Wednesday: Trouts and tarts

Rainbow trout baked with fennel, carrot and sweet peppers.

We improvised this bake to take advantage of the sweet, fatty flavor of upstate rainbow trout, which bears some resemblance to salmon.  (On the basis of that resemblance, we also added a generous amount of dill.)  We sauteed the vegetables with some onion before layering them over the fish in a casserole, and then baked it at 350F for about fifteen minutes.  We probably could have gotten away with a minute or two less - but this all depends on the size of the fish.

We also had a special dessert tonight: a red currant tart, cooked in the brand new ramekins we acquired thanks to Giselle's end-of-law-school Westlaw Points redemption extravaganza.

Saturday night pizza

Homemade pizza with broiled eggplant, fennel, mozzarella, Parmesan, and anchovies.

Making pizza dough at home is surprisingly easy, if you allow enough time in advance for the dough to rise. We've made pizza on a few occasions now, but we hadn't done anything more exotic than tomato-basil-mozzarella-anchovy. Tonight, we decided to branch out, using our first eggplants of the year:



Aren't they beauts? Eggplants are in the nightshade family (solanaceae), along with tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes. Like its siblings, eggplant seems prone to hybridize -- or, at least, there are a mind-boggling number of varietals available.

Here's a shot of a pizza ready to go in the oven, with some dough resting in the background: