Attempt #29: Baked Fish with Crème Fraîche and horseradish sauce

The original recipe from Jamie Oliver was for baked trout but trout is not so readily available in KL, I decided to replace it with Garoupa fish.

As the recipe involves only marinating and seasoning of the fish with salt, black pepper and optional of thyme & lemon, it is utmost important that the fish must be fresh. What you will get from this recipe is an easy, healthy and you get to appreciate the fish authentic flavour.

The result:

The horseradish and Crème Fraîche sauce compliments the fish really well as it will provide that strong salty, spicy and sour-ish flavour to the fish.

The recipe (serves 4):

Ingredients:

·         Olive oil

·         Salt and freshly ground black pepper

·         4 whole trout, approximately 14oz-1lb each, gutted and scaled

For the Crème Fraîche & Horseradish cream

·         I heaped tablespoon grated fresh horseradish

·         9oz Crème Fraîche (about 1 generoud cup)

·         Juice of 1lemon

Optional

·         A little fresh thyme, leaves picked from stems

·         1 lemon, sliced

 The Method:

Preheat the oven to 475F. 

Pat the fish dry, then with a sharp knife slash each fish at an angle on both sides – this will allow the heat and seasoning to penetrate. Rub with Olive Oil and seasoning.  For extra flavour, you can stuff the fish with fragrant herbs such as thyme and the lemon slices. Cook for around 12-15 minutes until crisp and golden.

While the fish is being cooked in the oven, make your sauce. Fresh horseradish, which you should peel and grate, is nicer, but you can also use the creamed horseradish bought in jars. Mix the horseradish in a bowl with the Crème Fraîche and season well. Squeeze over some lemon juice to taste.

Serve the fish with a good lob of the Crème Fraîche sauce. Goes nice with beer.

Attempt #10: Delicious roasted white fish wrapped in smoked bacon with lemon mayonnaise and asparagus

My 10^th attempt! Wait a minute, 90 more recipes to go. L

Anyway, this 10^th attempt didn’t turned out to be as great as I thought it would have been. Reason being, I thought that anything with bacon is easy breezy to cook. As I just found out, so not true for a chef wannabe.

The buying process:

As I was doing the shopping for bacon, I realized that there are so many different types of bacon. OK, in my defence of the shallow knowledge of bacon, I am not much as a meat eater moreover bacon which is the part of the swine that carries one of the fattest content.

Anyway, not know the difference between smoked and unsmoked bacon, I checked out ehow.co. The explanation:

The difference between the two bacon types come from the way in which they are cooked. The smoked bacon is just that: smoked over a specific type of wood to give it a distinct flavour; unsmoked bacon is cooked to whatever specification the chef would like, with no flavour initiated into the meat before it is sold commercially.

The cooking process:

When I was wrapping the fish with the bacon, I felt almost like an actual chef as the wrapped fish looked so artistically creative.

Photo of the marinated raw fish being wrapped in smoked bacon as below:

 

As for steaming of the asparagus, I can never get this right. It is either overcooked which means it gets all limpy or undercooked, which makes it taste too close to eating grass.  

The result:

The fish was quite dry while the bacon wasn’t crispy enough. The recipe asked for 10-12 minutes in the oven but I had mine for 15 minutes but the bacon did not turn crisp nor golden like the recipe said it would. The lemon mayonnaise did helped to add some tangy juicy taste to the dryness of the fish.

Picture below shows better clarity of the dryness of the fish without the lemon mayonnaise.

Link to full recipe here.

Attempt #8: Potato and chorizo omelette with a kinda parsley salad

This is my first time baking eggs!

I have tried scrambling eggs, poaching them, boiled, steamed…but never baked them like a soufflé. And I must say that it is so much easier than trying to poach an egg! (I am still sore that my earlier recipe asking for poached egg turned out to be a disaster).

According to Jamie Oliver, this omelette recipe is supposed to be a cross between a Spanish tortilla and an Italian frittata. It’s Spanish because of the chorizo and potato, but a little Italian too because it is finished off in the oven instead of on the hob.

Result:

 

Overall, interesting and easy recipe to make. It tastes almost like quiche but ‘heavier’ in terms of texture. The added rosemary leaves gives a pungent, spicy taste to the omelette. The rosemary also further enhanced the spiciness of the Spanish chorizo sausages.

Besides, anything with eggs, sausages and potatoes in them, along with onions as a salad dressing - it won’t go really wrong I think. J As Jamie says it, these are 3 ingredients which are usually "all time favourite” 

Recipe: 

- 4 small waxy potatoes, scrubbed and cut into chunks
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 6 large free-range or organic eggs
• 2 x 60g good-quality Spanish chorizo sausages, cut into 1cm thick slices
• 2 sprigs of fresh rosemary, leaves picked
• 2 shallots, peeled and very finely sliced
• juice of 1 lemon
• extra virgin olive oil
• a bunch of fresh flat-leaf parsley, leaves picked

Method:

Preheat your oven to full whack, (I PRE-HEAT TO 240C AS THAT IS THE HIGHEST IT COULD GO FOR MY OVEN) or get your grill nice and hot. Put the potatoes into a saucepan of boiling salted water and simmer them until cooked, then drain in a colander and leave them to steam dry. Beat the eggs with a fork in a large mixing bowl, season well with salt and pepper, and put to one side.

Heat a 20cm non-stick, ovenproof frying pan. Add the chorizo slices and the potato chunks. The chorizo will start to sizzle, releasing all its tasty oils and spices. After a couple of minutes, when everything’s lightly golden and crisp, remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and put to one side. Sprinkle the rosemary leaves into the hot fat. As soon as they hit the pan, they’ll start to crisp up. Pour the beaten eggs on top immediately, adding the potatoes and chorizo and spreading everything out evenly. Place the whole pan in the preheated oven or under the grill until the omelette is golden brown on top and just cooked through in the middle.

While the omelette is cooking, put the shallots into a bowl with the lemon juice, some salt and pepper and a glug of extra virgin olive oil. Toss and pinch the shallots with your fingertips to soften them slightly, then mix in the parsley leaves. Serve a little on top of the omelette and tuck in!

Jamie Oliver's Rendition of the Omellete:

Attempt #7: Soy-baked salmon with zingy salsa

With the poor attempt on my crab cakes, I still wanted to make a fish-based dish.

Having just bought a kg of fresh, chilled salmon from my friend (PM me if you ever want to get your hands on fresh, premium quality salmon), I selected this recipe (link to Jamie's website). Looks easy enough for a quick bake for dinner!

 

The result….absolutely Y.U.M.M.Y.

The zest from the lemon and the lime added in a taste of sweet bitterness to the fish. And the grated ginger provides that zingy, spicy element to the creamy texture of the salmon. The idea of searing the salmon (skin down) on the pan before popping it into the oven is fantastic! This way, it makes the skin of the fish so crispy and nice.

Here's the photo:

I did omit chilli again in this recipe. And I added in some finely chopped red onions and garlic into the salsa mix since I omitted the chillies.  

Curious Corner:

Do you know that salmons have a peculiar life cycle?
Extracted from Organic Factswebsite, salmons will lay their eggs near the mouth of the rivers. The eggs hatch there, develop into fries and start their journey towards seas. They grow in the seas into adult salmons and again go back to the rivers to reproduce, where most of them die after laying eggs.

Attempt #4: Baked white fish with olives and a simple tomato sauce

With almost 1 month down, I am only at my 4^th recipe attempt. Yikes!

Time to speed the cooking up. But I do have a valid excuse *grin*…I was on a road trip to Italy with my girlfriend. Here’s a sneak peak to one of the many yummy food that we had. More on my roadtrip later.

 

Moving on to my Baked White Fish attempt. This attempt proved to be quite successful. The recipe for Jamie’s Baked White Fish with olives and a simple tomato sauce is oh so easy and more importantly, very yummy.

 

I guess any tomato-based recipe will not go wrong much. I did substitute red wine vinegar with ginger wine vinegar and it still taste right! And I skipped the olives and capers. I may have short-changed Jamie’s recipe a tiny bit but hey credit to the chap, the fish still turns out yummy! J  

Enclosed the full recipe below by Jamie Oliver:

Method

To make your sauce:

1. Peel and finely slice the garlic cloves. Pick the basil leaves and put aside, finely slice the stalks.

2. Add a good couple of lugs of olive oil to a large pan on medium heat. Add the garlic and basil stalks. Pierce the chilli once with a knife so it doesn’t explode when frying, and add to the pan. Fry gently until the garlic is soft but not coloured, stirring occasionally.

3. Add the tins of tomato and season lightly with the salt and pepper. Gently simmer on low heat for 30 minutes. Remove the chilli. Break and mush the tomatoes with a wooden spoon. Season the sauce really carefully with more salt and pepper, if needed, and add a tiny swig of red wine vinegar to give it a little twang.

To prepare and cook your fish:

4. Preheat the oven to 220C/425F/gas7.

5. Pour your tomato sauce into a roasting tray (about 20cm x 30cm). Season the fish fillets on both sides with a little salt and pepper, then place on top of the sauce. Squash the olives, using the base of a jar or something heavy, and remove the stones. Sprinkle the olives and capers over the fish. Scatter the reserved basil leaves over the fish.

6. Cook in the oven for around 15 minutes or until the fish is cooked through (check by cutting into the thickest part of one or two of the fillets; they should be pearly white and not transparent). Lovely served with new potatoes and a green salad.

ingredients

• 3 cloves of garlic
• a small bunch of fresh basil
• olive oil
• 1 fresh red chilli
• 2 x 400g tins plum tomatoes
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• red wine vinegar
• 4x 150g white fish fillets such as coley, whiting or pollock, skin off and bones removed
• a handful of black olives, stone in
• 1 tablespoon capers, drained

Attempt #1: Perfect Roast Chicken

News has it that roasting a chicken is one of the easiest dish for new cooks (or a chef wannabe) to start with. So, when I found this recipe on Jamie Oliver’s website for a Perfect Roast Chicken…I thought I struck gold…or poultry heaven in this case.
 
But oh….roasting a chicken was not as easy as 1-2-3 as news has it!

Here’s what happened and learning! Learning! Learning! to remind myself the next time I attempt to roast an entire chicken! 
 

Mistake #1: Never try to adjust the recipe of a great chef when you are trying your virgin attempt to roast a chicken!

Instead of organic, free range chicken which I thought was rather large for a family of 2 adults and 2 small kids, I bought a ‘kampung’ (village fed) chicken. This means that I should have also halved the other ingredients which I did not and adjusted the baking time.

IMPORTANT: Depending on the size of the chicken, may not be full 80 minutes as per recipe. Else, you will get a much burnt bird!

 

Recipe asked for celery and carrots. I replaced with leaks and cherry tomatoes. Reason being: I had leftover of leaks and cherry tomatoes and I wanted to use them before they went rotten. Waste not, want not right?

IMPORTANT: Roasting is like a box of chocolates, you will never know what it will taste like if you have not tried it. So, don’t try to be creative just yet!

Mistake #2: Size of the lemon must be in according to the size of the chicken!

The lemon keeps popping out from the chicken’s rear end as you can see from the photo! It took me longer trying to tackle the lemon and stuffing it into the chicken’s behind than to clean the chicken.

Not just that, if the lemon doesn’t get inserted well into the chicken, you get burnt lemon.

The RESULT: Chicken was slightly burnt and a little tad too sour (probably from the tomatoes!). But overall, it was quite tasty. The citrusy taste of the lemon goes really well with the sweet onion.

p/s: Visually, I thought the roasted chicken looks like an alien trying to eat that lemon! Don't ya think? See the resemblance? Gosh, I got to do something about my visual presentation of the food!