Saturday December 1
It is a truly frabjous day when we can get fresh bluefish here in Cincinnati, either from Luken's or Jungle Jim's. We don't know how they manage to make a living off a fish that is so perishable, so East Coast, and so foreign to Midwest "can't-I-have-something-boneless-and-bland?" tastes. Especially at $2.99 a pound, which is cheap for fresh fish - though Holt remembers days of yore in New Haven, when a bluefish was what they threw in as lagniappe when you bought something better.
Once again, we used the classic method of oven-roasting.
In this case, we even had some freshly-made basil oil, the last fruits of this year's crop. When drizzled over the hot fish, it is sublime.
As an accompaniment, Barbara sacrificed two of her amazing garden creatures, the Florentine fennel plants that have been growing like multi-limbed mutants. It's a good thing that none of the neighbors understood her cries of "Eh! Finocchio!" as she cut them off their roots. Some of their ferny fronds went into the fish to be roasted, while the bulby parts were chopped, gently simmered in white wine and a mite of butter until tender, and topped with grated parmesan cheese and a grind or two of white pepper. The garden stuff turned out to be much more fresh-flavored than your usual supermarket or even organic-foods big-bulb fennel, so we consider this experiment to be worth the $2.50 it cost for the packet of seeds.
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