Luscious!
We’ve had a weird spring, which makes us even more giddy to see strawberries at the farmers market. It’s hard to feel springy when you’re using your fireplace to stay warm on May 4. The temperature dropped from the 80s to the mid 40s that week. But berries always let us know summer is just around the corner.
We’ll be featuring strawberry recipes all week — salads, booze, desserts! — and highlighting a few of our old favorites. Here’s a look back at some of our favorites:
Quick and easy!
This very easy, very quick and very delicious mushroom sauce changed my life, completely.
Okay that’s a total exaggeration, but well, at least I no longer have to go and buy those pre-made sauces for steaks (God knows what’s in there). I can make this sauce myself, at the comfort of my own home, with pantry ingredients (okay you probably need to grab the mushrooms and milk/cream from the market, but yea you get the idea, right?) And the sauce tastes so good, so spoon-licking good that I can’t stop eating it right out from the pot (even before I started cooking my steaks).
So yea, in a way you can say that this sauce is revolutionary. 😉
View original post 442 more words
TGIEOT—yes, that’s a bit more than TGIF! It’s end-of-term. The Spring term was the school term from hell, starting right at the end of Fall term! Over the winter break I had unexpected course preparation to do for two online classes—switching from Blackboard to Sakai—for content management. Top that off with an ongoing indexing project, and it’s—well, let’s just say it left very little time for cleaning, cooking, or writing! Then, add to that a hard-drive failure for my computer….but it’s over now.
I’ve taken some time to work on revising the on-deck herb garden since I had plants that needed to go into their home pots, and a couple of days to do nothing but have quality time with the cat. All that has left me yearning for some relaxation time and some really good food—cooked by me.
My day was absolutely made when I got my email delivery of the “Fresh Catch” specials from my local Harris Teeter this morning: they had monkfish! In terms of favorite fish, that’s right up there with Chilean sea bass for me. Needless to say, I scarfed down my morning coffee and headed right off to HT.
fennel, leeks and garlic
Supper this evening was roasted monkfish, with roasted fennel with leeks, garlic, and a dash of red pepper flakes, with a nice un-oaked chardonnay. The fennel was an in-store, spur of the moment thing since it looked so gorgeous.
Even though it is warm this afternoon, I opted to cook in the oven because I wanted roasted fennel as well. I’ve done monkfish in hobo-pack style before but I thought I’d try roasting it this time and see if I couldn’t have a one-pot dinner.
monkfish
I’d seen a post by Edward Schneider in Mark Bittman’s NY Times column (Diner’s Journal) about roasting monkfish, and the differences in monkfish on both sides of the Atlantic. After reading that I salted my monkfish for about an hour, and then roasted it. I did manage to make a one-pan meal out of it. Since I had to allow about 40 minutes for the fennel to roast, I started that first. After about 15 minutes, I laid the monkfish on top of the leeks, pushing the fennel wedges to the side, and popped it back into the oven for about 15 minutes. I used very simple seasoning on the fish—olive oil and salt before going into the oven, and nothing for than fresh-ground black pepper and a pat of unsalted butter after it came out of the oven. So very simple—so very good, and even healthy.
(The only thing I wish I had done differently would have been to add some sweet red (or orange or yellow) bell pepper with the fennel. A glass of un-oaked chardonnay complemented the meal very nicely.)
The “leftover” cod to which I alluded in a previous post was the result of beginning-of-term course preparation frenzy (always happens no matter how well I think that I’ve planned). It was an OMG-I’m-starving-what-have-I-got-in-the-fridge, what-can-I-put-into-the-oven-so-I-don’t-have-to-watch-it, panic situation.
cod & vegetables ready for oven
I had the cod fillet, but I was really pressed for time. After madly rummaging in the vegetable crisper, and came up with cabbage, carrots, potatoes, lemons, and onions. The cabbage got cut into bite-size pieces, the carrots and potatoes sliced into about 3 mm (1/8-inch) pieces. I tossed the cabbage and very thinly sliced onions with some extra-virgin olive oil and a pinch of salt. I gave the carrots and the potatoes the same treatment, threw in one of the few herb mixes that I keep on hand–herbes de Provence (my go-to in panic mode), some red pepper flakes put the fillet on top, plopped some lemon slices in, covered it, and stuck it in the partially preheated 325°F oven for about 45 minutes since it was a very thick cod fillet–and set a timer! (Since there were lemon slices, and the cabbage was still damp from rinsing, the cover for this baking dish fit very well, and I knew there would be a bit of liquid from the fish, I didn’t add any water.)
one-dish meal
When the timer went off I went back to see what I had–the thinly sliced carrots and small red potatoes were tender, the cabbage was tender but still slightly crisp, and the fish flaked nicely–success on the fly! If you don’t like a little crunch with your cabbage, you might remove the heavier ribs.
Good results for minimal effort, and a really healthy meal. The lemon and extra-virgin olive oil complemented all the veggies and the fish. The red chili pepper flakes spiced things up just a little. Yes, pretty simple, but tasty. Good food doesn’t have to be complicated if you have good things to start with.
I’ve been working on planting the herbs on my deck this weekend–though it’s been raining off an on so it’s not going as fast as I’d hoped. In the past I’ve tried filling in the bottoms of very deep pots to decrease the amount of potting mix needed, I’m not doing that this time around. Going to go with the advice posted by in “Growing Herbs in Containers.”
As usual, when I’m skulking among little plants at the nursery, I’ve come home with some unplanned ones: Vietnamese coriander (Persicaria odorata) and Cuban oregano (Plectranthus amboinicus) for the herb garden–and they are looking good, but my summer savory crumped. Guess I’ll have to get another one…which means I’ll probably come home with more than that….
a-single-serving.com 