quick

Mexican Baked Fish

- Alex 3 Comments

mexican baked fish 1

Earlier in the week I bought a few too many Coorong mullet fillets and we weren’t able to eat them all in one go (er, strictly speaking, we weren’t able to fit them in the pan all in one go – I’m sure if we tried we’d have been able to eat them all up!).

Rather than just pan fry them again I wanted to do something a bit more warming and filling.  I’m not going to complain about Adelaide’s weather again (especially not as it was 22°C yesterday) but we did need something more substantial than just a bit of pan fried fish!

This Mexican baked fish recipe sounded perfect. It verges on being a store cupboard recipe and, when made with a thinner fish fillet, such as the mullet, is super speedy.

Quantities below are for two people – assuming one fillet of fish each.

Take your fish fillets and rub in some salt and lime juice. Set aside while you get yourself sorted.

If you are using thinner fillets, you can get away with doing this all in the one pan, on the stove top. If you’re using thicker fillets, preheat your oven to 200°C.

Heat some oil in the pan and fry the fish. Thinner fillets, you really want to cook the fish, thicker ones, just sear the fish’s skin side. Remove the fish from the pan.

In the now empty pan, cook a single sliced onion until translucent. Add a crushed clove of garlic (or more, if you fancy) and cook for another minute or two before adding 200g (half a tin) of crushed tomatoes. Stir and then add half a red capsicum, finely sliced, a generous splash of water, and the juice of at least half a lime. Add roughly chopped green olives, capers and chilli flakes to taste (I used about 10 olives, about 1 tbsp of capers and a generous sprinkling of chilli). Allow this to cook for 10 minutes or so and adjust seasoning. You want the sauce to thicken up a fair bit, so you may need to cook for a little longer to evaporate off any extra liquid and to intensify flavours.

When you’re happy with the sauce, return the fish to the pan and cover it with the sauce. Thin fillets – you are just heating through, but if you’re using thicker fillets, pop the pan in the oven to finish cooking the fish.

We served this with coriander and lime rice (yes, that’s plain rice with lime juice and chopped coriander stirred through it – as I was using left over rice, I also gave it a quick fry up … delicious!) and an extra wedge of lime.

The really important thing here is to not omit the lime juice. Really and truly. You can forget about the capers or the olives if they’re not your thing, or they’re not in the cupboard but you really CANNOT do without the lime. It lifts the dish and, I think, makes it feel Mexican.

To drink: a cold beer would work, as would a lime-like Clare Valley Riesling.

Jamie Oliver’s Feta and Spinach Pie

- Alex 3 Comments

Feta & Spinach Pie

It’s been some pretty horrid weather in Adelaide recently – cold (especially when you don’t have central heating) and wet (yep – the washing’s been hanging on the line for about a week) so what was in order for Sunday night supper was something quick and HOT.

There was another constraint: the huge pile of feta cheese in our fridge that had been bought to make a Greek salad to take to a BBQ that we subsequently couldn’t attend.

Salad out of the question, the natural mate of feta is spinach and I remembered seeing Jamie Oliver do a feta and spinach pie as part of his 30 Minute Meals.

My approach took quite a significant departure from his – mainly because we had less spinach and I suspect a considerably larger pan. As a side note, never ever buy Woolworths Own Brand frozen spinach: not only is it from China but our packet was mostly stalk. It really irritates me that I’m yet to locate an Australian grown frozen spinach. If you know of one, let me know!

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

In a pan, toast off a generous handful of pinenuts – pay attention to them and don’t let them burn!

In a bowl, whisk 4 eggs before adding about 200g of crumbled (or finely diced) feta. If you buy your feta from the supermarket you will most likely find that the deli counter sells a selection and you can buy Australian feta much much more cheaply than you’ll buy anything that’s prepackaged. At our supermarket, the deli product is also much better than the packaged stuff, so it’s a win all round.

Add the pine nuts, a pinch of oregano, a pinch of cayenne pepper, a grating of nutmeg, black pepper to taste and a glug of olive oil (if you want to measure, probably about 1tbsp). Finish by adding the zest of about half a lemon. Don’t miss the lemon zest!

Cook the spinach off in a pan. If you’re using frozen spinach (I used a 250g pack) you want to cook the water out, and if you’re using fresh, you want to wilt it so it’s soft. Allow the spinach to cool a little and then stir into the egg mix.

The bit I really like about this recipe is Jamie’s approach to the filo pastry. You know how working with filo can be a real bore … keep it covered with a damp towel, melt butter and brush the sheets and generally spend all afternoon faffing about. None of that with Jamie (well, we’d hardly expect that, would we?).

Take a large sheet of baking paper, sprinkle it with olive oil and then rub the oil all over it. Layer the baking paper with your filo pastry, rubbing olive oil between the layers (do this with your hands – it is so much quicker than trying to use a brush). Now, overall you want at least three layers of pastry but you’re likely to have to overlap sheets to cover the whole of the paper. Try to keep the overlapping to a sensible minimum though – you don’t want 6 (or even 9) sheets of pastry in some parts and only three in others.

When the baking paper is covered, pick the whole lot up and put it in a large, high sided frying pan. There should be a generous overhang. Pour the egg mixture in to the pastry case and fold the overhanging pastry away from the paper and across the top of your pie. You don’t need to fold it neatly – allow it to finish with bits of pastry sticking up: that looks kind of cool.

Now, cook the pie for a few minutes on the stove so that the bottom starts to cook and crisp up. Literally, we are talking about a few minutes here … don’t do what I did, which was wander off and start doing other things, because the pastry can (and will!) start to burn quite easily. Then put the pan in the oven to finish cooking – it will take about 20 minutes and the pastry should turn golden.

Because the pie is cooked on baking paper, it will be easy to slide off on to a plate. However, if, like me, you need to do some surgery on the base, it’s just as easy to flip the pie over. Fortunately, the layers of filo pastry and a palette knife meant I could remove the burnt bits easily, leaving us with a very tasty dinner. Had the base been shortcrust there’s no way I could have rescued our dinner!

Andy rightly pointed out that this would be brilliant made in smaller pans for an entrée and I think you could definitely do something canapé sized using something like a minced pie tin.

The most important thing though is not to skip on the lemon zest – this noticeably lifts the flavour of the whole dish. With all the cheese and egg having a little something cut through that richness is just perfect.

Salad Dressings

- Alex Leave a comment

IMG_0672

Hmm, not sure it makes for the most exciting title but salads needn’t be boring and, with a bit of thought, they make a good (healthy) low effort meal.

Mostly a salad dressing is just some olive oil, vinegar, garlic, maybe some mustard but if I’m going to make a meal out of a salad I find I need a bit more inspiration.

This first dressing I like because it makes use of tahini. I buy a jar of tahini, needing a tablespoon of it for something or other, and then it hangs around the fridge for ages and ages – so I love recipes that use it. The original of this comes from Cuisine, but commits the culinary crime of using orange and the sugar is totally unnecessary. In fact, this is really a dressing which needs no recipe: just take olive oil, lemon juice, some mustard (I used grainy) and some tahini (when making salad dressing for two, I just use a teaspoon of tahini). Give it all a good shake and it makes a lovely creamy, rich dressing. This works perfectly well on a standard green salad but because it is creamy I don’t use it on a salad which includes feta cheese.

If you have a bit more time on your hands, then this dressing from Ainsley Harriott’s Friends and Family Cookbook.* This is a Caesar salad style dressing, so don’t bother reading on if you’re on some kind of low calorie health kick …

Crush two anchovies (I used a mortar and pestle to make this dressing), and add a clove of garlic. Make a smooth paste. Mix in 3 tablespoons of mayonnaise (I used bought – we had that lying around in the fridge too, left over from something a while back), 1 tablespoon of sour cream, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard and a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce. Finally add Tabasco to taste and any seasoning you find necessary. I put in plenty of Tabasco so no pepper required and the anchovies were salty enough.

I used this dressing on a green salad, made with Roma tomatoes from the garden, a few warm, diced potatoes and chicken (marinated in olive oil, paprika, garlic and parsley before being fried up – also thanks to Mr Harriott). It was absolutely brilliant – loads of flavour, and certainly enough for dinner.

Just not particularly healthy!

*Also available from Amazon UK, Amazon US, and internationally through The Book Depository.