a vegetarian diet, but who still want to regularly include fish and shellfish and just cut out meat. This, my friends, is called a pescatarian diet (not ‘vegetarians who eat fish’).

Eating fish, of course, is widely accepted as being good for you because it’s packed with protein, minerals and vitamins. ‘Brain food,’ as my late mum used to call it. Which might explain why I’m somewhat lacking upstairs!

But health isn’t the main factor for me. I would just like to cook my wife’s favourite food for her and enjoy some couple time after our three kids have retired to their rooms.

So, for this cookbook challenge, I made Jo’s crab pasties for my wife – then another batch for myself, substituting the crabmeat for firm goat’s cheese. Win-win.

The pasties were a doddle to make, rolling out shop-bought pastry, adding the relevant fillings, sealing and baking. It really couldn’t have been more straightforward but the results were both impressive and also, well received.

I tried three more recipes from the book (see photos, below) that worked for not only me and my wife, but also our fish-loving kids. The master recipe for cod, haddock & prawn-coated Scotch eggs was made fish-free by gently frying onion and garlic, then blending with chickpeas and spices to make a thick paste. Vegetarian sweet potatoes became pescatarian by swapping a feta cheese filling with smoked mackerel. And spaghetti puttanesca – made with anchovies – became veggie by replacing the fish with a finely chopped roasted red pepper.

It might seem labour-intensive to approach cooking in this kind of way, but with a bit of planning you can keep everybody in the family happy and healthy.