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.

Sunday: Simmered flounder and kohlrabi

Simmered flounder with sauteed kohlrabi shreds and white rice.

This fish recipe comes from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, although it was intended for a whole fish rather than a fillet.  Garlic, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil and vinegar are brought to boil in a shallow skillet, then lowered to a simmer and the fish is added and cooked for ten minutes.  For the simplicity of the recipe, we actually thought this fish turned out beautifully - simmering on only one side of the fillet produced a pleasant "crust" of strong flavor.  The shredded kohlabi was just sauteed with a little ginger to serve as a crunchy foil.  It would probably have been a bit plain on its own, but it went well with the strongly sesame-flavored fish.

Thursday: Twist and trout

 

Puntarella salad with smoked trout and lemon juice, served over quinoa.

We spiced up our normal puntarella salad by substituting smoked trout for the usual anchovy.  This truly delicious trout from Max Creek Hatchery comes in the form of a whole fish, which can be flaked into a salad or eaten over toast.  We highly recommend it to our New York readers.

Sunday: Pea is for porgy

 

Pan-fried porgy, served with peas with mint.  

Fresh shelling peas are a refreshing treat at this time of year - they don't need much other than a very brief saute in butter, and here we added some fresh spearmint and a little sugar to play up their sweetness.

Monday: Skating along

Skate with brown butter, served with roasted asparagus and couscous.

A skate is a type of ray, and the cut seen here is skate fin.  It's sometimes sold with the cartilage layer still included, but this fillet had been cleaned for us by the good folks at Pura Vida Fisheries.  In this recipe we poached the fish in wine vinegar and water, and topped with with crushed capers and brown butter.  (Brown butter is just butter that is heated until it darkens.)  The skate was interesting - its texture was more like that of lobster than a normal fish.  It was a little rich...though of course that could be because we poured butter all over it.

Sunday: Tap that bass

Black sea bass fillets braised with olive and lemon, served with roasted asparagus and brown rice.

This recipe comes from Paul Johnson's Fish Forever.  Like the Vegetable Book, it's both a comprehensive reference and a reliable recipe source.  We absolutely loved this dish, in which this very strongly-flavored fish is balanced by the acidic lemons and the salty bite of olives.  This is definitely one to make again.

As you can see, asparagus season is now in full swing, and we will be taking advantage of it while we can!

Sunday: Dinosaur food

 Baked monkfish with chive-topped boiled fiddlehead ferns and wild rice.

Fiddleheads are the curled-up young form of the ostrich fern.  In other countries, some other types of ferns are used as well, but apparently some of them are a little toxic.  There is just a brief window each year in which fiddleheads are available, so they are a special treat.  We thought they smelled very similar to asparagus, but the texture is a little firmer and they have their own unique taste.

The monkfish was dredged in flour and herbs, then browned in a pan, after which we added some stock and put the whole thing into the oven to bake.  Monkfish has an interesting lobster-like moist texture.














eating ferns makes you feel like a dinosaur

Sunday: Just a fluke

Broiled fluke with baby mustard greens and quinoa.

Back to our usual fish meal, though the lovely mustard green mix from Monkshood Nursery livened things up a bit.

Sunday dinner: Pollock frolic

Pan-fried pollock on quinoa with kale.

Here's a D4SA take on fish-and-chips quinoa.  The pollock was dredged in flour before shallow-frying, and since pollock is related to cod, it had that familiar firm but flaky texture.

Sunday dinner: The whole fish, and nothing but the fish

Whole roasted Boston mackerel and roasted purple potatoes with mixed greens salad.

This was our very first experience roasting a fish whole.  It came about somewhat by accident, since the fishmonger didn't have enough mackerel fillets for our full order, and instead threw in two small whole fish.  The fish come cleaned and gutted, so all we had to do was rub them with a little oil, season them by stuffing with a couple garlic cloves, and then roast them over a bed of thinly sliced onions and potatoes.  The difficult part was knowing when the fish were done: a fillet has a relatively uniform thickness, so you can usually count on the whole thing being done if one part flakes nicely.  Whole fishes, however, have a lot more variation, so even if one part seemed well cooked, we were still concerned that thicker areas remained too translucent.  Like all cooking, this is obviously a learning process, but now we know that we can do it.  (And whole fish does, often, taste better than fillets.)

We wanted to share with you a picture of our prepped roasting tray complete with mackerel and potato slices, but we realized the image might be a bit graphic for our more sensitive, veggie-oriented readers.  In deference to your sensibilities, we have placed this picture below the jump.  Reader beware.

Sunday dinner: Brought to you by the color orange

Pan-fried grey flounder with roasted sweet potato and gingered carrot-pea salad.

This time, we dredged the fish fillets in a little flour before pan-frying, and served them with fresh lemon juice. The carrots here were diced very fine - almost like those ridiculous mixed vegetable salads you'd find in a school lunch side dish - and simmered with peas, fresh grated ginger, and a little sugar, giving them a lightly sweet dressing.

Sunday dinner: Porgy and Bes(t mustard greens ever)

Pan-fried porgy topped with sesame, served with rice and baby mustard greens.

The fish here is flavored with sauteed ginger and garlic. We used to always broil fish, but now that we're buying better quality fish from the farmer's market, perhaps we're getting a bit braver...

These young mustard greens, purchased at the Columbia greenmarket, made a fantastic salad.

Sunday dinner: Protein, starch, veg

Monkfish with grainy mustard, potatoes roasted with rosemary, and mesclun.

This is a pretty standard fish-and-potatoes meal for us, but we've used the dried rosemary that we specially ordered from our CSA this winter.

Sunday: Stew Night

Saffron-cod stew with 7-grain toast.

We were looking for a recipe to replicate the fish stews that we enjoyed at Portuguese restaurants when were living in the Cambridge/Somerville area, and we found this take on the classic cod-and-potatoes combination. Unlike New England-style chowder, this stew contains no dairy. Instead, it is flavored with saffron, garlic, and onion. We didn't have leeks, prawns, or parsley, and we substituted homemade veggie stock for the fish stock.

Although this stew was pleasant and comforting, it wasn't as similar to those Portuguese stews as we had been hoping. The saffron flavor was perhaps a bit too subtle - we would definitely increase the quantity of saffron if we were to make this recipe again.

Sunday dinner: It's CHOWDA! Say it right!!

Hake chowder with homemade biscuits.

This was our first time making chowder - and quite a success. Chowder always seemed to us to be one of those meals that can only be had at a restaurant. But of course it's been a staple in the Northeast for years in average homes. After making it, we can see why: there's no easier or more practical winter meal than a mix of long-storing potatoes, fresh-caught winter fish, and a little dairy.

In this recipe the fillet gets chopped before being added, but as it cooks the pieces fall apart, giving the chowder that characteristic creamy texture. (In fact, this recipe actually contains no cream - only milk.) We'd be remiss if we didn't mention that this is of course a New England-style chowder, not a Manhattan or Rhode Island-style, which are tomato-based. The long and sordid history of the battle between these two chowder factions is featured extensively in The Food of a Younger Land, and we highly recommend the book to anyone invested in the question.

Faithful readers might notice that these biscuits look a little different from those we made only a short while ago - these are made mostly with whole wheat pastry flour, with only a little half-white bread flour added. Using pastry flour, which has a much lower protein content, changed the texture of the biscuits markedly: they had a much finer crumb and denser consistency.

In the past we always used to use "all-purpose" flour, which has a medium protein content and is therefore pretty versatile. But lately we've discovered the wonders of fresh-milled local bread and pastry flours, which frankly taste a lot better. We've found there's a learning curve involved because the two types of flour act differently in recipes; to cook with them, you need to get a sense of when to use each one and how to adapt recipes to cope with the higher or lower protein content. For example, bread flour can hold a lot more moisture than pastry flour, so to get a similar batter you might need to add a lot more milk or water when using bread flour.

(And by the way, yes, you DO have to say "chowda.")

Monday: Cod Stew

Cod stew with olives and capers, and Pecorino cheese melted on baguette.

Although we cook fish a few times a month, we don't typically incorporate it into more complicated dishes. Usually we just bake or broil a fillet and then put it on a plate with two neatly separated piles of starch and vegetable matter. But it was high time to branch out, so we decided to make this tomato-based cod stew. We both love dried salt cold, known as bacalao (or baccalà, bacalhau, etc), which is also wonderful in stews, but here we used fresh fish.

This stew combines cod, tomato, olive, and capers with lightly floured and fried zucchini/yellow summer squash. (We used the summer squash from our CSA!) The recipe comes from The Silver Spoon, a classic Italian cookbook.

Wednesday: Pea shoots...and scores!

Artic char with stir-fried pea shoots on quinoa.

Pea shoots are the tips of young pea plants, which are snipped off in the spring to encourage the plant to continue growing. We were excited to see them in our Winter Sun Farms CSA, since we haven't made them before. In this stir-fry, they are briefly sauteed with garlic, sherry, broth, soy sauce, and sugar.

Saturday: Tea Sandwiches

Tea sandwiches with several fillings: egg salad, smoked salmon-dill-caper, red radish, watercress, and marinated cucumber.

For a change of pace, this meal was almost entirely NON-local (with the exception of the egg salad we made, which included some local pickles from Rick's Picks, and the smoked Atlantic salmon). But Santa promised Lizz's parents some tea sandwiches, and tea sandwiches are what they got!

Tea sandwiches are generally made with very thin-sliced soft white bread from which the crusts have been removed, and usually contain mayonnaise. They can have many types of fillings, but we made a few classic ones. The radishes were sliced into slim rounds, salted and left to sit for twenty minutes or so, and then rinsed. This process removes a little of the bitterness and makes them crisp.

Our favorite may have been the cucumbers, which we marinated in this improvised manner: two medium-large cucumbers were peeled and sliced as finely as possible. Then we mixed together two minced garlic cloves, about four tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, the juice of one entire lemon, about 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne, and some salt to taste. The cucumbers were added, stirred in thoroughly, and left to marinate for maybe twenty minutes to a half hour. We stirred the mixture every once in a while; at first the liquid collected at the bottom, but it accumulated as the cukes marinated.

Thursday: Hake with a mustard-amaranth crust

Mustard and popped amaranth crusted hake with steamed broccoli Romanesco and couscous.

The amaranth plant is one of those agreeable vegetables that produces both a leafy green and edible seeds. The seeds, which are quite small, can be used as a grain, but they will also pop (like popcorn!) when dry-roasted. Popped amaranth can be used as a topping in the manner of breadcrumbs; it has a nice texture but not a particularly strong taste.

We improvised this topping for hake: mix dijon mustard with melted butter and a little lemon juice and coat the fillet, then cover with popped amaranth. (Although we usually broil fish, this was instead baked at 450 F for 10 - 12 minutes - we've learned from experience that the crust will burn if broiled.)

The broccoli Romanesco was cut into florets and then steamed in the microwave with a dash of crushed red pepper. We put the florets in a small microwavable bowl with a few tablespoons of water and covered with plastic wrap. We then microwaved the florets on high power for two minutes, then in additional one minute increments as needed until they tasted done.

Tuesday: Balsamic Brussels

Broiled haddock with brown rice and garlic-roasted Brussels sprouts.

These sprouts got an amazing treatment out of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: they were allowed to sit undisturbed in a little oil in a hot skillet for 10 minutes with several whole cloves of garlic, and then the whole skillet was transferred into a 450F oven for about 30 minutes. They were finished with a dash of balsamic vinegar. The sprouts end up deliciously singed and slightly crunchy.

If you haven't seen Brussels sprouts in their native habitat, you might be amazed by the below:



Yes, they really grow like that! The sprouts grow like little mini-cabbages along a thick, inedible stalk. The protruding stems once had big cruciferous-looking leaves; these are lopped off before the stalk is sold at market. It is extremely satisfying to snap the sprouts off. (Kind of like the feeling of popping bubble wrap.)