Sole Meunière with Caper Butter and Butta Rice

Thursday July 3

As we've already mentioned, Trader Joe's packages frozen sole in pound-and-a-half bags. It's too much for one meal, and once you've defrosted the bag, you have to use up the rest of the delicate fish quickly. That's our excuse for having (horrors!) THE SAME THING TWO DAYS IN A ROW.

We're also still eating light, undemanding, stick-to-it (ahem) foods. One of the best is rice. Barbara's grad school apartment on Frost Street was occasionally graced with the presence of Hitoshi Hashimoto, who gave us the recipe for what he called "Butta Rice" - actually, fried rice. For that, you need already-cooked cold rice, but today, it inspired a light, freshly-cooked imitation.

Rice takes longer than sole, obviously, so we started by melting some butter in a small saucepan with a tight cover. In it, we sautéed a small diced carrot and a few small tender snap peas, the last in the garden, for a minute or so. Then we poured in a third of a cup of rice, a pinch of salt, and two-thirds of a cup of water, and brought the whole thing to a boil. We slapped the cover on, lowered the heat to minimal, and let it go for 19 minutes by the timer (you can't mess with rice, it burns readily). When the timer goes, you open the rice and taste: if too moist, let it sit open for a minute; if too dry, steam closed for a minute; if perfect, fluff it up and leave it half-covered until ready to serve.


In the meantime, we took the sole fillets and tossed them in a brown paper bag with flour seasoned with a dash of salt and pepper. They were fried in the big skillet, in butter and oil, only about a minute on each side. Then they sat on hot plates in the warming oven while we added a big knob of butter and a forkful of capers to the skillet, until it browned and thickened. This got poured on the fish, and the rice adorned the side.

Okay, so it's a white meal. But it's what the people want.

At this point, perhaps we should expound on the difference between "rice" and "R*I*C*E."
"rice" is the raw, hard, little grains of the increasing expensive stuff, while "R*I*C*E" refers to the cooked, fluffy, tender mess of the increasing expensive stuff. This useful distinction was first introduced to the culinary world by that immortal opus, The Impoverished Students' Book of Cookery, Drinkery, & Housekeepery, by Jay F Rosenberg (1967), which got a lot of hippies through graduate school. Copies still turn up on abebooks.