My Jamie Oliver Experiment

This is me making fish cakes for the first time. The recipe is from Jamie Oliver's cookbook "Jamie's 30 Minute Meals". I love that guy. His show is really fun to watch. It is one of the few regrets Garrett and I have for not having TV :) I read the beginning of his cookbook and was inspired by his ideas. He felt that he was spending too much time cooking during the busy week and doing too much clean up. So he decided that for the week night meals there needed to be something quick and still healthy and yummy. He and his team did a lot of work and made the "30 Minute Meals". He has explicit directions for step by step getting the meal done in 30 min. He tells you what to do first second third so that you have all dishes going at the same time instead of making it dish by dish. Since we aren't doing once a month cooking right now I was captured by this idea and dying to start trying. I want to learn the style of cooking he uses in this cookbook. So, I decided to cook my way through the cookbook much like the movie "Julie and Julia". I will probably start putting all of these things on a new blog so that those of you who are interested in how it goes can follow it, and those who aren't don't have to get on here and see it :)
Here is my first Jamie Oliver 30 minute meal:
Swedish-style Fishcakes, Roasted baby New Potatoes, Sprout salad, and Fresh Zingy Salsa. When I was shopping for the fish it seemed almost wasteful to go to a beautiful fish market and buy really beautiful and high quality fish-Salmon, Tarakihi, and Tuna and then plop them into the food processor and grind them all up. That seems like something you do with leftover fish, but that's not Jamie's style I guess. Just so you know...the fish alone in this recipe cost $50. Gasp! I know I know. But it was restaurant quality food and we got 2 and 1/2 meals out of it so that made it not quite so terrible.

If you are going to cook like Jamie you can't be afraid to get your hands dirty. He mixes, stirs, fluffs, and kneads everything with his hands. After making the fish mixture into a ball you flatten it onto the bread crumbs that make your crust. Jamie makes his own bread crumbs in the food processor, but since I have a large bag of high quality wheat breadcrumbs I just used those.

This is what they looked like when it was time to turn them over. Some of them were a little dry from over cooking so I had to cook them less time that I thought they really needed.

Golden brown on both sides means time to take them out.

Roasted bennes with a little butter, salt and fresh rosemary. He used new potatoes but since it is benne season here, and since they are so delicious I used these instead.

Here is the food: fishcakes, salsa, and salad. The salad has sprouts, fresh mint, avocados punnet of cress (which I couldn't find although I finally figured out what that is), and crisp breads or carta di musica. Simple but very amazing when you get a little of everything all at once. LOVED IT!

There were some sprouts in there that were radish sprouts and those pack quite a punch. I would recommend just using alfalfa sprouts when feeding this dish to kids.
One of the best things about this salad is the drizzle of olive oil and squeeze of fresh lemon that are the dressing. It is fun to drizzle and squeeze your dressing right there at the table. The kids loved it too, and kept squeezing more lemon on their fish and salad.

The zingy salsa was FANTASTIC. We loved it. It has bell peppers, fresh red and green chillies, garlic, cucumber, red wine vinegar, lime juice, and fresh basil. It is so fresh tasting and we had lots of leftovers so I put it over scrambled eggs for breakfast and it was divine.

My sweet husband squeezing his fresh lemon. Doesn't he look like a pro squeezer?