Our never-fail fish dish - Baked Dory in Mashed Potatoes

When Mother is too busy to make dinner and I am in the mood to help out in the kitchen, we always go for our foolproof healthy dish - baked cream dory topped with mashed potatoes.  It's good for us because its gourmet-ish (so we don't feel deprived that there's no good food at home) but its also yummy and filling.  When Mama goes out of town or is busy for the weekend, we make a lot of this dish, store it in the fridge and just heat it in the microwave when we're hungry.  We all like it (well, except for our baby brother who is still such a growing boy) so nobody complains.

So it's pretty easy to make.  For the baked dory, all you need is the fish -cream dory(supermarket love), dried basil leaves, a pinch of salt and the ingredient of the day, a small sachet of Knorr Real Sarap.  Its really a no-brainer. You just lay the dory in an oven-safe platter, sprinkle it with the salt, Knorr Real Sarap and dried basil leaves and put it in the oven for six minutes.  In my case, I bake it in the microwave, because I'm still afraid to use our real big oven.  I haven't baked in a while.  The microwave and I are pals.  (Thank God our friends gave us one as a wedding gift).

I think anyone who has ever ate at KFC or Kenny Rogers know that mashed potato isn't just mashed potato.  My love affair with potatoes has led me to several experiments on how to make our mashed potato perfect.  But just now, looking for a proper mashed potato recipe, I came across this article that says there is no perfect recipe for mashed potatoes.  It just depends on how you want yours.  I like mine creamy and buttery.  Mama wants it salty and less creamy.  But making mashed potato is so basic (yabang!) that you can always alter the ingredients to get the taste and consistency you want.

Our recipe goes like this: we peel the potatoes, mash them with a fork and put it in a pan with butter.  I just mix it well until the butter's all melted.  After that I sprinkle white pepper, salt and Knorr Real Sarap. I just mix and stir so that the potatoes blends finely with the other ingredients.  I usually add half a cup of all-purpose cream and half a cup of milk, but we didn't have all-purpose cream last night so I just poured in a cup of fresh milk and mixed it.  For a while there, I thought I ruined our mashed potato (really, who ruins a simple mashed potato dish?) because they were swimming in milk.  It looked almost soupy.  But I grated some cheese in it, continued to stir and after a few minutes, the potatoes absorbed the milk and had the perfect creamy color.  I added some more salt because the last time hubby tasted my mashed potatoes, he said it lacks a bit of salt (but I actually like it less salty).   It's ready!:)

After that I just put the mashed potatoes on top of the baked fish so that it's completely covered and it's back to the oven for three minutes! Viola! We now have our easy, ready-to-serve gourmet dish that we can store and reheat any time we get hungry.  My sister and I had it for dinner last night with some salad, our parents paired it with rice.  As of this writing, the boys, who ate out last night are having it for hangover brunch.

Here's how it looked like last night after we got a pretty big serving:

(I know, I have to work on food photography.  I didn't bother to make an elaborate presentation for this too)


It's good that this is one of my no-brainer dishes.  I want to learn dishes that can be stored and reheated without losing its goodness. Hubby has irregular meal times, and as a boy, is always hungry so I would always want him to feel that I have something waiting for him inside the fridge.  It will save us from emergency fastfood and it's good for him since he is not allowed to eat pork or beef.

Oh by the way, here's a more decent version of the mashed potato recipe from the internet:
http://www.reluctantgourmet.com/mashed.htm

So that's one down, and so much more to go! Mama Ets is out of town, but I promise to cook the simple lutong-bahay dishes for the coming week!=)