halibut with thyme & lemon

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.

pomegranate marlin and dill pilaf

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.

roasted vegetables with an egg on top

We were dying for vegetables after our odd weekend in the Tri-Cities, so we loaded up a shopping cart with mushrooms, onion, fennel, beets, carrot and a parsnip and took it all home to roast with olive oil and salt. I separated out the shrooms and fennel to roast together, parboiled the beets and put them in a pan with the carrot, and put the onion and parsnip in a third pan (J is not a big fan of the parsnip). When everything was caramelized and soft I tossed it all together on our plates, and topped the piles with a lovely halibut steak that I had roasted as well. It was all very fresh tasting and delicious, and made us feel that it was nice to be home (sleeping in our own bed helped, too).

So dinner was nice, but I felt the high point was lunch the next day. I was feeling inspired after seeing this post and video on poaching eggs, as well as months of reading the wonderful blog posts on Last Night’s Dinner featuring beautiful poached eggs on top of duck hash or other yummy things. I had been known to poach an egg occasionally, but usually wimped out and ended up frying them (I’m good at frying eggs, at least) and eating them for breakfast on top of leftover greens or couscous.

But I did it! It’s not as pretty as it could be, but it was perfectly done and it tasted wonderful with the roasted parsnip and beets and such, with the yolk dribbling down and mixing with the sweet vegetables juices. With a good sprinkle of fleur de sel, it was a cheery and restorative lunch.

cooking class: polenta three ways

Last week we helped out at a great cooking class: Casey Schanen from Nell Thorn restaurant did the cooking and Renee Stark of Noble Wines brought the wine. The theme was polenta in different preparations, which sounds like it would be repetitive, but in fact it was fabulous. Not a surprise, of course - Casey’s cooking is always fabulous.

We didn’t start out with polenta immediately. Casey likes to bring an assortment of nibbles with him, so we assembled a bunch of plates for the guests with marinated olives, cheesy wafers, Nell Thorn sourdough bread and butter. I think putting out the nibbles is a great idea, it keeps the guests from getting antsy while the first course is being demonstrated (the classes start at 6:30 and sometimes no food gets served until 7:30).

roasted balsamic tomatoes

I haven’t been feeling a lot of inspiration this week, so I’ve been depending on stopping by the co-op after work each day and seeing what catches my eye first. One night it resulted in a very nice pork tenderloin , with a pilaf of wild rice, mushrooms, shallot, spinach and roasted sweet potatoes, so that worked out all right.

For the next night I had an idea that I would get some fish, probably salmon. No idea what I wanted for a side dish, so I grabbed a cookbook that I hadn’t yet done a thing with, Jamie’s Kitchen by Jamie Oliver. After a quick flip through I was struck by a lovely photo of a panful of roasted tomatoes stuffed with bay leaves (I guess I am all about the pretty pictures), and decided that if I could find the ingredients I would do it. Of course tomatoes are SO not in season right now, but the co-op had some decent hothouse romas, and I had basil in the fridge and my own garlic and bay leaves from the garden. Jamie calls for baby leeks, but that just wasn’t going to happen.

sole with lentils and breadcrumb salad

Boy, this dinner was a smashing success if I do say so myself. We had been pondering what to do for food one night, and I was idly considering something involving fish, since we were about to go to the grocery store. I opened up a few cookbooks and flipped through their fish sections…many of them too complicated, too weird-sounding, wrong kind of fish…then, in Tom Douglas’ Seattle Kitchen, a book I hadn’t yet made a thing out of (but I sure do love the Palace Kitchen and Serious Pie, two of his restaurants), I saw a heading for pan-roasted halibut with herbed lentils and toasted breadcrumb salad.

For some reason, the thought of that just really did it for me, so I headed to the fish case with my eyes peeled for halibut. They had had halibut cheeks a few days previously, but of course they were out - so I ended up getting a few fillets of very fresh, beautiful looking Dover sole.

Because I had such a delicate fish, I ignored the recipe’s instructions for cooking halibut and instead just tossed the fillets in a pan with some butter and pan fried them very lightly. Other than that I followed the recipe pretty closely, with just a few small adjustments on the fly.

Padang fish curry

In further pursuit of soft foods I can eat after my oral surgery last week, I’ve been going through cookbooks and looking for recipes that use white fish - I figure it’s one of the few animal proteins that doesn’t require much chewing. I’ve also been getting bored, so I thought a curry might be nice, as long as it didn’t have too many chunks in it. What I ended up with was the Padang fish curry, a sweet and slightly spicy coconut milk dish, from Cradle of Flavor. Thank goodness, it was actually like eating real food again!

Padang fish curry for two

adapted from Cradle of Flavor by James Oseland

flavoring paste:

• 2 oz shallots, coarsely chopped
• 1 clove garlic, chopped
• 1/4 tsp ground turmeric
• 1 piece fresh ginger, thinly sliced
• 2 unsalted macadamia nuts

for the curry:

• 2 Tbsp canola oil
• 1 stalk lemongrass (ideally), tied into a knot
• 2 kaffir lime leaves
• 1 daun salam leaf (if you have it)
• 10 oz coconut milk
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• kosher salt
• two serrano chiles, tops cut off
• 2/3 lb white fish

Salmon with beets & fennel

Saturday night’s dinner was pretty exciting (and filling), so I made us a “recovery” dinner for Sunday, just a fillet of wild-caught sockeye salmon, pan-seared in olive oil, and a head of fennel and some beets, cut up and roasted in the oven. It was beautiful, fresh tasting and sweet, and it turns out that salmon and fennel are really good together (note for future experiments).

Of course, we may have undone some of the good of this dinner by also baking up the rest of the gougères and eating them all. Whoops.