As you must’ve known by now; cooking is by far my biggest hobby. I’ve enjoyed cooking and helping out in the kitchen as long as I can remember. One of my earliest cooking memories is preparing entire ‘meals’ together with our girl next door. We started by making mushrooms from eggs and tomatoes, garnished with some mayonnaise. 🙂 As you can imagine, that was hardly enough to be called an entire meal.
I spend most of my spare time in the kitchen, not only when I’m at home but also when I’m at parties, family gatherings or at dinners. I just like helping out and cook a meal.
Every year with Ascension Day we spend the weekend with the family of my mother’s side. The exact amount of participants differs per day but on average we are with 16 -19 people. In the beginning we chose to go out for dinner one of the evenings but since we are making so much noise together it’s just easier to cook for ourselves all of the days. When my sisters, nephew, niece and myself were still young we just loved the first day because arriving on that day meant: fun shopping (putting as much in the shopping carts as we could possibly get in)! My uncle was the star; he just made it so much fun. But honestly I was more interested in what my uncle was going to cook that weekend than putting potato chips and candy in the shopping carts.
Looking back I think that I can honestly say that my uncle has been my biggest example when it comes to cooking. I was looking forward to all the sleepovers I could spend with my aunt and uncle; trying out new recipes in the kitchen, going out for groceries and getting all new, non-regular products and after that; preparing a delicious meal.
During our family weekends my uncle was always one of the chefs and my best memories of those weekends are helping him out while he was cooking. Nowadays I’ll prepare the meals myself. During the year I try to come up with new recipes and ideas on what I could make at our next weekend. Luckily everything was received well so far. For the coming weekend I’m thinking about preparing the following dish: Marinated cod with potato gratin.
Ingredients for 4 pers.:
- 4 pieces of cod
- 4 medium sized potatoes
- 1 lime
- 1 red chili pepper
- 250 ml cooking cream
- 1 clove of garlic
- grated young cheese
- 4 twigs of fresh thyme
- olive oil
- salt and pepper
How to prepare it:
Tip: the dish needs to stand in the oven for 45 minutes, so it’s important to start on time with the preparations.
Get an oven-resistant dish in which the fish as well as the gratin will fit nicely. Heat up the oven to 200 degrees. Grease the dish with some olive oil. Spread the cods on the bottom of the dish, put them closely together so that the gratin isn’t going to fall in between. Grate the skin of the lime and squeeze out the juice. Marinate the cod with a bit of lime juice and some lime grates.
Peel of the skin of the potatoes and cut them with a mandolin or a cheese slicer into very thin slices. Cover the cod with several layers of potatoes until you see a thick layer of potatoes.
Chop the thyme. Cut open the red chili pepper and take out the seeds. Cop the red chili pepper.
Put a small sauce pan on the stove and add some olive oil. Peel of the skin of the garlic while the oil is heating up and remove the root. Squeeze the garlic into the pan and add the thyme and the red pepper.
Fritter the ingredients for a minute and add the lime grates and the cooking cream. Let the cream boil for two minutes. Take the pan of the stove and sprinkle the cooking cream on top of the potatoes. Make sure you spread out the cooking cream over the entire dish. Sprinkle some grated cheese on top of the dish. Put the dish in the oven as soon as the oven is hot enough and leave it in for 45 minutes so the potatoes can get completely cooked.
Enjoy!
Leave A Comment