Baked Cod with Butter Sauce

Very nice in taste, but more complicated than really necessary, and I don't really see this qualify as 'Real Fast Food'.

It took me at least 45 min to get the food on the table. Half of this might have been my fault, as I thought it would be fastest to first boil the potatoes, then in the meantime prepare the runner beans before looking at the fish. I ended up having to keep the side dishes warm until the fish was finally done. But actually, I would have expected the fish to be done much faster, or at least that the recipe would give an indication of how much time you'd need.

Also, I had a problem with the quantity and the required size of the baking dish. The recipe requires 'one glass of white wine' - but how much is that? I would expect something like 125 ml, but I know that in some places, you'll be served a glass full to the rim with wine, which is about 250 ml. The recipe does give a clue, albeit a vague one: at the very end, after baking and then reducing, you should end up with approximately 8 tbsp (=120 ml) of sauce. At that point, the sauce should have been reduced by two thirds, which means that originally it should have been 360 ml of sauce; this includes the 50 g butter (~ 50 ml) you added in the very beginning (for the ease of calculating, I'll ignore the fact that some liquid will have evaporated during the 15 min spent in the oven). So, for the purposes of the recipe, expect one glass of wine to be 310 ml, if not more. Wow.

The problem I had with the size of the baking dish is that I didn't realize immediately how much wine was needed. The recipe requires 'a shallow baking dish', so I chose a shallow baking dish which fit the fish snuggly, and added what I thought was a good amount of wine - the wine covered the fish completely. This set me off thinking, as the fish would have cooked in the wine, instead of baked, and it was only then that I realized that I was supposed to add even more wine (see above), and that the point wasn't necessarily to use a shallow baking dish, but one that was large enough that the fish wasn't covered by the wine. Geez, why didn't you say so?

So no wonder it took me so long to get this dish done!

In the end, there is a much faster way to do it, even if not quite as sophisticated. According to the recipe, after you've baked the fish in the sauce of white wine and butter for about 15 min, you'll take out the fish, keep it warm (try doing that without lettng the fish get either cold or dry!), reduce the sauce by two thirds, and then add more butter to give it a better consistency. It would be much faster to fry the fish in butter (or, if you really must, bake it in a very small dish, with just a little butter and white wine), while you make the butter sauce in a separate pan on the stove at the same time. Don't forget to scrape the fish juices into the sauce at the very end! This is what we did on the second day, and it was just as nice.

I will admit that the sauce was just very slightly acidic, which is most likely because I used a bottle we've probably had in the fridge since Christmas (this sounds bad, but it was a good wine and had actually kept quite well) - with a newer bottle, you probably won't have that problem. And it it's actually nice enough to serve it to guests!

I also really liked the combination with boiled potatoes and runner beans; the sauce probably works just as well with salmon, leeks and boiled potatoes.