The sun has finally come out! It’s like “Enchanted April” - a month late. The wisteria is in bloom, the iris are all budding, the lilacs are (finally!) open, and the daphne smells so sweet it almost knocks us out every time we go up our front steps.

After a short trip out of town last weekend, we did a quick swing by the grocery store to get something easy for dinner. Pacific halibut is still looking wonderful, so I picked up a fillet and went home to peruse another of our new cookbooks, West Coast Seafood. This is the book we’ve been needing for a long time - it sometimes seems like all the really comprehensive fish books are either too elaborate for my sort of cooking, or they use fish that we simply never see in this part of the world (turbot? mackerel?).  This new book seems like it strikes a nice balance between accessible and interesting, and it uses real fish that we can actually buy around here.

For my halibut, I picked an easy recipe that sounded good, wasn’t too involved, and also used up an old lemon that I didn’t want to waste. I zested the lemon over the fish, then sprinkled on fresh thyme leaves, salt and olive oil. The recipe was for grilled halibut, but we didn’t have time to fire up the grill that evening - so I put the fish in the oven along with the Yukon Gold potatoes I was roasting, and it came out perfectly - tender, juicy, just cooked through, with lots of clear lemon flavor.

I used the juice from the zested lemon to make a salad dressing, with olive oil, salt, pepper and chopped fresh basil. The lemony greens with the lemony fish were wonderful with the sturdy, crisp roasted potatoes. Also, I had just picked up a bottle of La Piece Sous le Bras chardonnay/viognier/roussanne, and it was magnificent with the fish and potatoes. A lovely, summery supper to finish out the weekend.

This is proving to be a mighty busy week. We kicked it off (after a full Monday back at work) with a cooking class featuring dishes from the Andalusia region of Spain. Brian Tolbert of the Dulce Plate did the cooking, we did lots of chopping and running around with plates.

To keep the guests from expiring from hunger right off the bat, Brian started with some fairly simple mussels cooked in a vegetable and wine broth. They were good, of course (fresh mussels, duh), but I would have liked a slightly heavier broth and a lot of bread to sop it up. Fortunately, there was more food coming…

The second course was quite solid: piquillo peppers stuffed with a mixture of yellowfin tuna and bechamel sauce, then dredged in egg and seasoned flour and fried in olive oil. Wowzers, these were good. I could eat a couple of these for a meal.

Chicken roulades were supposed to be next, but they weren’t done cooking yet, so we had a quick stew made of precooked lentils, precooked potatoes, onion and tomato, blood sausage and Spanish chorizo. Great stuff, with a nice earthiness - I love lentils and sausage together. If anyone was still starving, this took care of it!

For anyone still able to eat after the stew, there came slices of chicken roulade: pounded chicken meat rolled around nuts and prunes, then roasted, sliced and drizzled with balsamic blackberry sauce. To be honest, not my thing (plus I was full), but most people seemed to like it a lot.

The final course was a very simple pear compote that had been simmering away quietly throughout the class. Each portion was topped with toasted almonds - no cream or booze or anything else. Nice clean flavor, and light enough that we could actually eat it without regretting it.

So we came back home from our Vancouver trip loaded down with new cookbooks, and of course I had to immediately find something new to cook. The first recipe that jumped out at me was a pomegranate molasses-marinated swordfish from the Casa Moro cookbook. Hey, I thought, we still have pomegranate molasses! And, as fate would have it, we were able to buy big fat steaks of Hawaiian marlin at the store - plus the weather was good enough for outdoor grilling!

To go along with the fish, the book recommended a pilaf, so I tried out the Moro recipe for rice with dill and pine nuts.  It involved rinsing and then soaking basmati rice so that it took very little cooking - not a technique that I’d tried before, but it worked like a charm.

About two hours ahead of time, I combined pomegranate molasses, cinnamon, cilantro, garlic and salt in a pie pan and rubbed it all over the fish steaks, which then went back into the fridge. Then I measured out the rice, rinsed it several times and set it to soak in warm water and salt. J got the grill started, then sliced eggplant and rubbed it with olive oil and salt.

Once the grill was ready and J was starting to cook up the eggplant for a side dish, I melted some butter and tossed in freshly ground allspice and chopped dill. A minute later I added the drained rice and a quarter cup or so of pine nuts and stirred it all up well, then added water until it was just above the level of the rice. This all got brought to a full boil, then I put the lid on the pot and let it cook at medium heat for five minutes, then turned the heat to low and waited another five minutes. Much to my surprise, at that point the rice was perfectly done! J grilled the fish and brought it upstairs with the eggplant, and we had a really fantastic dinner. The flavors were very mild, but delicious and beautifully matched to each other. The pilaf especially was amazing - must experiment further with this recipe.

For one brief growing season, I worked at a greenhouse. It didn’t pay a lot, and I tended to bring my paycheck home in the form of plants. When we moved I brought many of them with me, and several are still thriving in the garden here, including this pretty exochorda shrub. It’s kind of an awkward plant to grow, since it has a long gangly habit, and despite its resemblance to orange blossoms it has no smell whatsoever. But when it’s in bloom it’s ever so pretty, and the flowering branches can be entwined through other bushes, up walls or over furniture.