Cornmeal Crusted Baked Fish, Buttermilk and Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes with Rosemary, and a How-to-Fillet Tutorial Video

As you can tell by the long title, dear readers, there's lots going on this week.


Wanting to use the low-fat buttermilk left after making last week’s Oven Fried Green Tomatoes, a couple of days later I put together a dinner that used it for both freshly-filleted fish and mashed potatoes. So this week, you’re getting not one, not two, but three featured items…


• Cornmeal Crusted Baked Fish
• Buttermilk and Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes with Rosemary, and
• A tutorial video on cutting your own fish fillet for the baked fish recipe!
The photo at right also includes homemade herbed buttermilk biscuits (click here for the recipe) and another favorite side dish, asparagus bundles, gently seasoned asparagus wrapped in glorious bacon (or, in this case, glorious low-fat turkey bacon). The vegetable bundles side dish is from a Paula Deen recipe (using green beans) that you’ll find at
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/green-bean-bundles-recipe/index.html .


So let’s get started!


First, you’re going to need fish fillets. You can buy them, of course, but paying for a package of fish at the supermarket doesn’t make for a very interesting video. And so, for those so inclined, here’s how to fillet your own.




Now that you’ve got your fillets, either by buying some or cutting them yourself, let’s make the rest of dinner. (The recipes below make four servings.) Fish generally cooks fairly quickly, so we’ll do the mashed potatoes first. This recipes uses baked potatoes instead of the usual boiled ones; as with most dishes normally made with boiled potatoes, baking the potatoes gives a deeper flavor that really adds something extra.


Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.


Place 4 russet potatoes on a baking sheet and perforate with a fork. Bake for 45 – 60 minutes until a fork penetrates easily.


While the potatoes are baking, prepare the roasted garlic (which has a wonderful sweet, creamy texture useful for many dishes) as follows:


Slice the top off two heads of garlic, leaving the papery skin on. (Slice off enough to expose some of the garlic inside.)


Place the garlic heads on foil. Drizzle with olive oil and ½ teaspoon of white wine vinegar. Wrap the foil around the garlic heads and roast in the oven with the potatoes till lightly browned and soft, about 30 minutes. When done, set aside until needed.


When the potatoes have finished baking, cut into cubes, and put them and the roasted garlic through a food mill and into a bowl. (You can use a masher instead, but the food mill gives a smoother texture that works especially well with the roasted garlic and the buttermilk we’ll be adding in the next step.)


Once the potatoes and garlic are in the bowl, add the ¾ cup of butter substitute, ½ cup low-fat buttermilk, and 1 tablespoon of dried rosemary, and mix till smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste.


Now let’s prepare the fish:


Preheat the oven (or, if you made the potatoes, increase the temperature) to 450 degrees.


Pour ½ cup of low-fat buttermilk into a shallow pan. Put four serving-size fish fillets into the milk and let sit for 15 minutes.
While the fish is resting in the milk, prepare the breading by combine the following coating ingredients in another shallow pan or a sealable plastic bag: ½ cup cornmeal; 1 tablespoon kosher salt; ½ teaspoon fresh ground black pepper; 1 teaspoon garlic powder; 1 tablespoon dried parsley; 1 teaspoon dried thyme; 1 teaspoon dried rosemary; and the zest of 1 lemon or orange.
Working one fillet at a time, remove the fillets from the buttermilk and place them in the breading until well coated. Place each coated fillet on an oiled or parchment-lined baking sheet.


Bake until the fish is cooked and flaky, about 10-12 minutes, turning them over half way.


To serve, drizzle each filet with a little olive oil and garnish each plate with a lemon wedge.




And that should be plenty for one week!


Drop me a like if you’d like a cookbook-style copy of this recipe. (Be sure to include your e-mail address.) And be sure to visit again next week for another delicious, reduced-fat dish! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Easy Omelettes (or, if you prefer, Omelets) Tutorial Video

Greetings to new subscribers Marie, Bonnie and Keetha!


Before I go any further, let me say this: despite anything Microsoft Word may say to the contrary, “omelette” is a perfectly acceptable alternate spelling of omelet. Now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s get to this week’s post.


One of my favorite foods to cook is an omelette. I like eggs anyway, but there’s so much to love about the omelette process: the folding of the cooked eggs, the selection of filling and, of course, the sheer athleticism of the all-important flip. (I’m 51 years old. At my age, flipping an egg is athleticism, ok?)


Making omelettes is not difficult, but it’s one of those things that is easier to learn if someone demonstrates and explains it than if it’s just described in writing. And so, this week, an Easy Omelettes Tutorial Video joins the previous tutorial videos on making homemade ravioli and blind-baking a pastry shell.


In the video, you’ll see how to make two styles of omelettes: a simple single fold, and a tri-fold. (You’ll also see how to wrist-flip the eggs, as well as how to do an easy “cheater’s flip” that’s as close to foolproof as you can get.) For demonstration purposes, I used a simple filling of green peppers, shallots, garlic and mushrooms, since I wanted the focus of the video to be on the handling of the eggs and not on a particular filling. Needless to say, feel free to use any filling you like, and don’t be afraid to be creative! (Even leftovers sometimes make a great omelette filling.) In the video, before sautéing the filling ingredients, I set a small amount of each aside and used them to top the finished omelette. Having the cooked vegetables inside, and the same (uncooked) vegetables on top, is a good way to create an interesting texture/flavor combination.


And don’t forget the cheese!


The total video length is about 12:19. Happy Omelette making!




See you next week! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Blind Baking - A Tutorial

For a story that's probably not true, it has been told many times and in many versions:
In 1966, a legendary film director was returning to Hollywood after an extended time away, and had not yet heard that the actor Ronald Reagan had announced his intention to run for governor of California. As he was getting off the plane, a reporter asked the director what he thought of  Reagan as governor. He considered it a moment before answering. "No," he said. "Jimmy Stewart as governor. Ronald Reagan as best friend."
So how exactly did I end up playing "best friend" in a video in which the star is a pie crust? Especially since my original plan for this week was to start exploring some wonderful old-school Southern cuisine from my wife's grandmother's cooking notebook? It started when, after a couple of recent posts called for blind baking a pastry crust, a number of people asked me about the right way to do that, giving me the idea that this would be a timely and appropriate subject for this week's entry. Then, while drafting that post, I started finding that many aspects of blind baking, while easy to do and show, are hard to describe. The solution: a tutorial video. Look out, Steven Spielberg! (Crass promotion alert: you'll see that some aspects of the video are aimed at You-Tube viewers not yet familiar with this site.)


I'm still very much looking forward to working with those wonderful Southern dishes in the coming weeks. For this week, "cut and mix" has been replaced by "cut and print!" So quiet on the set...ready...and, action!




That's it for now. As always (and as you just heard in the video), stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)