D: This week we’re doing jumping ahead a couple of meals and doing a dinner recipe. This meal is effectively a pesto crusted fish and veggies. It’s super easy, and helps resist the urge to treat dinner as a red meat meal, as I often do.

You’ll notice, in this post, I’ve added a required tools section. My beef with the recipes in this book so far, is that tools, especially uni-taskers that one might not already have are buried in the body of recipe. So I’m going to add in my notes:

a) any odd required tools that might be a surprise b) I’ll move up any prep that I think should be done earlier, in my opinion (this will largely affect next week, you’ll see, you’ll see.)[S: David has a love/hate relationship with Jamie Oliver recipes. It’ll be mentioned more than once for sure.]

[Serves 2]

Ingredients:

• 7 oz ripe cherry tomatoes on the vine
• 1 slice of whole-grain bread (or bread crumbs, or panko)
• 1/2 a bunch of fresh basil (1/2 oz)
• 1/2 a clove of garlic
• 1 tbsp pine nuts
• 1 lemon – 1/2 cut into wedges, 1/2 to juice
• 2 large eggs
• 3/4 oz Parmesan cheese, grated
• extra virgin olive oil
• 2 * 4oz fillets of firm white fish, skin off, scaled, boned
• 8 oz baby white potatoes
• 3 1/2 oz each of green beans, broccolini, baby spinach
• 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 1 pinch sea salt

Required tools:

• mortar & pestle (can be substituted with a food processor, preferably with a small work bowl)
• oven, preheated to 400F
• pot or pan with matching colander [S: If you don’t have one, no worries. Keep reading and see the hack we did since we lacked this ourselves]
• medium sized mixing bowl to toss and coat vegetables

Time the cookbook says it’ll take: 30 minutes Actual time it took to cook: 30ish minutes

Verdict: I really liked this recipe. With a couple of tweaks, it’s a super easy dinner to throw together that is filling and tasty. We’ll be making it again, and likely ~ somewhat often as a fallback when we’re not sure what to make for dinner [S: We actually made it again the day after. So it’s definitely something we’ll be keeping in our back pocket].

The Step-by-Step:

Step 1: Cherry tomatoes

• lay out the tomatoes on a sheet pan, put in the oven for 10 minutes while doing other prep
• while tomatoes are cooking, pulse a slice of whole grain bread in the food processor until broken down into crumbs (this could be substituted for bread crumbs or panko to speed up prep time – somewhere around 1/4 cup of breadcrumbs/panko if substituting)
• start water, salted boiling in the pot on the stove

Step 2: Pesto

• peel the garlic
• pound the basil in a mortar and pestle
• add the garlic and sea salt
• add the pine nuts
• work into a paste
• squeeze in 1/2 the lemon’s worth of juice (around 0.5 tbsp)
• grate in, or add grated parmesan
• add 1 tbsp oil
• mix together

Step 3: Breading the fish

• cover the fish pieces in the pesto (this will be messy)
• bread the fish in the breadcrumbs (pesto is the binder)
• remove the pan from the oven, add any leftover breadcrumbs to the pan with the tomatoes
• add lemon wedges to the pan, to roast
• place fish on pan
• roast in the oven for 15 minutes, or until fish is cooked through and breading is golden brown

Step 4: Vegetables – potatoes

• clean the baby potatoes if needed
• half any larger potatoes, small ones can remain whole-grained
• add to boiling water on the stove, will be cooking for 15 minutes, but in parallel with steaming the other veggies

Step 5: Vegetables – greens

• clean and trim green beans
• halve the broccolini
• after the potatoes have been cooking for 10 minutes, place the beans and broccolini in the colander to steam
• after 13 minutes, add the spinach to the colander

You’ll notice we happen to not have a pot with a matching colander. So that was our solution in the image above, we used a drying rack over top of the pan, and put the lid over that [S: Not going to lie, was quite proud of thinking of it at that very moment.].

Step 6: Dressing vegetables

• add balsamic vinegar and 1 tbsp oil to a bowl large enough to toss the vegetables in (a medium sized mixing bowl)
• drain potatoes
• toss vegetables in the dressing
• serve, with the roasted lemon wedges, and a drizzle of balsamic

That’s it! With some streamlining of the process, and a little bit of practise with prepping everything, it’s legitimately a few minutes of prep and around 25 of cook time. Easy peasy, just need to.. uhh.. thread your prep steps so you’re not wasting any time while things are cooking.