Grilled betki & mash that can be cooked in one’s sleep

I haven’t posted a recipe in a while but that doesn’t mean that nothing was cooking in our kitchen.

Take this for example. Made in the midst of planning the walk, going to Jaipur and what not.

A grilled betki cooked post spine clinic workout and then a walk. With mash too.

Sounds difficult?

Well this is all I did. I came home after the walk. Took the betki fillets, the fish favoured by Bengalis for Continental cooking, that I bought from Poonam at Khar market (1.5 kilos become 750 g of fillet when cleaned), out of the deep fridge and thawed it in the micro.

I looked around the kitchen shelf and took some pretty intense and distinct flavours to make the marinade.

So in to my mortar went about 10 pickled olives, 2 tablespoons of Habanero sauce (yes, bear with me here). 2 tablespoons of English mustard, 1/2 a teaspoon of salt & 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar. I gently pounded this together.

I then applied the marinade on both sides of the fillets. Poked holes all over the fish with a fork so that the flavours would go deep in. I put the fish on the baking tray lines with a foil.

Preheated the oven for 10 min at 200 C and then put in the tray with fish for 15 min at 200 C.

Once done I let it rest for 5 minutes for the juices to settle down.

For the mash I took out some potatoes that I had asked Banu to earlier boil, peel and keep in the fridge.

I cut these into cubes and put them into a bowl with about 20 g of butter and a pinch of salt. I put this into the micro and heated it for 5 min (you could avoid if the potatoes are hot).

Then I put this mixture into a mixer grinder and whipped it for about 2 minutes.

Dinner was ready.

Perfectly grilled fish. The sweet meat of betki forming a beautiful canvas for the diverse flavours and one could specifically make out the taste of olives and the habanero sauce and bit of the tang in the background of balsamic.

With this there was some angelic buttery mash.

Time spent on cooking?

Not more than ten minutes discounting time taken to photograph the food.

Feels great when folks tell me that the recipes here or the cooking videos have helped them cook. Cooking is very easy. Don’t let folks convince you otherwise. And it’s the best way to ensure you eat well. I just created a  blog page with links to all the cooking videos I have done. Here’s the link.

Would love to know if you have used any of my recipes and, if so, how have they turned out.