The Early Bird Special

My husband has his weekly hockey game this evening, which translates to an early dinner in our household. I started to prep around 4pm today, and before 5pm we were sitting down to a lovely meal! The new menu started today, and I chose to begin with the Steamed Sea Bass, Green Beans with a White Wine, Vanilla, Cream and Garlic Sauce from Jamie's Kitchen by Jamie Oliver. Except, instead of sea bass, I chose to purchase cod steaks at the grocery store...they were a bit more affordable, and looked really nice and buttery. This meant altering the cooking times a little bit but that's okay. This recipe doesn't call for a ton of ingredients so my mise en place didn't take very long at all!

So, here we have 2 vanilla beans, some lemon zest, olive oil, a couple of cod steaks, salt and pepper, a clove of garlic, some green beans, white wine (measured by the glass - gotta love Jamie), a little heavy cream and the leaves from a celery heart, for garnish. Not too much to prep at all!

I made a marinade for the cod steaks, using the lemon zest, one of the vanilla beans seeds, and the olive oil. Vanilla beans are an interesting ingredient - I slit open the leathery skin and scraped out the insides, which look like a black blob when grouped together but when mixed with an oil or liquid, the seeds disperse and you can see how small each one really is. They are like little flecks of deliciousness. I rubbed this mixture all over the cod.

Meanwhile, my large pot of salted water was coming to a boil on the stove, and once it got there, I threw the garlic clove into the water for the first three minutes. On another burner, I had the second vanilla bean's insides, plus both pods steeping in some white wine that I left to reduce. We've definitely got some multi-tasking goin' on here!

Look at all the little flecks of deliciousness!

Once the garlic had been in the boiling water for three minutes, I placed my cod steaks in a steamer and placed them on top of the boiling water. The recipe actually calls for throwing the green beans in the water at this time too, but since my cod steaks were definitely thicker than a fillet of sea bass, I added 3 minutes to the cook time. I put 8 minutes on the timer, and when it counted down to 5, that's when I added the green beans!

While the cod steamed and the green beans cooked, I added the cream to my reduced wine and vanilla beans, and allowed it to heat through. I didn't want the cream to come to a full boil and burn, but I allowed it to get pretty hot and begin to reduce. The recipe said to continue reducing until it coated the back of a spoon nicely, and that's just what I did. I also added a touch of vanilla extract to the sauce...the recipe didn't call for it, but I think my vanilla beans might have been a little old and lost a bit of their flavor, because I wasn't getting the scent I wanted ...so I improvised!

When the timer dinged, I pulled the steamer off of my pot, drained the green beans, and transferred the garlic clove to the sauce and mashed it up a bit in there. I poured the sauce into a small food processor just to blend the garlic in and get a touch of foaminess to the cream. I bunched the green beans on the plate and placed the cod steak on top of that. I drizzled on a generous amount of sauce and then garnished the plate with the celery heart leaves.

Isn't that pretty!? It was a very mild, refreshing dish. There wasn't a lot of salt or pepper in it, but yet it had a ton of flavor. The vanilla beans and lemon zest really added a lovely fresh scent which also transferred to the palate! This dish made me think of spring...something I wish would hurry up and get here!