I decided to cook a
30 Minute Meal on Saturday. They always feel
like a feast and this one includes a drink and a pudding. As much as I love the '15 Minute Meals' it was nice to go back to where I first got excited about Jamie
Oliver books. I chose to do Sea Bass and crispy pancetta with sweet potato mash, Asian greens and a berry ice cream to follow. The drink is sparkling lemon and ginger. This is a great meal, it has the balance that I
have come to expect from a Jamie Oliver feast, although it is very difficult to find
sea bass in Shetland so I used local haddock from the fishmongers. They had no
fillets with the skin on and crispy skin seemed to help with the cooking, so I chose to buy a headless/gutted haddock and fillet it myself. I am really not
great at this but I took my time and got the fillets off. It was a little scrappy
in places but did the job. It works out a lot cheaper this way but is messy and
a sharp knife helps a lot.
With my fish prepared I sorted my other
ingredients and pans and started the clock. With so much more going on than a
15 minute meal you really have to keep your head, and I also had a 2 year old sous-chef which caused some delays! My little girl loves tasting ingredients as I
cook which is generally a good thing when it comes to beetroot but more tricky
to explain that a chilli is too spicy to eat and not actually pepper at all. She did chew
on some lime flesh just to prove she would eat it after I said she wouldn't like
it. As a result it took me 38.35 minutes and I did the ice cream after; although I knew
we would struggle to eat the ice cream straight away after such a big meal. The fish was very tasty
with just some lemon zest, fennel seeds and salty-crispy pancetta to
compliment it. The dressed greens with chilli were really tasty and fresh but
the best part had to be the sweet potato mash. It was incredibly easy to do and
had fresh coriander, spicy chilli and sweet mango chutney running through it. I
could just eat bowls of it. I can see me using this with chicken and maybe even
pork in the future.
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| Ingredients |
There are no difficult techniques at all.
I know some people find cooking fish daunting but it is really straight
forward. The use of a microwave to make the mash is great as it doesn't take up
a free hob. The only thing I would say is that the recipes seem to use a bigger
frying pan than I have so I end up using two quite a lot and this was no
exception.
The drink is made of lemonade, sparkling water ginger and mint. Unfortunately we were not able to
get any mint. Although I can see what the mint would have contributed it was
nice without it. I think if I did it again I would be tempted to strain the pieces of ginger but that is personal preference.
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| Haddock, pancetta, Asian greens and sweet potato mash with lemon drink |
The desert is berry ice cream/frozen
yoghurt. It is incredibly simple putting frozen berries and greek yoghurt
together in a blender. It made a bright purple very tasty pudding with lots of
fresh blueberries to finish it off. This could work with any fruit and would be
great for children.
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| Berry frozen yoghurt with fresh blueberries |
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