On top of waxin’ recipes and cooking, Gerry Mak plays in the band Bloody Panda.

Some cooking methods are reserved for hipster foodies, while others are only for the working masses. Braising is the domain of McSweeney’s-reading elites, whereas Joe Six-Pack prefers boiling.  You have a subscription to the New Yorker?  Let your cleaning lady fry her onions while you sauté yours.  The way you apply heat to your food denotes class and privilege.  Do you know the difference between baking and roasting?  More often than not, roasting refers to cooking something in the oven at a higher temperature than baking, but then there’s slow roasting, which calls for temperatures lower than you would use to bake bread.  The confusion in terms stems from the changes that occurred in cooking with the advent of the home oven/stove top setup we’re used to these days.  In any case, if you’ve got a piece of meat in the oven, just tell people you’re roasting it, and they will know that you went to an Ivy League.

Roasted Whole Rockfish with Sautéed French Beans and Watercress Porcini Mushroom Soup

Ingredients:
1 whole fish (I used rockfish because it was cheap at about $2.50/lb and locally caught)
parsley
lemons
garlic
onions
bay leaves
porcini mushrooms (I used the dried kind from the Asian market which cost $1.75/package)
watercress (nothing says haute cuisine like watercress, even though you can get it for $1.59/lb)
chicken stock (put a left over chicken carcass in a pot with salt, onions, carrots, and celery, and put it in a 180-degree oven overnight)
French beans (more commonly known as green beans, but we’re trying to sound fancy here)

Instructions:

Fish: Make sure to have the fish guy clean and gut the fish.  You can have the head removed, but that’s wasteful, and white people who have been to Thailand pride themselves on being able to handle things like fish heads.  Preheat the oven to 400 degrees (that’s roasting temperature for sure!).  Rub the fish with salt, pepper, and oil, making sure to get it in the cavity.  Stuff the fish with lemon wedges, chopped garlic, and chopped parsley, and tuck some bay leaves under it in the roasting pan.  Put it in the oven.  The fish is done when the meat lifts off the bone easily – this fish was a bit over two pounds, and it took about 20 minutes.

Soup: Sauté some onions and garlic in a pot (tip: I often fry up some diced up bacon first before adding the onions) until they’re transluscent.  Pour the stock in.  Let it simmer for a while. Meanwhile, rehydrate the mushrooms in hot water for about 15 minutes. Throw them into the pot.  Keep simmering until the mushrooms are tender.  Rinse and chop up the watercress, discarding the tougher ends of the stems.  Throw that in the soup about 5 minutes before your ready to serve.

French beans: trim off the stems. Get a pan relatively hot, put in some oil, and throw the beans in, making sure to shake the pan a bit so the beans cook evenly and don’t scorch.  Salt.  Pepper.  Garlic if you want (I didn’t because I had garlic in all the other dishes). Turn the heat down, add a knob of butter if you want, and let it cook until your desired doneness is achieved.  I like my beans pretty well done, but not mushy.