Weekly cooking - Part 1

A little history:

We got hooked on watching Gordon Ramsay's "The F Word". It's basically a show where he encourages people to cook proper food instead of buying ready-made meals and eating junk. After watching a season and a half (or, if you're British, a series and a half) we decided that we both like cooking, and we could probably make better food than the pre-packaged stuff at Costco.

ANYWAY, I decided it would be fun to blog about the food choices we make each week - which ones worked, and which ones didn't.

So, this week, our first food choice was Pan Fried Hake with Tomato Relish, from Gordon's Fast Food book (my wonderful father's day present).

Turns out that the dudes at Safeway have never heard of Hake. Instead of trucking down to Billingsgate market and paying a snotload of money, Kathryn picked up some snapper fillets instead.

The recipe was super simple - just pan-fry the seasoned fish in olive oil, then remove the fish and toss in some cherry tomatos, white wine vinegar, cilantro, green onion and seasoning. The recipe called for Hake with the skin on - and you were supposed to make the skin all crispy and golden as you cooked it.

Turns out that snapper doesn't come with the skin on from Safeway. So, our fish crumbled a little bit.

In any event, this one was a definite winner. It didn't even taste like fish (that was for Janine). It was so good that we almost didn't have restraint to save some for the next day.

Today's bonus:

We had a roast chicken last week, so we decided to make our own chicken stock. In all, we now have 7 cups of stock frozen away, just waiting on a recipe to use it. I can't wait - it smelled wonderful while simmering.