If – after more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic – you’re sick and tired of cooking and facing a sink full of dirty dishes – Laura Prepon has a great recipe for you. The former Orange Is the New Black star is a foodie who has turned her passion into a new cookware line, PrepOn Kitchen. Now, she’s sharing her super easy one-pot recipe with HollywoodLife readers.
The stovetop cod recipe (which you can see below) is her go-to way to cook fish (as you can see in the video above, where she uses the same technique to poach salmon). As the 41-year-old mother-of-two says in the clip, this method is perfect if you don’t want to “smell up your house and your apartment” with fish and you’re hankering after something that involves “zero clean-up.”
Finding solutions for tricky problems is the inspiration behind PrepOn Kitchen, which is available on HSN. Laura’s love of cooking is something that has rubbed off on her 3-year-old daughter. In fact, the toddler is already her mom’s sous-chef when they make their breakfast favorite.
“She’s obsessed with pancakes,” Laura says of her daughter, whose name she prefers to keep private. The actress likes to mix up the recipe by focusing on gluten-free options, using quinoa, almond, or even buckwheat flour.
“I put blueberries and walnuts in it and my daughter loves the blueberries and she is also really into walnuts now,” the actress says. “The other cool thing too is she’s now at a point where, because she’s three and a half, she can hold a measuring cup and level it off…safely.”
“I never give her anything sharp,” Laura says, noting that the little girl uses a “safe knife.” Her daughter also likes to crush the walnuts. “I give her walnuts in a baggie and she can smack them and put them up,” the former That ‘70s Show star says.
“It’s a great recipe because she can feel like she’s a part of it,” says Laura, who also has a 1-year-old son. “And then she has that feeling of, not only cooking with her mom, but also then we eat it. It’s like the feedback loop of, ‘Oh, I’m cooking this nourishing thing. I’m with my mother and now I’m with my whole family.’”
When it comes to a quick and easy evening meal that Mommy (or Daddy) can do with a minimum of fuss, Laura suggested this Stovetop Cod recipe, which she also shared in her 2020 book, You and I, as Mothers: A Raw and Honest Guide to Motherhood. Bon appétit!
Laura Prepon’s Stovetop Cod
Ingredients:
2 (8oz) boneless cod fillets
Juice of half a lemon, plus wedges for serving
Olive oil
1 teaspoon of salt
½ teaspoon of ground black pepper
½ teaspoon of Italian flat-leaf parsley (optional)
1 tablespoon of butter
Instructions:
- Rinse the fish and pat it dry. Place each fillet on to a separate piece of parchment-lined tinfoil.
- Squeeze lemon juice onto the fillets, spreading it with your fingers.
- Drizzle with oil and massage it into the fillets. Sprinkle with the salt and pepper.
- Fold the tinfoil over each fillet to create a little pouch. As Laura notes in the video above, where she demonstrates how to do this, “you want to make sure the juices and stuff say inside.” “So, it becomes a like a little pouch and this air above the fish, it basically steams in the lemon juice, the olive oil, salt and pepper, [in] its own juices and…steams itself in this little pouch,” she adds.
- Put each pouch into a deep pan and cover it with a lid.
- Depending on the thickness of the fish, cook on a medium heat for 3 to 7 minutes. “[As] soon as you start hearing a little bit of sizzle…you’re doing to turn it down to medium low and then you gently cover it,” Laura says, noting that if the sizzle gets “really loud,” you should “turn it even lower.”
- Turn off the stove and serve after the fish is cooked to your liking.