Oven-baked barramundi

Since I've never tried this before it seemed like a good experiment to try cooking a whole fish. I don't eat a lot of seafood so my judgement isn't great when it comes to how they taste or look, but my wife is a much more experienced aficionado, so she can judge my attempts. I went with barramundi since it looked nice in the window of the deli, and tried a simpe recipe to bake it in the oven.

I put it in a dish and covered both sides with oil, salt, pepper, and rosemary. It warmed a little as the oven preheated and just before I put it in I daubed it with butter on the top side. I cut some grooves in it on each side in the hopes it would help the herbs and such seep in. I also liberally sprinkled lemon juice over the whole thing.

Here's the result after twenty minutes. The flesh was falling apart and was very juicy, quite tasty and well cooked. It smelled delicious and was obviously ready.

 

I'm not sure which portion looks better, but here they both are. I had no idea how to partition fish up, so I removed the head and tail and as many fins as possible. I then diced it up into roughly equal segments and plated it up. I cooked some asparagus in butter to go with it, which came out pretty well considering I'd never cooked that either. Overall, a very good review for this meal, especially considering my total inexperience with both cooking and eating the subject matter. Very satisfied, now back to watching the footy!

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Lemongrass chilli chicken

I am calling this lemongrass chilli chicken because I figured I'd better just pick two or the post title would be too long. But actually this has a bunch of other herbs and things all of which combine to make it very aromatic and tasty!

First brown some chicken and onion in some oil (I used olive oil) in a wok. Then remove them and set them aside. Next add some more oil and put in lemongrass, chilli, ginger (all finely chopped) and ground coriander seeds (yay, I got to use my new spice grinder for the first time!). Cook these for maybe thirty seconds to release their delicious flavours, then add your vegies. I used carrot, buk choy, capsicum and cashew nuts. For the sauce, I used soy sauce, plenty of fish sauce and some raw sugar (to counteract some of the sourness of the fish sauce). When everything is mostly cooked, add back in the chicken and onion.

Finally, once it's all done, stir through some fresh coriander leaves and serve with rice. All in all this was pretty quick and easy, especially with magic chopping-stuff-up gadgets.

Roti

I have never made roti before but it turned out to be surprisingly easy and fun. The dough is just flour and water, and optionally some salt if you want. The recipe I have says chipati flour or, if you can't find that (as I couldn't), half plain and half self-raising flour. You sift the flour into a bowl, then make a well and add water, mixing it through, until you have enough water that all the flour has become dough and is left slightly sticky. Then you knead it for 8-10 minutes and leave it in a warm place, covered with a damp tea towel, for about half an hour.

Next you take the dough and break it into even pieces and make it into balls - each ball should be about the size of a golf ball. Then you roll them out into flat circles, which you can easily do by rolling in the one direction and turning the roti as you go. The cooking part is where it gets really fun. Cooking roti turns out be basically like cooking a pancake, at least to start with. You take a non-stick frypan, make it very hot, then turn the heat down somewhat and put in a roti. When it starts to bubble, flip it over and cook the other side. When the new bottom side has little beige spots, you can take it out. All of which takes less than a minute.

Then, you take a separate gas burner and turn it on and, using tongs, put the roti directly over the open flame, just resting on the stand thingy that you usually put a pot on. You only need to do each side for a few seconds. The roti will puff up immediately, it's pretty amazing actually, it just inflates like a balloon. Once it's puffy and has a few black spots on it it is done and you can eat it.

North Indian Lamb Curry

Since we were going to be out this evening, it was time to pull out the slow cooker. I started with some lamb chops - they were the closest to an appropriate cut of meat for the slow cooker that the supermarket had. In any case, they turned out ok. I diced up the meat and an onion and browned them. Then I cut up a couple of capsicums (one red one green, because I like having colourful food) and put them in the slow cooker.

Next I added a bunch of spices: two green chillis (chopped up), a lot of garlic and ginger (blended into a paste), two black cardamom pods and two green ones, a bay leaf, some garam masala, some tumeric and some salt. I was also supposed to put in coriander powder but I didn't have any. I did have some coriander seeds, but not a spice grinder of any kind, so I put them in the blender thingy. It didn't really work that well, to be honest, but at least they weren't whole seeds anymore. I crushed them a bit with the flat of a knife to further break them up and then put them in too. Then I put the meat and onion on top, and then poured four tomatoes worth of tomato puree over it.

Then leave it to cook for six hours or so and come home to delicious curry. Just before serving, stir through some fresh coriander. I served it with roti, which I will put in another post.

Paper parcels

On today's episode of Stuff We Cooked: wrapping things in paper and putting them in the oven.

Specifically, prawns and green beans (top left), chicken and shredded sweet potato (top right) and more shredded sweet potato (bottom) because there was too much. Flavouring for the prawns was chilli and garlic and for the chicken a middle eastern spice mix - the recipe called for za'atar, but the only one I could find in the supermarket was harissa. I don't actually know what either of these spice mixes involve, but it tasted good.

These things were then sprinkled with vegetable oil and wrapped in their respective pieces of baking paper before being put in the (pre-heated to 200 degrees) oven for about 15 minutes. Once done, they were garnished with parsley (for the prawns) and mint and plain yoghurt (for the chicken and sweet potato).

This was a fairly healthy and very quick meal to make, which is unusual for oven things! Having magical gadgets to shred the sweet potato and finely chop the chilli and garlic definitely helped with the preparation speed though, so if you lack such gadgets, it may take a bit longer.

Æbleflæsk

Since we had some real Danish bread, we obviously had to make some real Danish meals.  Other than just eating it straight with butter, the most famous use of the stuff is Smørrebrød (lit: butterbread), which are basically just open sandwiches of... any kind of flavoursome stuff on bread. Tasty and awesome, but not exactly worth writing a post about, since it's essentially "Cut bread. Put stuff on bread. Put bread in face."

So I decided to make something very slightly more involved - a breakfast dish called "Æbleflæsk" (lit: applepork).

Fry a pan worth of bacon, cut an onion and an apple into slices and chunks respectively.  Remove the back to some paper towel, then fry the onion and apple in the rendered baconfat until they're both slightly mushy.  Add a little sugar (we used three not-all-that-flat teaspoons), a dash of cider vinegar (which was a bit of genius culinary improv from Steph, actually) and half a cup or so of water, lower the heat and let it thicken a bit.

Butter some rugbrød (or any bread you like, toasted if you prefer), and dump the mix from the saucepan  straight onto it, then top with the bacon.

Mmm. Makes one feel like plundering the English coastline.

Rugbrød

So, my parents have recently been baking their own bread - particularly danish rye bread, which is a very dense sourdough with amazing flavour that is sliced thinly because otherwise your colon just can't handle it.  Apart from the fact that it's delicious, this is basically Dwarf Bread. The relatively small loaf pictured here weighs 1300gr and has the structural integrity of a housebrick.

I won't go into details about the recipe (interested parties can find it here), but it involved mixing buttermilk, yeast, flour, water and salt, parking that in the fridge for a week to ferment, then mixing that in with rye flour, rye grains, linseed meal, beer, molasses and some other stuff. I think I overcooked it slightly - the crust is a little too dried out, because it was really hard to judge doneness as apparently it's supposed to be slightly sticky in the middle when it's done - it solidifies in the 24hr rest time it requires after baking.

The finished product.  Serious bread!  I think this compares quite nicely to the picture in the recipe link above - nailed it!

And a consumption shot.  This stuff is flavoursome enough to be eaten with nothing but butter - it tastes of grains and malt and seeds and awesomeness.  Note the butter thickness - the Danes call this "tand smør", or "tooth butter", as it's thick enough to leave toothmarks in when you bite.  This is apparently how it's supposed to be done. I figure eating bread that's an order of magnitude more wholegrain than wholegrain qualifies you for a few health credits that can be spent towards buttery goodness.

(note also the silly soldier mug - hooray for hand-me-down stuff!)