Mediterranean Baked Branzino

So last night I went to a fun fun girl's night at my friend's house. There were 7 of us and the theme was Mediterranean, we each brought various yummy delights - hummus, baklava, dolmades, watermelon and feta salad, herbed rack of lamb etc etc. I decided to venture out of my comfort zone and try something I love to eat (whole fish) but had only tried cooking once before about 7 years ago (turned out OK from recollection!). This dish wasn't my dish choice when I was thinking of my pot luck contribution, but boy am I glad I made it, it was so delicious and I would love to share it with you.

So here's the backstory.  I headed to my local fancy schmancy supermarket that sells great product, fresh baked bread and really fantastic meats and seafood. When I arrived there I had originally intended to make a marinated Octopus salad but I was super disappointed to find that the only octopus and squid they sold was frozen. It was 1:30pm and I had to be at my friend's house at 6:30pm.  Being Australian, I have been spoilt with always fresh-never frozen seafood and buying the product frozen in a package made me incredibly nervous! I put it in my cart, started to walk away and all kinds of thoughts crossed my mind What if I can't thaw this out in time? Will I screw up this dish and force everyone to eat rubber? Am I making life harder for myself with this dish? I went with my gut instinct (excuse the pun!) and put the packet back in the freezer case. 

While I waited for service, I thought to myself When I think of the Mediterranean, what dishes do I think of? My first thought was whole fish-lemons-olive oil. Turns out I had two choices that day for whole fish: red snapper or branzino.  Branzino!!! How could I pass this up? Well, if you don't know, Branzino is a European Bass with a delicate white flaky flesh, lots of bones and fairly small but is absolutely synonymous with Mediterranean or Italian food.

The fishmonger was nice enough to remove the gills and guts and I had the option to have the heads removed but opted to keep them and the tails for a prettier presentation (isn't it odd that a dead animal's head on a plate makes the dish look stunning!?! Crazy!)

So here's how I prepared it (super easy and very delicious)

Prep Time: 10 mins

Cooking Time: 32 mins

Oven Temp: 325F

Serves: (1 fish per person as a main meal or 1 fish for 2-3 people as a shared appetizer) Roughly .5-1lb per fish

Ingredients:

1-2 Branzini (about .8lb per fish)

Herbs - flat leaf parsley, dill and fresh oregano

Lemons

Olive Oil

1-2 cloves garlic thinly sliced

1 Shallot thinly sliced

Salt

Pepper

1. Preheat oven to 325F

2. To a baking sheet or oven proof dish, drizzle a  tsp of olive oil and lay the fish presentation side up.

3. Cut three slits to the presentation side of the fish

4. Season the entire fish with salt and pepper. Don't forget the cavity of the fish.

5. Fill the cavity of the fish with lemon slices, the sliced garlic, shallots and whole springs of dill, flat leaf parsley and oregano. Reserve a few garlic slices for the slits and insert the slices in the slits.

6. Season again with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil and top with a few thin slices of lemon. 

7. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the fish and bake uncovered for about 32 minutes.

8. Allow the fish to rest for a few minutes but do serve as soon as possible.

9. After resting, transfer the fish carefully to a serving platter.  Garnish with more lemon slices and wedges, a drizzle of olive oil and chopped flat leaf parsley, dill and fresh oregano. Sprinkle sea salt and serve with a light salad of dressed greens with shaved fennel and red onion.

**Note: be careful, this fish (albeit delicious) has lots of little bones.  Be very careful if you are feeding this fish to children, though I probably would not recommend it.

What's for dinner tonight?

Ginger flank steak fried rice!

Buy the best beef you can afford. Slice very, very thin:

Marinate for an hour in sesame oil, soy sauce, freshly grated ginger, 4 cloves of garlic sliced, hoisin sauce, honey, vegetable oil. Don't add salt until you start stir frying in your wok. Heat wok to high and add some vegetable oil. Stir fry the beef until just cooked.

Remove cooked flank steak and keep in a dish together with the cooking liquid.

In a little more oil, stir fry your favorite vegetables. I used, broccoli, red pepper, carrots, grated and squeezed zucchini, mushrooms, onions, cabbage, green onion and green beans.  Make sure you cook things like the onions, pepper and carrots before more delicate items that require less cooking time like mushrooms. Once stir-fried, add soy sauce, salt, pepper, a dash of honey and sesame oil. Do not over cook !

When the vegetables are almost cooked, add day old cooked white rice, if the rice is dry, you can heat separately with a sprinkle of water in the microwave for a minute or so to revive it. Stir fry still on a high heat. 

After a few minutes of stir frying, reintroduce all the cooked flank steak (it should look a little ground or chopped beef and be very tender) and all if its juices and liquid. Stir fry for a few more minutes before adding anything that requires off-heat last minute cooking such as toasted peanuts, chopped cilantro, free onions or sesame seeds.

Lamb cutlets with a red wine jus

Made this last week for dinner one night.  Australian lamb cutlets marinated with rosemary and garlic, served with a red wine jus, buttery mashed potatoes and sauteed garlic spinach.

Vanilla Custard Pots for Toddlers

An easy little dessert for your toddler and the good news is it takes no time at all and your child will love helping you in the kitchen!

The only adjustments I made to the above recipe was that I used a little more sugar.  Preheat the oven to 350F.

In a small jug, mix the egg and the sugar together, then add the vanilla extract.  This is a great opportunity to have your children involved. My daughter excitedly broke the egg and helped me stir the sugar in. She loved it!

The recipe calls for bringing the 2/3 cup of milk to a near boil on the stove but that was too much work for me, so I poured the milk into another jug and microwaved it in increments to make sure it didn't boil.  In all, I think it took less than 2 minutes.

Very carefully, slowly pour the milk into the egg mixture while stirring rapidly so the eggs won't curdle.

Place 2 or 3 small ramekins into a deep oven tray and strain the custard into them to lose any lumps.  Carefully pour enough boiling water into the oven tray until the water comes halfway up to the ramekins. Make sure no water splashes in the custards or it will compromise the texture.

Place the tray in the oven and cook for about 15-20 minutes, or until the custards are set.

Roasted Tomato and Garlic Sauce

Our neighbors dropped off a box of their last summer harvest of juicy red tomatoes. Yes, we love these neighbors! I kept looking at the tomatoes for 2 days, pondering what I should make with them that would do justice to the impeccable quality of these beautiful organically grown fruits. I wanted to enhance their deliciousness, without losing it amidst a zillion other ingredients.  I had previously made a roasted tomato basil soup, so I thought about instead making a really delicious pasta sauce. It turned out incredibly (if I may say so myself!), even my little fussy eater has been eating her pasta with the sauce (she is usually a fan of plain boiled pasta)!

So here it is.

The first thing I did was I halved all the tomatoes lengthways and cut out the hard top stem.  I placed them neatly on two sheet trays, skin down.  I think I must have had several pounds of tomatoes (15 big sized tomatoes in all).

After laying them out, I gave them all a good seasoning of freshly ground sea salt and black pepper. I sprinkled them with torn fresh basil from my garden (probably also the last for the season), good extra virgin olive oil and finally scatter about 8-10 whole garlic cloves, still with the skin in tact

At this stage, don't worry about the skins because we will peel them off later after the roasting process.




Preheat an oven to 350F.  Place the trays in the center rack of the oven and roast for at least an hour and a half.  Keep checking. You want the tomatoes to be juicy, cooked and aromatic.  Too coked and they will dry out, not cooked enough and they won't have that roasted flavor.

Once they are done, take the trays out of the oven and let them rest for a little while so they are cool enough for you to handle.

Once you can safely handle to tomatoes, keep a pot handy and start peeling the skins of the tomatoes by hand, discarding the skins and putting the flesh in the pot. Peel off the garlic clove skins and add the roasted cloves to the pot, discarding those skins too. Add the basil to the pot as well.

Everything added to the pot

Now, peeling those tomatoes is a bit fiddly, I admit.  However, I don't really know any better method (any suggestions?? - you need the skins for the roasting process).  The only thing I can say to ease your mind is that because the tomatoes have been roasting for so long and because they are cut in half, the skins should come off fairy easily.  If you wanted to, you could very well score an "X" on the bottoms at the very beginning to encourage the skins to peel away during the cooking process.

Once everything is peeled and added to the pot, lift off any of the nice pan juices and remaining olive oil on the sheet trays with a couple tablespoons of water.  Use a plastic or wooden spoon and stir, add this water to the pot.

Put the pot on the stove and bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for about 30 minutes. You want to cook the liquid out a little more and meld all those flavors nicely. At this stage, I found my first pot too small, so I had to transfer everything to a larger pot (hence, the different pots in the two photos!)

After the mixture has reduced a little, the color will change slightly and the sauce will start to look more cohesive. Here is a close-up.

Turn the stove off, move the pot to a safe place on the counter near an outlet.  Use an immersion blender to puree the mixture into a sauce, which you can run through a sieve if you choose to (I didn't because I actually like a more rustic textured sauce)

And there you have it! Check for seasoning and adjust if you like.  This is great as a sauce but quite frankly, you could just eat it in a bowl with a spoon, as a soup.  I think the sauce works best with spaghetti or a more textured pasta like rotini or spirals.  I didn't take a photo of it as a finished product because I was too quick to eat it - OOPS! You could also use this sauce for proteins like chicken or shrimp, or as a base for a hearty stew or other soup.

Vietnamese BBQ Pork Steamed Buns

So I did some late night grocery shopping on Thursday night by myself, once Super-J came home from work... I had forgotten how peaceful and enjoyable it can be when you don't have little ones in tow pulling at you and asking to hold every little thing you put in the cart (many an odd lime has had to be forcibly purchased after Mini-V has insisted on holding it through the entire shopping experience and then refuses to let it go as checkout... I don't think they want it back with teeth marks anyway!).

Well, you know what happens when you shop alone? You roam down the aisles you really don't need to go down (just so you can prolong the "alone time") and you end up discovering all kinds of exciting ingredients. Then, you have a false sense of time and buy everything you really don't need, thinking oh yeah, I will make that on the weekend.  I had one of those moments on Thursday night and purchased a mysterious packet of Vietnamese "mixed flour" labelled Bot Banh Bao.  OMG steamed buns!! I love those at Dim Sum, really how difficult can it be!?!?

Let me tell you.... 6 hours of cooking later and I made them!!! They were delicious. I am adding this to my new section called "What's Cooking" because I love to cook and know you will love to see what I make!

First, I had to roast the pork. I looked up 'Chinese BBQ pork' on the internet and found this amazing recipe.  I varied it to only use the marinade. I didn't marinate it overnight and I did omit some of the ingredients, it turned out great. Here's how I made the sauce -

Combine -

1 1/2 Tbsp sugar
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp Chinese five spice
1 garlic clove chopped
3 Tbsp ketchup
3Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp rice vinegar (I didn't have the white wine the recipe called for)
2 Tbsp Hoisin sauce
2 Tbsp Honey

 After mixing this, I smeared it all over boneless country style pork ribs and put it in an 350F oven for about 2 hours, turning it over every now and then to check.  I admit, you can cook it for less if you want but I wanted the sauce really caramelized and pork super tender.

Once the pork was cooked, I started on the Bot Banh Bao dough. I really wish you can make the dough ahead of time because having to wait for the pork to be done first adds so much time to the cooking process. Unfortunately, it is one of those sticky doughs that has to be mixed, rested, then re-kneaded and finally rolled and steamed immediately. Time consuming (especially with two small kids).

I followed the instruction on the packet. Basically, you have to mix the packet of "mixed flour" with 1 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of sugar and 1 Tbsp vegetable oil. The instructions said to hand-mix for 10 minutes. No way I was doing that, so I put it in my Kitchen Aid and set the dough hook on low for 10 minutes.

Then you have to let the dough rest for 15 minutes (this is when I took a break to have my lunch, which might I add, I did cook simultaneously!). After 15 minutes, I used the suggested 2 Tbsp of reserved mixed flour to flour my board and then you have to knead the dough for ten more minutes. Let me tell you, the dough is sticky so make sure you reserve more than the recommended 2 Tbsp of mixed flour.