baked cod with sweet creamy sauce

I literally conjured up this recipe in my head whilst showering this evening before i enter my kitchen to cook for dinner. I had two slices of cod thawing but no idea how to cook it. Then i had a revelation of combining the element of salty from the fish and sweetness from the accompanying sauce and hey presto! It worked and my missus loved it.

Serves 2

2 pieces of cod fillet

a stick of salted butter

half a lemon, to squeeze for juice

¼ cup of breadcrumbs (or use cracker, smashed until bits)

olive oil

for the sweet creamy sauce

one onion, finely chopped

a stick of unsalted butter

a cup of cooking/single cream

Preheat oven to 200°C. To prepare the fish, melt the salted butter. Once melted, remove from heat and stir in the breadcrumbs until all coated with the melted butter. Finally squeeze the lemon to get the juice out. Prepare a baking dish, drizzle some olive oil on the surface. Place the cod side by side, top-off with the combination of butter-breadcrumbs. Bake inside oven.

Heat a small skillet or sauce-pan. Lug in some olive oil and add in the onion. Carefully under low-heat you want to caramelize the onion without browning it. The caramelized onion is the one that will give the sweetness of the onion. Once caramelized, melt in the unsalted butter. The reason for the unsalted butter is because i do not want the saltiness of the salted butter to overpower the sweetness of the onion but if you have no choice, add in a teaspoon of sugar to help to get it sweet. Once the butter is melted, add in the cooking cream and let reduce until the sauce is thick.

Spoon out the sauce onto a plate and serve the cod on top of it. Optionally add some greens onto the plate as i have done on the pics.

meatball and sauce

In this meatball recipe, i made a sauce similar to those Swedish meatball sauce so glamorously coveted at Ikea restaurant but i simplify the ingredients so as to reduce the cost to prepare it.

Prepare your meatball here.

For the sauce

2 tablespoon of butter

a tablespoon of all-purpose flour/wheat flour

a litre of beef stock

one large onion, diced

a medium carrots, cut into small pieces

salt & freshly ground black pepper

Melt butter in a sauce pan or pot. Cook the meatball until browned all over. Then transfer to a plate and set aside. Using the fat built-up in the same pan, saute the onion until lightly browned. Then stir in the flour, and cook until the flour had absorbed the liquid inside the pan. Immediately deglaze with a quarter of the litre of the beef stock. Then add the remaining beef stock and bring to a simmer. Add the meatball and the carrots and let reduce the liquid over medium heat until the sauce thickens. Once the sauce thickens, check the seasoning with salt and pepper, and optionally add a dash of lemon juice and a stick of butter to finish.

pan-fried pollock with parsley sauce

Pollock is the poor man’s cod. But unlike what those kind of statement normally imply, it’s actually delicious. Couple with the parsley sauce, which is essentially a modified bechamel sauce you use to bake lasagna, it’s a match made in..a plate!

Serves 2

4 pollock fillet

olive oil

freshly squeezed lemon juice

salt & freshly ground black pepper

for the parsley sauce

200ml of full fat milk

1/2 medium onion, quartered

1 bay leaf

a stick of butter

a tablespoon of flour

small bunch of curly parsley, chopped

salt & freshly ground black pepper

First, make the sauce. Pour the milk into a saucepan and add the bay leaf and the onion. Turn on the heat and bring to a gentle simmer for 5 minutes. Then turn off the heat and once cool, remove the leaf and the onion. Set aside.

Sprinkle the pollock lightly with salt. Heat the olive oil in a non-stick sauté pan over medium heat. Fry the fish in the pan, skin-side down. Turn down the heat and let fry until the skin browned, then flip it over, turn back the heat to medium and fry until just done. When the fish is about done, squeeze some lemon just over it and season with the black pepper.

Set the fish aside and finish off the sauce. Melt the butter in a small pan and stir in the flour. Cook for 30 secs. Slowly add the milk to the pan, stirring and simmer gently for 5 mins, all the while stirring continuously. Stir in the parsley and add a little extra milk if the sauce seems too thick. Season with salt and pepper. Keep warm over a low heat, stirring occasionally until ready to serve.

roasted crab with creamy-butter sauce

In order for this dish to be worth your time you need to be using mud crab, dungeness crab or stone crab.

The serving size for this recipe is for two large crab, cut into pieces, sufficient serving for two. When increasing the serving size, always ensure every can of condense milk is exactly for half a brick of butter, and take ot forward from there.

Ingredients

Crab, obviously, cleaned and cut into pieces
Half a brick of unsalted butter
A can of evaporated milk
One onion, diced
Two cloves of garlic, crushed
Chili, thinly sliced (optional)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Start by melting your butter in a large saucepan or a large wok. Once melted, stir in your garlic and the onion and fry until translucent. Add in some chilli if you like some heat in your sauce, then pour in the evaporated milk. Let reduce for about 10-15 minutes while stirring constantly. Season well with salt and pepper.

Then stir in your pieces of crab. Stir for about a minute or two, ensuring all pieces are coated by the sauce. Finally transfer the crab and the sauce into a roasting dish and finish the cooking in a pre-heated oven at 230 °C for 15 minutes.

baked meatball with tomato sauce

Despite its simple form and style, there are considerably some efforts needed to prepare this. First off, prepare the meatball. Here’s how.

Then prepare the tomato sauce. Here’s how.

Finally, pre-cook the meatballs halfway on a pan (by pre-cook I mean half-way or ¾ way since they will be baked inside the oven later). Prepare a square baking dish, pour the tomato sauce into the dish, place the meatballs in, top with some sliced cheddar or grated parmesan or shredded mozzarella and bake until the cheese has melted, about 15 to 20 minutes. Serve with bread.

Perfect for a lazy night of cooking. (provided the meatballs are prepared earlier and making the tomato sauce is no longer considered as troublesome chore)

hollandaise

Hollandaise is basically an emulsified butter sauce. It is one of the five sauces of french haute cuisine mother sauce repertoire. The sauce is one the great transformations of butter. Its appearance is light yellow and opaque, smooth and creamy while the taste is rich and buttery. It has a mild tangy acidic taste, a result of added vinegar (or lemon juice substitute) but not too strong to overpower the flavoured dish it accompanies. The sauce is serve warm but not hot and is excellent with beef, poultry, vegetables and fish. Two phases follow: cooking egg yolks and emulsifying the butter. It’s easiest to cook the eggs over simmering water. If you use direct heat, the eggs might be overcook which will results in lumps instead of smooth and silky sauce. After the eggs are airy and hot, you remove the pan from the heat and whisk in melted butter. Some cooks use whole butter and keep the sauce over heat, but I think you have more control using melted butter.

Creating an emulsified sauce using fat(oil/butter) and liquid(water/vinegar/egg) takes time and practise (i personally broke my sauce in the first two attempts) but that shouldn’t hinder anyone to try it. You’ll be rewarded with a wonderful sauce for your patience and once you get it right, you’ll never go wrong again. The chief danger to the emulsion is not having enough water (which includes lemon juice and vinegars). Water content is essential in this sauce is cooked (and thus continuously giving up its water as it vaporizes during the cooking). So the water quantity is critical. When making a hollandaise, I usually keep some water on hand to drizzle in if needed.

The standard ratio for making the sauce is 5:1:1(translates to a weight ratio of approx. 5 parts butter to 1 part yolk and 1 part water). That is, for example, 50 grams yolk and water for every 250 grams of butter. But if you’re making a small batch, just enough to serve 2 like i always do, it by tablespoon measuring, a standard egg yolk is a tablespoon, and ibuse two egg yolks, so that’s two tbsp water and ten tbsp of butter. Remember the ratio and you’re golden whether you’re making large batch or small. After that, it’s all about flavor: seasoning with herbs, aromatics, spices, and acid.

4 teaspoons water

½ teaspoon salt

50g yolks (or 3 large egg yolks)

250g warm clarified butter

2 teaspoons lemon juice, or to taste

First of all, make the clarified butter. Melt the butter in a medium pan over medium heat. Reduce the heat to low and continue to cook the butter. The water will slowly cook off; skim off the white solids that float to the top of the butter that forms on the surface. When the water is cooked off and you’ve skimmed the solids, strain the butter through a fine-mesh strainer to extract any remaining impurities. You should be left with pure yellow butter fat.

Prepare a double-boiler by partly fill a saucepan with water and bribg to a simmer. Bring a bowl and insert in the saucepan (the water shouldn’t touch the bowl), and whisk the yolk and the water continuously. When the yolks have doubled or tripled in volume, remove the double boiler from the burner and begin whisking in the warm clarified butter in a thin stream until it’s all incorporated and the sauce is thick and creamy. If the sauce becomes very thick and shiny, almost as if the water is being squeezed to the surface, or if you sense the sauce is about to break, add a teaspoon of cold water. When the butter is incorporated, taste and add the lemon juice to desire.

Do not be daunted if the sauce breaks, and it will, all you have to do is fix it. Simply get another yolk and a couple of teaspoons of water, warm them a little, and start adding your broken sauce the way you added the butter. You’ll have your sauce back in no time.

pesto

Nothing beats the taste and freshness of a home-made pesto. It it so easy and so universal, you can use it for any purpose and companion for any dish you could think of. Most people associated pesto with pasta and pasta only, when in reality, you can pair pesto with just about everything, roasted chicken, shellfish, bruschetta, fish, veal, steak, roated vegetables, jacket potato or with cheeses such as balls of Mozarella, the list is endless. You can make pesto in a food processor, or traditional pestle or mortar (i can attest that pounding pesto in pestle and mortar over time would results in a firm biceps and triceps!) Toast the pine nut lightly, though some would prefer to do them until they’re colored, which would develop a creaminess taste rather that nutty one.

Serves 4

1/2 a clove or garlic, chopped

salt and freshly ground black pepper

3 handfuls of fresh basil, leaves picked and chopped

a handful of pine nuts, very lightly toasted

a handful of Parmesan cheese

extra virgin olive oil

Pound the garlic with a little pinch of salt and basil in a pestle and mortar, or pulse in a food processor. Add the pine nuts and continue the pounding (or pulsing). Remove the mixture into a bowl and add half of the Parmesan. Stir and add the olive oil – you need just enough to bind the sauce and get it to an oozy consistency. Season to taste with salt and pepper, then add the rest of the Parmesan and pour in some more oil and taste again. The key is getting it right to keep tasting and adding cheese or oil until you have the righ semi-wet but firm mixture. Optionally, you may add a squeeze of lemon juice at the end to have a little bit of acidic taste into the pesto, but it’s not essential.

** To have an authentic Genovese pesto, use pecorino Romano cheese, or Parmigiano-Reggiano instead of Parmesan. These type of hard sheep’s milk cheese, gives out a much strong flavour to the cheese. Unfortunately, both these cheese are considered an indulgence, expensive and such a rare variety that to-date, i have yet to find any grocery store (Tesco, Carrefour, Jusco, Cold-Storage, Isetan, or even Mercato) that actually have these cheese on their shelves.