Are you afraid of cooking fish? It doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, I find fish one of the easiest things to prepare. The most common crime is overcooking it. No one wants to eat something dry and tasteless. Fish should be anything but that. Unfortunately, if you’ve ever been served overcooked fish, you probably didn’t want to eat it again any time soon.
As usual, I did not know ahead of time what I would do with the cod that I had defrosted. That’s the fun of cooking: creating something delicious and new with ingredients on hand. I don’t often repeat exactly the same dish because ingredients available vary and I can’t be bothered with shopping lists and recipes. Buying lots of fresh vegetables, whole grains and proteins makes that possible.
Once I was ready to think about dinner, I looked at my produce and realized I had some tomatoes that I needed to use. What else would pair well with my anchor ingredient, the cod? Looking into my refrigerator, I remembered I had some feta. Hey, I don’t often use cheese with seafood, but I remembered a shrimp dish from a Greek restaurant that contained tomatoes and feta. It had been delicious, so I began to get inspired with a Mediterranean theme. Fresh fennel and some rice could round out this meal.
Here’s how I went about cooking this fish dinner:
Sliced fennel bulb and tossed with olive oil to put on the bottom of a casserole dish. Sprinkled with a tiny bit of salt. Spread a layer of leftover cooked brown turmeric rice on top of that. (Always cook extra rice because it comes in so handy for easily pulling together a future meal like this one.) Seasoned cod with garlic powder, dried oregano and salt. Topped each piece of cod with sliced tomatoes. Crumbled a couple of dice sized chunks of feta all around it and sprinkled some chopped parsley on top. Drizzled a touch of olive oil over the fish and covered casserole dish so everything would stay moist while baking at 350 for about 40 minutes.
Now, 40 minutes sounds like an awfully long time for fish. Here’s why it worked in this case: multiple layers of ingredients filling up a casserole dish take longer to cook. The cod I used were really thick chunks. The sliced tomatoes and casserole lid kept everything super moist. You want the fennel to get tender and the fish should just be cooked through until opaque and flaky. So start looking at it sooner rather than later. I checked on things after 20 minutes and then at ten minute intervals based on how it looked.
How Will You Know When It’s Done?
Fish was moist and juicy and the tomato had just begun to slump down. Test the middle with a fork to see if it flakes and is opaque. It looked beautiful in the baking dish and on the plate, but at the end of a very long day, I was more interested in eating than in taking pictures for your benefit. So, today’s picture is of a leftover bite just so you can see the way the inside of properly cooked cod should look. Never dry. Always flavorful and juicy.
So there you go. Cooking a fish dinner is so simple that it could become your favorite go-to meal. Develop your intuition in the kitchen and start cooking without a recipe. Here’s more on how to successfully bake fish fillets.
Ingredients I Used:
- sliced fresh fennel bulb
- cooked brown rice with turmeric
- cod fillets
- dried oregano
- garlic powder
- salt
- olive oil
- feta cheese
- chopped parsley