local dignitaries, the Chancellor of your University, members of the Royal Family, etc. For this reason, the quantities given in this recipe are only for one person. Multiply up when cooking for more people or,if you are totally drongo-thick (at the level of a Jamie Oliver apprentice) get someone with a GCSE in Maths to do the sums for you! Or a 7-year-old.
- Cod - get a fillet that weight about 200g. or looks like the size that you could manage eating in one go. Make sure that it’s got the skin on. Don’t get cod “steaks” or anything that’s still frozen. What you want should be fairly flattish, about 15cms long and about 1cm. thick.
Now, carefully arrange the cheesy grilled cod on a hot plate. Be careful when you take the fish off the grill rack because the cooking will have made it all quite fragile.
Hoorah. The fish is cooked.
Whilst you were preparing and cooking the fish, you could have been sorting yourself out with something to eat with it.
A good suggestion would be:
Mixed boiled vegetables. (which come from the freezer cabinet in supermarkets and are dead easy to cook - just bung ‘em in boiling water for five minutes).
Baked or mashed potatoes. (I’m not gonna tell you how to cook potatoes coz I'm writing this at 10.00pm on Sat. nite and have been invited to a party. Byeee).
- Onion - actually you only need a half onion, but you’ll make a total ass of yourself if you try to buy a half onion. So buy a whole one. Get one that’s medium sized - nothing special, just a bog-starndard, cheap onion will do. If, as happened to me yesterday, some slack-shouldered, acne-pocked oik tries to charge you 80p for it, then stamp your little foot and scweem and scweem and scweem until the Boss Man comes and suggests a more realistic price. Like 14p.
- Cheese - get some dead cheap mousetrap, such as coloured cheddar. You’ll only need about 100g. but you’ll probably have to buy a bigger lump.
- Mustard powder - get good ol’, strong English mustard powder. You’ll find it squatting shyly on supermarket shelves in a nervous proximity to all the poncy mustards.
- Olive oil - or just use vegetable oil. Or melted butter would be ok.
- Salt & Pepper - never-ever buy anything except cheap cooking salt. IMHO, everyone who advises you to buy or use “rock salt” (or any other nonsense) is a dirty rotten scoundrel who is sneering at you and has the ulterior motive of separating you from the hard-earned dosh. Anyway, the recommended daily intake for salt is less than 6g. so you’re probably already eating too many of the white crystals. Futhermore, if there's a suspiciously large quantity of salt in your house, you'll have to employ an expensive solicitor if you ever get raided by the Narcotics Police.
METHOD
Grate about 100g of the cheese.
Finely chop up half the onion. It needs to be very finely chopped so, if Santa ever got you a food processor, now’s the time to use it. If you’re chopping the onion with a knife, it’s gonna take you at least three minutes and you’ll be weeping like a baby.
In a bowl, mix together the grated cheese, with the finely chopped onion, with a teaspoon of the mustard powder, with a pinch of salt and pepper.
Meanwhile, heat the grill (full blast) and try to pluck out of the fish any of its extraneous bones. Use your fingers dipped in salt coz this’ll give you a better grip.
Then lightly dampen the piece of cod with the oil. Lay the cod, skin side up, on the rack of a grill pan and put it under the hot grill for about 3 minutes. Don’t let it burn. Then, carefully turn the piece of cod over so that it doesn’t disintegrate. The white flesh side of the cod will now be facing upwards. Drizzle on a bit more oil and grill for another 3 minutes.
