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: 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.

Thursday: It's not easy finding greens

Bell pepper omelet with toast and spring greens salad.

This was just a quick weeknight meal using the greens we got at the Columbia farmer's market. For some reason mesclun is not available all winter, but it has been showing up at the markets lately.

Saturday lunch: Salad days

Tasty salad of sucrine lettuce, baby swiss chard, Kirby cucumbers, green heirloom tomato, chopped walnuts, sliced Bosc pear, and chevre. (Pictured in front of a little bit of fall bounty.)

We dressed this salad with a drizzle each of olive oil and champagne vinaigrette, and served it with some multigrain bread and a glass of apple cider.

Saturday lunch: Baba ghanoush

Baba ghanoush (roasted eggplant dip) with pita and mixed baby greens salad.

We still had one eggplant left from last week's market, so we made this dip in order to use it right away. Incidentally, we ended up having to make our own tahini paste by grinding white sesame seeds because we turned out not to have any.

The baby greens mix, though not from Yuno this time, was pretty amazing:



We recognized spinach, purslane, baby Red Russian kale, nasturtium flowers, and possibly arugula - but we haven't ID'd the other seven specimens yet.

Monday: Raw pasta sauce reprise

Ok, we just made raw pasta sauce recently, but heirloom tomato season is short and we like to make the most of it. (Especially this year - the late blight is still taking a toll.) As you can see, we added a little variety by throwing in a green salad mix that we picked up at YuNo Farm. We don't usually buy baby greens mixes, mostly not being salad people, but we liked this mix a lot - it contained fun things like baby red mustard greens and edible flowers.