Fish Goujons with Dill Mayonnaise

goujon [ˈguːʒɒn]

n

(Cookery) a small strip of fish or chicken, coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried

[French, literally: gudgeon]

If you are anything like me, the kitchen activity you detest most is frying. Of any kind.

But like all boys of the XY sort, they all love fried food. Why? I have absolutely no idea because I don't. I think I was born lacking the "fried food gene". I even dislike tempura and everyone knows how much I adore Japanese food.

Leng and I are attempting to stick to Fish Fridays. The only problem is that the boy doesn't like seafood. Say what? Yes, you read right, he actually dislikes seafood - I can't believe it either!

Until he met Nigella and her fish goujons!

This simple recipe from her Nigella Express is pure genius. I can whip this is up in under 20 minutes and a Fish Friday supper is served.

I beg you to try this because Leng and I were simply bowled over by it. The only pointer I will say is to use the freshest fish as possible. I only purchase my fish from my favourite fishmonger from Prahran Market and I would never attempt this dish with Woolies bought fish.

Also, Japanese panko is muct finer and somewhat tastier than the Korean brands so go for those instead too. And finally, don't overfry your fish. Despite the goujon being crumbed and crunchy on the outside, the inside is moist, juicy and very sweet! You will get a hang of it after a few strips and know when to take them out of the oil.

Fish Goujons with Dill Mayonnnaise

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Ingredients:

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Nigella states 2 lemon sole fillets but I've never seen them in Melbourne so I used flathead instead which worked a treat

70g cornflour

100g panko

2 eggs

canola oil for shallow frying

salt & pepper, to taste

200g mayonanaise/salad cream

small bunch of dill

1 lemon

optional side: cornichons

Method:

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1) Cut your fresh fish of choice into small fillets

2) Put cornflour into a shallow bowl and season with salt and pepper. Put the panko into another shallow bowl and beat eggs in additional bowl

3) Dip each goujon into the seasoned cornflour, coating it well and then the beaten egg and finally the breadcrumbs

4) Fry goujons for about 2 minutes in the hot oil/until crisp and golden.

5) To make the dill dressing, you can use mayo but I prefer Krafts Lite Salad Cream

6) Put mayo/salad cream into a bowl with finely chopped dill and lemon and seasoning to taste

7) Serve dressing cold

Cornichons are just baby cucumbers, pickled and you can get them from Woolies in jars. They give an element of sweet and sour crunch and really tie the entire dish together. Do try it!


The dill dressing is simply out of this world! Dill is a herb I don't normally use in my kitchen but Leng and I really love it's aniseedy flavours. It's a very Swedish herb and I suggest making gravlax using the leftover dill.

What To Do With Leftover Roasted Chicken

So I promised a small recipe on what to do with your leftover roasted chicken.

The little picnic cum day trip to regional Victoria to eat your leftover chicken is of course, optional :)

Leftover Roasted Chicken Filling

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Ingredients:

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salad cream/mayo - japanese or otherwise, to taste

ABC sambal, to taste

juice from a lemon, to taste

freshly ground pepper, to taste

Method:

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1) Mix everything together till consistency and taste to your liking. Just remember that this will be your sandwich filling so you might want to make it a tad saltier than normal.

2) Sandwich this delicious filling between 2 pieces of bread or do what we did, go on a lovely mini road trip on a gorgeous, sunny, spring day and buy freshly baked baguettes and have a picnic outside!

After each roasted chicken meal, I get as much chicken off the bone as possible, including all the leftover watercress/salad that went with it. You can even take things a step further by freezing your leftover roasted chicken bones to use to make stock in the future!

Here, I used the Japanese Kewpie mayo but Kraft's Lite Salad Cream works a treat too.

Mix everything till is looks something like this. I know, not really appetising right not but just wait...

I basically just clingwrapped the bowl I made the filling in, wrapped that in aluminium foil and then wrapped the entire thing in a tea towel to keep it nice and cool.

We drove north to Gisbourne and found this lovely spot under a tree.

Hungarian and white loaf baguettes from Bakers Delight and takeaway coffee - yummo!

We also managed to check out some local sights. This is the Memorial Cross at Mount Macedon.

We even managed to get ourselves to Daylesford and Hepburn Springs in the evening (isn't daylight savings phenomenal??)

So I was wondering why Leng took the water bottle out of the car and realised so that it was for us to try the spring water. Urm, it was really carbonated and tasted like unrefined fizzy mineral water - I didn't like it!

Julia Child's Herb Roasted Chicken With Garlic, Lemon & Watercress

When I first got my hands on the fabulous How To Eat by Nigella Lawson, I marvelled at her ability to wax lyrical about roasted chickens.

That buxom woman literally had 6-7 recipes on how to roast a chook alone in that book.

Then I slowly discovered the gorgeousness of roasting a bird in the oven. Just a few ingredients can transform your free range (please, ONLY free range, I beg of you. Believe me, you will taste the difference!) chicken into an utter gastronomic feast.

Long before Nigella, another buxom lady was already promoting chickens of the roasting kind - Julia Child. This lady not only had the wonderful opportunity of attending Le Cordon Bleu in Paris but also had her own cooking show.

So without further ado, this is Julia Child's Herb Roasted Chicken on Watercress.

You MUST give this recipe a go. The chicken is moist and juicy yet beautifully punctuated by notes of garlic, rosemary and thyme. But the lemon, oh the lemon is the star of this dish undoubtedly and just ties in all the savoury and sweet notes and makes the dish sing even more.

I have now cooked this numerous times as Leng requests for this chook more so than Jamie Oliver's Perfect Roasted Chicken.

VERDICT: 10/10 Such an easy dish for a Sunday roast. The flavours in this are amazing - sour, bitter (from the peppery watercress), savoury and sweet. Plus the leftovers make the best chicken sandwich! (recipe for that coming up real soon!)

Ingredients:

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1 free range whole chicken (I normally get a 16/17 bird for 2 people)

1 garlic clove, peeled and smashed lightly with knife

3 lemons, halved

1 brown onion, sliced

1 bunch of watercress

rosemary & thyme (preferably fresh but I've used dried and it works fine too)

freshly ground pepper & salt, to taste

Method:

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1) Wash chook, inside and out and pat dry with kitchen towel

2) In a large bowl, squeeze your lemons and throw their skins in together along with garlic, herbs, freshly ground pepper and salt.

3) Mix well

4) Transfer chicken into bowl and rub the marinade you just made all over it

5) In a roasting tray, put your sliced onion on the bottom to make a trivet

6) Stuff herbs, garlic cloves and as many lemon halves you can into your chicken and truss it

7) Transfer chicken to roasting tray and pour remaining marinade on top of the chicken

8) Drizzle olive oil over chicken and generously salt skin

9) Roast in preheated oven at 200C for about 1 hour and 20 minutes

10 Wash and chop up watercress whilst waiting and line on large serving platter

10) When done, transfer chicken to a bowl to rest and to collect resting juices

11) In the hot roasting tray, pour some chicken stock if you have some on hand, or else I use the new Campbells chicken stock concentrate that comes in the squeezy tubes with some water and scrape down the tray with salt & pepper to taste

12) Strain it with a sieve into a serving jug and pour into it whatever resting juices you may have collected from the chicken

13) Transfer chicken to serving platter and serve!

Italian Bussola Biscuits (from Tessa Kiros's Venezia)

I have only eaten this biscuit once before. On the colourful island of Burano, just off Venice. I remember it clearly like it was yesterday. We had just finished a delicious Italian summer lunch when out came these S shaped biscuits. No meal is complete without a shot of espresso in Italy and the heavenly combination of the sweetness of these biscuits dunked into the bitterness of the espresso was unforgettable.

So unforgettable that when I saw this recipe in Tessa Kiros's Venezia cookbook, I just knew I had to give it a go!

VERDICT: 9.5/10 If you enjoy shortbread-like bikkies, then you really have to try making these. Not only were they easy to conjure up but really yummy too. The best bit is how you can control the amount of sugar that goes into the recipe. Highly recommended!

Italian Bussola Biscuits

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Ingredients:

125g cold, unsalted butter, chopped

250g cake (OO) flour

110g sugar

2 egg yolks

1.5 tsp vanilla extract

1.5 tsp finely grated lemon zest

2 tbs milk

Method:

1) Mix butter with flour and sugar until it looks like damp sand

2) Combine egg yolks, vanilla extract, lemon zest and milk in a bowl.

3) Pour into the bowl and mix it together until it comes together (alternatively, pulse in a food processor)

4) Turn out onto a board and bring it together to make a fat 20cm long log.

5) Wrap in plastic wrap and put into fridge for an hour or more

6) Preheat oven to 170C and line 2 baking trays with baking paper

7) Lightly flour surface and hands and keep half the dough in fridge whilst you work with the other half

8) Cut slices about 5mm and roll out into 8cm thick to form S shape. Alternatively, you can roll them and join the ends instead to make circles.

9) Bake for 10-15 minutes until pale and golden here and there. They shouldn't bake till too hard as they harden once out of the oven

10) Best served with an espresso!!

Let's just say I have been eyeing this food processor for a LONG time. It was the typical case of "Do I need it? Or do I NEED it?". But then someone special decided to surprise me with it. And he chose it in my favourite colour too - white!

Tessa's recipe called for OO flour for which I obediently trotted to Essential Ingredient for.

Her recipe stated that it would make 50 biscuits. For some reason, I only got about 20!! I think I made my S's too big!

It was only whilst I was photographing them, that I suddenly realised I have an acute case of dyslexia! My S's were inverted! I had made 2 biscuits instead!!!

(I ate the one in the middle thus the gap!)

The only downside to baking and hauling your mighty food processor out, is the awful washing up afters. The Magimix is dish washer proof so that helps.

Spaghetti Vongole (from Jamie Does Italy)

To all my new readers out there, I just want to say right now that there will be A LOT of Jamie in this little blog of mine. He has to be, hands down, my favourite chef.

It all started back in 2002 when his Naked Chef series started airing on Aussie television. Here was a cutie who not only taught me how to make puttanesca from scratch but also influenced me so much, I ordered my first ever carpaccio in Paris not knowing it basically was thinly, sliced raw meat!

I fell in love (yes, I used the word, "love") with his humour and his pukka one liners and because of him, my culinary repertoire has grown by leaps and bounds.

The love affair still continues and last night, I whipped up his spaghetti vongole.

I have very vivid memories of this dish from a family trip to Venice not so long ago and was aching to recreate it in my own home. In Italy, the locals ate pasta dishes as their entree, not as the main. Additionally, I discovered that the Italians also considered the pasta itself as the star of the dish, not the sauce that accompanied it. Thus most pasta dishes in Italy are dressed very minimally and not drowned in sauces like in Australia.

VERDICT: 7/10 Jamie does put a disclaimer at the bottom of his recipe stating that this dish gets better with practise which I agree wholeheartedly. It is an amazingly fresh dish, perfect for a summer's supper, accompanied by a glass of chilled white wine.

Once upon a time...

I ended my previous blog with the ever famous "The End" and deemed it fitting that I started this new blog with "Once upon a time"

So here goes....

Once upon a time, there was this girl named Cat. She had the most magical childhood. But she knew that she had to leave the safe walls of the castle and venture forth to become a learned being.

On the way, she learnt many things about herself.

She learnt that she loved to cook. She also learnt that she was a foodie in her past life.

She also discovered she was very much an idealist. Romanticist, dreamer, stargazer; whatever you would like to call it.

Now, I would love to tell you how this fairytale ends...but the last time I checked, our heroine was still experimenting in the kitchen, gazing at the stars and well, living life.

So until the "and they lived happily ever after..." bit, hope you all enjoy reading this new little blog of mine!