Archive for the ‘Cooking’ Category
Roast Potatoes
OK, time for another recipe. This is actually the very first thing I decided I wanted to make when we first had the idea of making our own Christmas dinner at the end of last year.
My mother makes the best roast potatoes in the world (I’m pretty sure if you check with top chefs they all concur with that). This is her recipe, it’s simple and amazingly good. Just a note on the type of potatoes to use; I’ve only used white potatoes for this recipe so far. Every recipe tells you to use a different type of potato but all I can say is the white ones turned out great.
Preheat the oven to 425F. Take a roasting pan (baking sheets aren’t very good for this as they buckle at this temperature) and add enough oil so that there’s a thin layer covering the bottom of the pan. Regarding the oil, my mother’s recipe calls for goose or duck fat rather than oil, but if you can’t find any (I couldn’t here in Canada) you can use vegetable oil instead. It’s not as flavourful but it’ll work fine. Put the pan in the oven to start heating the oil.
Peel and cut your potatoes. I cut small ones in half and big ones into quarters. Don’t make them too small, they shrink up a bit when they cook and you’ll be doing something else in a moment to make them a bit smaller! Boil a pan of water (enough water to cover the potatoes when you put them in) and add a little bit of salt. Now boil the potatoes for about 10 minutes, until they’re starting to go soft.
Then drain the water from the pan, cover it and shake it around hard! This crushes the edges of the potatoes and gives you awesome crispy bits when they’re roasted. After that, take the roasting pan with the hot oil out of the oven, and place the potatoes in it. Baste them with oil, and put them in the oven. Turn every 10 minutes, and cook for about 30-40 minutes total. I’ve seen recipes which say you don’t need to turn them, but I tried that and they went all black on one side so I wouldn’t recommend it.
That’s all there is to it! Something I’ve read about which I’ll probably try next time is to add some pieces of garlic to the oil and cook them along with the potatoes. But even the base recipe is really easy and so good.
Blackened Halibut
I wanted to make something new last night, and as we’re still complete neophytes in the kitchen I wanted it to be something simple. I’ve been browsing a few cooking blogs lately, and found the excellent House of Annie. I found a really easy way to pan-fry halibut on there, but they used a store-bought seasoning that we don’t seem to have easy access to in Canada. So a bit of random Googling got me a recipe which I adapted a bit and here’s what we ended up with!
Blackening spice:
3 tsp paprika
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder
3/4 tsp cayenne (the original recipe said 1/4 tsp… lightweights!)
1/2 tsp white pepper
1/2 tsp rough-ground black pepper
1/2 tsp thyme leaves
1/2 tsp dried oregano
Just mix all that up in a small bowl. Next, put 2 tbsp of oil into a non-stick frying pan and put it on a highish heat (we used 8 on our burner’s 1-10 scale). Then get your fish out of the fridge, cut them to whatever sizes you want, and put PLENTY of the spice all over them. I sprinkled it on and patted it in, though as I’m dumb and a total noob I forgot to do the sides of the fillet as well as the top and bottom – cover the fish completely.
The fish with the spice applied, right before cooking.
Then after 10 minutes or so when the oil’s nice and hot, drop the fish in, reduce the heat to 7.5, and let them just sit and sizzle for 5 minutes or so. Then jerk the pan to make sure they’re not stuck, and flip with a plastic spatula. Cook for another 5 minutes, and take them out. And that’s it!
After flipping once.
I LOVE ordering blackened stuff in restaurants and I wasn’t sure what to expect from this, just how close it would be in flavour. Well, it’s IDENTICAL to my favourite stuff (here in Vancouver, Earl’s do a great blackened chicken) and in fact a bit better as we obviously use more cayenne for heat! We served it with rice, asparagus and spinach, all steamed by my wife in a vegetable steamer we bought a couple years ago, and it was incredible. This cooking lark is great; I’m amazed and also annoyed that we didn’t make more of an effort to do this years ago.
All done!
The rough cost of the meal:
Halibut fillet, I think about 250g: $11.50
Spices: Let’s say $1 for the whole amount I used
Rice: MAYBE another $1, probably not but let’s keep the numbers easy
Asparagus: $2
Spinach: $1
Lemon: 50c
Total: $17.00 for two people – plus some white wine and beer 
